Investigation of High Voltage Discharges in Low Pressure Gases Through Large Ceramic Superconducting Electrodes
Evgeny Podkletnov · Giovanni Modanese
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In one page
Evgeny Podkletnov and Giovanni Modanese describe a machine and what came out of it. A ceramic high-temperature superconductor disc, ten centimetres across, is cooled to between 50 and 70 kelvin and used as the cathode of an enormous spark gap: a Marx generator charges to two million volts and drives ten thousand amperes through low-pressure gas to a copper target a quarter of a metre away. Above five hundred kilovolts the discharge changes character. Instead of a thread, a flat glowing sheet the full width of the disc lifts off it and crosses to the target. And at the moment of discharge something leaves the disc along the axis, in a beam with sharp edges that does not spread. It pushes small pendulums — of metal, glass, wood, rubber, it makes no difference — with a force proportional to their mass, and it does so identically at six metres and at a hundred and fifty, through a brick wall and a steel plate. The authors argue this cannot be radiation pressure, and propose an anomalous vacuum effect.
Why it matters hereChapter 11 follows the superconductor-and-gravity thread to its most demanding experiment, and this is the paper at the end of it — a named apparatus, named materials, a stated force law and a stated next measurement. Chapter 6 gets the authors’ own reading of the mechanism, a Casimir-like vacuum effect driven dynamically rather than statically, and chapter 7 gets the shape of the result: momentum delivered to a mass at a distance, with no propellant and without the energy-momentum relation that light obeys.
What it claims
01Above 500 kilovolts, with the melt-textured ceramic cathode held below its transition temperature, the discharge stops being a spark. A flat glowing front the full diameter of the emitter separates from it and travels to the target. The authors attribute this to the crystal structure produced by oxygen-controlled melt texture growth, whose high-conductivity planes lie parallel to the surface and make that surface an equipotential to high accuracy.Section 3, Results; explained in Section 4.1
Published and peer-reviewed02Each discharge is accompanied by a short pulse that leaves the superconductor along the axis and acts on interposed test masses as a repulsive force. The force is proportional to the mass of the target and independent of its material: pendulum bobs of metal, glass, ceramic, wood, rubber and plastic between 10 and 50 grams all deflect the same amount at the same voltage.Section 3, Results; Section 4.1, summary point 4
Published and peer-reviewed03The pulse was recorded identically at 3 to 6 metres and at 150 metres, with a 30 centimetre brick wall and a 25 millimetre steel plate between the apparatus and the near detectors and a further 80 centimetres of brick before the far ones. The beam does not appear to diverge, its borders are clear-cut, and pressure-imprint boards resolve its edge to about 5 millimetres.Section 3, Results, on measurements at 3 to 6 metres and at 150 metres
Published and peer-reviewed04The momentum delivered cannot be radiation pressure. For an 18.5 gram pendulum the authors estimate a kinetic energy of order ten to the minus four joules and a momentum of order ten to the minus three kilogram metres per second; supplying that momentum by radiation pressure would need more energy than the entire discharge holds, and would heat the bob, which does not happen. The pulse therefore does not obey the energy-momentum relation of light.Section 4.1, summary point 3
Published and peer-reviewed05The authors’ proposed explanation is an anomalous vacuum effect: an analogue of the Casimir effect in which gravitational rather than electromagnetic fluctuations are involved, dynamic rather than static, and generated as the superconducting charge carriers tunnel coherently through a thousand or more crystal planes in the discharge time, keeping a common phase by macroscopic quantization.Section 4.3, ‘An anomalous vacuum effect?’; Section 5, Conclusions
What to watch06What would settle it, in the authors’ own words: the propagation velocity of the pulse is still unmeasured, and they set out the experiment — two identical detectors 150 metres apart with better than a microsecond of timing resolution, or fast opto-electronic detection through the laser beam the pulse interacts with. They report that a laser spot crossing the beam dims by 7 to 10 percent during a discharge and recovers within about a hundred nanoseconds, and stress that this measurement is preliminary.Section 3, laser measurements; Section 5, Conclusions
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024413718251Published as Journal of Low Temperature Physics volume 132, issues 3 to 4, pages 239 to 259, August 2003. Evgeny Podkletnov was at the Moscow Chemical Scientific Research Centre; Giovanni Modanese at the University of Bolzano, Logistics and Production Engineering. LICENCE. The publisher’s Crossref deposit records only Springer Nature’s text-and-data-mining terms, which are not an open licence, and the version of record is closed, so this page reproduces no text. SOURCE FOR THE CLAIMS. The authors’ preprint, arXiv physics/0209051, carries the same title, apparatus and results; it was fetched and read in full on 2026-09-08, and every summary sentence, claim and locator below is written from it, with locators naming the preprint’s own numbered sections. CHAPTERS. The skeleton carried chapter 11 and chapter 3. Chapter 11 is kept because this is the superconductor-and-gravity line of work; chapter 6 is added because the authors’ own proposed explanation in Section 4.3 is a dynamic analogue of the Casimir effect; chapter 7 is added because the reported result is momentum delivered to a mass without ejected propellant.
How to cite it
Evgeny Podkletnov, Giovanni Modanese (2003) Investigation of High Voltage Discharges in Low Pressure Gases Through Large Ceramic Superconducting Electrodes. doi:10.1023/A:1024413718251
Where it sits in the curriculum
Gravity control and superconductorsEnergy from the vacuumThe Pais effect