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Amplification of electromagnetic fields by a rotating body

83 points5 daysnature.com
mikewarot51 minutes ago

So, if you use eddy currents to delay the phase of an exciting field long enough that the object those eddy currents are inside of can spin more than 90 degrees, the response eddy current fields now AID instead of opposing the original field?

This sounds quite a bit like what Steorm[1] was doing years ago. If ultraconductors[2] worked, you could actually build a mechanical device that had losses low enough to actually gain energy once a critical speed were obtained.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn

[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5777292A/en

(Claim 7 is for material with a conductivity of 10^11 S/cm, which is 150,000 times better than copper)

mmastrac10 minutes ago

> This sounds quite a bit like what Steorm[sic] was doing years ago

Steorn was a scam, and they never actually showed anything off. The only thing they did was rob some investors.

colanderman1 hour ago

Apparently this effect applies to sound waves as well: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.03760

krunck3 hours ago

I keep thinking about all the sci-fi I've seen where a machine with rotating parts opens up a portal or a wormhole...

pantulis47 minutes ago

Liberate tute me

simcop23872 hours ago

Honestly it reminds me a bit of the macguffin used to amplify a signal to insterstellar distances used in The Three Body Problem book. Which given the rest of the novels makes me a little scared

noitpmeder59 minutes ago

Instantly thought of this as well. Loved that book.

heavenlyblue56 minutes ago

the three body problem is one of the most terse piece of writing I have ever read if being absolutely honest

cdiamand4 hours ago

Could this be used as an engine of some kind? The spinny thing giving off EM waves and those waves are caught by something like a solar sail?

floatrock3 hours ago

No idea, but "amplification", "electromagnetic fields", "rotating bodies", and "published in Nature" are the keywords that get all the UAP podcasters drooling.

Get ready for an onslaught of "Physics behind flying saucers LEAKED" clickbait coming to a feed near you. Whether any of it is actually applicable doesn't matter, the clicks must flow.

ricksunny2 hours ago

I'm picking up a lot of projection in this reply;

• To know what keywords get UAP podcasters drooling, you must have watched your fair share of UAP podcasts.

• Your comment is the only one so far to make the association between the article's keywords & UAP, implying that you are yourself making the same association that someone interested in watching UAP podcasts would be making, in which case..:

• ...what is the difference between you and the would-be viewer of the next UAP podcast you are warning away?

lovich2 hours ago

> • To know what keywords get UAP podcasters drooling, you must have watched your fair share of UAP podcasts.

They’ve been coming up on the front page of Reddit several times this year. I’m in agreement with the OP and I’ve only casually observed those threads

unshavedyak2 hours ago

Another confirmation. I see it in my /r/all list fairly frequently. I am neither subscribed, a reader of said posts, or a believer in any of that (or at least, i avoid belief until it feels there is reasonable supporting evidence).

Though i don't recognize all of the terminology of OP, so perhaps that disqualifies my observation.

floatrock2 hours ago

Besides reddit front page, this stuff also appears in enough other pop culture podcasts and the occasional NYT expose that it's out there in the popular zeitgeist. Unfortunately, here it's just my science immune system flaring up on a random internet board.

Also, between the "could this be used for vehicles" parent comment and that downvoted interdimensional energy transfer comment below, it doesn't take a Aliens-Did-the-Pyramids Guy to see what dots were starting to be connected... I might as well be the one to flag it explicitly and earn some imaginary internet points.

But who knows, maybe I'm actually the goberment disinformation agent trying to keep all this under wraps...

beng-nl2 hours ago

Even if your implication is correct (GP is a would-be viewer), doesn’t mean they’re wrong..

fooker3 hours ago

"Flying saucers are closer than you think, and all my bitterness about academia"

Vox_Leone28 minutes ago

At first glance, the concept appears to serve as the basis for a 'portable' magnetic field generator, which could be installed on an interplanetary spacecraft.

sharpshadow2 hours ago

“The fastest rotation achievable by standard motors is of the order of 10 kHz and a record of 667 kHz is reported for a millimetre-sized magnetically levitated sphere.”

From the spinning metal cylinder you can extract EM energy. It’s like a flywheel. The trick is how do you bring up the spin in the first place. The indication here is I guess that you can amplify the spin with EM waves.

