A radio signal has been amplified by scattering it from a stationary coin-sized electronic circuit that behaves as though it is rotating at an enormous rate. Conceived by a team at the City University of New York, the experiment is said to provide the first observation of rotational super-radiance involving electromagnetic waves. This wave-amplification effect is inspired by rotating black holes and was predicted more than half a century ago. Andrea Alù and colleagues found that only radio waves carrying a particular kind of twist were boosted, by as much as a factor of six in power.

In 1969 Roger Penrose pointed out that a rotating black hole holds a vast reservoir of energy that, in principle, can be tapped. “An object entering the region around the black hole can split into two parts, one falls into the black hole while the other escapes with more energy than the original object had, effectively taking some rotational energy from the black hole,” Alù, explains.

Two years later the Soviet physicist Yakov Zel’dovich realized that the same thing should happen to waves. “If a wave carrying angular momentum reflects from a rapidly rotating absorbing cylinder, the reflected wave could be amplified and come back stronger than it arrived,” says Alù. That amplification is called rotational super-radiance, which Alù describes as, “a process in which a wave becomes stronger by extracting energy from a system that rotates very rapidly”.

The catch has always been the word “rapidly”. For the effect to occur, the rotation must outrun the wave itself, and for light or radio waves that means rotational rates no mechanical object could survive. The effect has been coaxed out of water waves swirling around a vortex and out of sound waves bouncing off a spinning absorber, but electromagnetic waves had been out of reach. “While the idea is fascinating, no experimental demonstration was reported for electromagnetic waves, due to the required very fast speeds,” Alù says.

Clever solution

The CUNY team has found a clever way around the speed restriction. “Instead of physically spinning an object, we created an artificial rotation by periodically changing the properties of a network of resonators in space and time in a way that mimics rotation,” says Alù. The new device is disarmingly simple, comprising three small electrical circuits wired into a loop roughly two centimetres across, each one tuneable like a radio dial. The tuning of all three is wobbled up and down, with each kept slightly out of step with its neighbours, so the pattern sweeps around the loop like a wave passing through a stadium crowd.

“Although no physical object is rotating, this travelling modulation pattern acts like a rotating system,” Alù explains. And because the apparent speed is set purely by how quickly the electronics are driven, it can be pushed as high as one likes. “In fact, this speed can be faster than the velocity of light without violating any physical law.” Nothing material moves, so nothing outruns light.

The researchers fed a 100 MHz radio signal into the loop. This light was in a specific twisted state (possessing orbital angular momentum). They then swept the rotational rate from 5 MHz up to 195 MHz. Below 100 MHz the reflected light weakened steadily, as expected. Above 100 MHz, however, the synthetic rotation overtook the wave and the behaviour flipped. The reflected signals reappeared at the same frequencies as before — 60, 70 and 80 MHz — but were twisted the opposite way, and were stronger rather than weaker. That reversal, Alù notes, is “a key signature of entering the regime associated with super-radiance”. The gain arises in special windows the team calls angular-momentum bandgaps, which open once the synthetic rotation is fast enough and through which “energy can be transferred from the synthetic rotation to the wave”.

Fussy amplfier

The amplification was fussy about its input. “Our observed amplification was selective to the angular momentum of the input wave, only waves with particular angular-momentum properties experienced gain,” says Alù. Stranger still, the effect feeds on waste. In an ordinary amplifier, energy leaking out of the device is the enemy. Here a leakier circuit gave more gain, exactly as the thermodynamic reasoning behind super-radiance demands.

Alù is careful about what the experiment does and does not deliver. “The experiment does not study actual black holes or quantum gravity. Instead, it creates a laboratory system that reproduces some of the same physical principles involved in rotational energy extraction.” What it offers, he says, is “a controllable analogue platform where researchers can test and explore concepts that are otherwise difficult or impossible to study experimentally in astrophysical black holes”.

Three circuits in the loop allow only three distinct twists, so the immediate goal is bigger loops supporting a wider range. Beyond that lies the jump from radio waves to visible light, and a quantum version in which synthetic rotation might conjure photons out of empty space. Practical spin-offs may arrive sooner. Amplifying only one twist at a time is a natural fit for encoding information, and, Alù suggests, “new forms of lasers, with selective emission of angular momentum, can be envisioned”.

The research is described in Nature.

