Profile
Martin Tajmar
Professor and Chair of Space Systems, Institute of Aerospace Engineering, TU Dresden
Tajmar develops electric and miniaturized space propulsion and precision thrust balances. With collaborators, he tests proposed propulsion mechanisms and separates force signals from thermal drift and electromagnetic interactions. Their EMDrive measurements used a counterbalanced double pendulum and onboard batteries; across the tested frequencies, they found no anomalous thrust above the classical photon-force equivalent for the supplied power.
Affiliations
- Technische Universität Dresden
Identifiers
- orcid 0000-0002-7406-7588
Channels
Bibliography
A bibliography listing does not establish authorship. Credits appear under attribution.
Published bibliography entries: 4. Showing 1–4 of 4.
Listed work
Paper · 2003
Gravitomagnetic field of a rotating superconductor and of a rotating superfluid
- M. Tajmar(Author)
- C.J. de Matos(Author)
Martin Tajmar and Clovis de Matos quantise an extended canonical momentum that includes gravitational drag, and apply it to rotating ring-shaped superconductors and superfluids. The starting point is the Barnett effect, in which rotation magnetises a material, together with its gravitational analogue in weak-field general relativity. Measurements of magnetic flux in rotating superconductors disagree with predictions made without a gravitomagnetic term, and the authors ask how much of that gap the gravitomagnetic term explains. For rotating neutral superfluids, the drag effects implied by the superconductor data would still sit within current experimental noise. They propose measuring the torque such a field would exert on a spinning gyroscope, an experiment not yet done.
Listed work
Paper · 2007
Measurement of Gravitomagnetic and Acceleration Fields around Rotating Superconductors
- Martin Tajmar(Author)
- Florin Plesescu(Author)
- Bernhard Seifert(Author)
- Klaus Marhold(Author)
Tajmar, Plesescu, Seifert and Marhold pursue their proposal that a rotating superconductor produces, besides its London moment, a large gravitomagnetic field that would explain an apparent mass increase of niobium Cooper pairs. A similar field follows from general relativity combined with the observed amount of dark energy. They built a facility to measure small acceleration and gravitomagnetic fields near a fast rotating, accelerating superconductor. Niobium measurements show first signs within a factor of 2 of their prediction, and possible error sources are reviewed. If this gravitomagnetic London moment exists, acceleration fields could be generated in the laboratory.
Listed work
Paper · 2005
Gravitomagnetic London moment and the graviton mass inside a superconductor
- C.J. de Matos(Author)
- M. Tajmar(Author)
Clovis de Matos and Martin Tajmar use the Proca form of electromagnetism and gravitoelectromagnetism to derive the magnetic and gravitomagnetic properties of a rotating superconductor. A superconductor expels magnetic fields and, when rotated, produces a magnetic field called the London moment. Both perfect diamagnetism and the London moment follow from the photon acquiring mass inside the superconductor. By analogy, their proposal to resolve the Cooper pair mass anomaly reported by Tate is explained by a graviton mass inside the superconductor different from its cosmological value. For niobium the required graviton mass is about 10^-55 kg, 14 orders of magnitude above the free-space limit, just as the photon mass is greatly raised inside a superconductor by the Higgs mechanism.
Listed work
Paper · 2021
High-accuracy thrust measurements of the EMDrive and elimination of false-positive effects
- M. Tajmar(Author)
- O. Neunzig(Author)
- M. Weikert(Author)
M. Tajmar, O. Neunzig and M. Weikert test the EMDrive, a proposed propellantless thruster in which microwaves in a closed tapered cavity would produce at least 1 mN/kW of thrust. Heat, mechanical load and large currents can create artefacts that look like thrust. They built an inverted counterbalanced double pendulum balance that removes most thermal drift, and ran the device on its own battery pack to avoid feedthrough interactions. Across a wide frequency band with several resonances and modes they found no thrust, limiting any anomalous thrust to below the force of classical radiation for the same power. The result sets strong limits for every proposed theory and rules out earlier test results by at least two orders of magnitude.