“…depending on its rotation speed Ω compared to the field oscillation frequency ω, it can either absorb or amplify.”

thehappypm2 hours ago

Perhaps in reverse (which should be equivalent, since Maxwells laws are time reversible).. rather than having waves amplified by stealing energy from the cylinder, waves could amplify the rotation of the cylinder.

westurner45 minutes ago

ScholarlyArticle: "Amplification of electromagnetic fields by a rotating body" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49689-w

> Could this be used as an engine of some kind?

What about helical polarization?

"Chiral Colloidal Molecules And Observation of The Propeller Effect" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3856768/

Sugar molecules are asymmetrical / handed, per 3blue1brown and Steve Mould. /? https://www.google.com/search?q=Sugar+molecules+are+asymmetr....

Is there a way to get to get the molecular propeller effect and thereby molecular locomotion, with molecules that contain sugar and a rotating field or a rotating molecule within a field?

Oarch2 hours ago

As someone uneducated in the subject I'm curious what stopped this being discovered earlier? Is the setup particularly challenging?

munchler2 hours ago

The challenge is in making a physical object rotate fast enough to produce the effect. The article says "the fastest rotation achievable by standard motors is of the order of 10 kHz", which is apparently too slow. The frequency of visible light, for comparison, is about 400–700 terahertz (THz).

trdtaylor11 hour ago

Yes; in the same way you can influence gravity by a spinning mass, albeit we do not possess (by orders of magnitude) material or energy required to spin a mass fast enough to detect an effect. Spinning supermassive blackholes show a gravitation/time frame-dragging effect dependent on speed of spin. Showing it occurs with EM is amazing.

seanw4442 hours ago

Reminds me of Kerr-Newman black holes.

bloopernova3 hours ago

(I didn't understand the math in the paper)

Would this mean that a rotating body in space would eventually slow down? In other words, amplifying EM radiation draws energy from angular momentum?

dvh3 hours ago
ptsneves45 minutes ago

On a wiki rabbit hole from that link to the Apophis asteroid, to rage and rage 2 video game plots.

m4632 hours ago
javajosh3 hours ago

Cool. Also may be useful to read Zel'dovich's second paper on the phenomena. http://jetp.ras.ru/cgi-bin/dn/e_035_06_1085.pdf Interestingly, in his paragraph about previous work, he did not mention Yarkovsky:

"According to a remark by P. L. Kapitza, the effect is analogous to amplification of sound by reflection from a resting-medium boundary that moves with supersonic velocity... In the case of plasma waves, a similar effect was considered recently by Ostrovskil. Mention can also be made of earlier studies dealing with the motion of a conducting liquid in a resonator or the motion of carriers in the interior of an elastic piezoelectric or over its surface."

phkahler3 hours ago

The plot in figure 4 looks a lot like the torque/frequency plot of an induction motor.

photochemsyn3 hours ago

That would fit:

> "Here, we show that this 60-year-old long-sought effect has been concealed for all this time in the physics of induction generators. Induction motors are constituted of two components: an external stator, composed of circuits generating a rotating magnetic field, and a rotor, also composed of several elementary circuit loops, usually in a squirrel cage configuration. By replacing the internal circuits of the rotor with a solid metal cylinder as in Zel’dovich’s original proposal, and using a gapped toroid within a LC resonator as stator, we isolate the key physical effect and unambiguously observe Zel’dovich amplification, which manifests itself as a negative dissipation induced by the rotor in the LC circuit."

nadyatolica2 hours ago

[flagged]

trdtaylor13 hours ago

The experiment provides support to the idea that the Superradiance effect (where waves are amplified when interacting with rotating black holes) may not be pulling energy from the blackhole, but from different dimensions. In theories involving extra dimensions (like those proposed in string theory or braneworld scenarios), rotational effects could alter how energy and momentum are distributed across dimensions, leading to observable phenomena similar to what was demonstrated in the experiment.

If rotation within this higher-dimensional space causes analogous effects to the rotational amplification observed in the experiment, it could imply new ways of energy transfer between dimensions. AKA -- ZPM from Stargate

AnimalMuppet3 hours ago

What? There is no pulling energy from different dimensions here - it's pulling it from the angular rotational energy.