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Deuterium nuclei fired into thin foils of palladium and titanium keep fusing when the nuclei’s incident energies are reduced to the level where the process should be all but extinguished. Instead, physicists in the US have found that as the incident energy is reduced, the fusion rate plateaus – even at the lowest energies probed. Indeed, the low-energy fusion rate exceeds predictions for isolated nuclei by more than 10¹⁸. While significant, the enhanced fusion rates remain far too small for energy generation.

The results suggest that a metal’s electrons and internal defects can influence how fusion occurs, according to the researchers at the University of California, Davis and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Nuclear fusion powers the stars, but here on Earth it has so far been impossible to create a practical fusion reactor that delivers usable energy to the electricity grid

“Fusion is hard in the laboratory because positive nuclei repel each other,” explains team member Thomas Schenkel at Berkeley. Quantum mechanics offers a loophole – nuclei can tunnel through the repulsive barrier without having enough kinetic energy to overcome it. However, the tunnelling probability is very small at low energies.

Not fade away

Physicists measure these nuclear collision energies in kiloelectronvolts (keV). Today’s fusion reactors tend to operate plasmas at temperatures that correspond to collision energies of about 10 keV. Below that, reactions fade away, and earlier experiments showed that fusion pretty well stopped  near 5 keV.

Yet a solid is a very different environment to a plasma. “Metal lattices contain electrons, defects, and locally concentrated deuterium, all of which can combine to create reaction environments that do not exist in a conventional plasma,” says Jeremy Munday who along with Micah Karahadian is based at UC Davis . The metal’s electron cloud partly shields the repulsion between nuclei, letting them approach more closely. This “screening” effect has been studied since the 1990s and is still not fully understood. The field also carries the scars of the 1989 cold-fusion debacle, during which experiments reporting enhanced fusion rates in solids at room temperature could not be reproduced.

Schenkel and Munday came to this field in the 2010s as participants in a Google-funded effort that revisited the 1989 claims. The programme found no evidence for room-temperature fusion, but it seeded their current collaboration.

Membrane reactor

The team’s apparatus places a metal foil, a quarter of a millimetre thick, between two very different environments. “At the heart of our experimental setup is a type of membrane reactor that combines an electrochemical cell with a deuterium ion beam,” says Schenkel. On one side, an electrochemical process – “similar in principle to charging a battery,” says Munday – pushes deuterium into the metal from a liquid. On the other side, in vacuum, a beam of deuterium ions strikes the same foil, burying itself just a few millionths of a millimetre below the surface.

Each fusion event spits out a fast proton or neutron, caught by two independent detectors. “Detecting these products independently, along with extensive background and control measurements, gave us confidence that the signals came from fusion,” Munday says.

As the team reduced the incident energy, they were surprised. “We observed the well-known exponential rate drop, but then the rates did not drop anymore but rather plateaued as we further decreased the ion energy,” says Schenkel. The plateau appeared below about 2 keV in both metals, and loading extra deuterium electrochemically roughly doubled the yield.

“This is an enormous relative enhancement, although the absolute fusion rate remains far too small for energy production,” Munday stresses. “The immediate significance of our work is therefore the discovery of a new physical regime in which the material actively influences the nuclear reaction, rather than the demonstration of a practical energy source.”

Welcome corroboration

Konrad Czerski, professor of nuclear and medical physics at the University of Szczecin, Poland, sees the result as welcome corroboration. “The Berkeley study represents an independent confirmation of the effect found by our research group over two years ago within Europe’s CleanHME project,” he says. His team saw a similar plateau in zirconium, palladium and titanium with a different technique. The palladium results of the two groups agree well, he notes, but the titanium data differ.

Czerski is not persuaded by the American team’s explanation, which attributes the plateau to unusually strong screening in the foil’s damaged surface layer. His group’s measurements, he argues, “demonstrate unambiguously that the yield plateau arises from fusion of deuterium at ordinary thermal energies, and the screening energy doesn’t change.”

The disagreement underlines how much remains open in the field. “The most important next step is to identify the microscopic origin of the low-energy plateau,” says Munday. This would involve untangling the roles of screening, surface damage and the way deuterium moves and gets trapped in the metal. The US team also wants to test whether light or crystal vibrations can affect the reaction rate. Near-term applications, he suggests, might include compact neutron sources rather than reactors.

Czerski has a bolder vision for the future. “The experimental setups and the results obtained can launch a new research field focused on materials and enhancing the electron screening effect in nuclear reactions,” he says – one that “can finally lead to commercial applications, and even possibly to construction of a new energy source.”

The research is described in Nature Communications.

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