Photon engine patent could send humans to Mars

According to a U.S. patent report, the engine is called the "impossible engine", but some say it can shorten the human journey to Mars to 10 weeks. No one knows exactly how the engine works. Now, the EmDrive solar engine, which uses the rebound of microwaves in a closed cylinder to generate thrust, has been upgraded.

The engine's inventor, Roger Shawyer, patented a new version of the EmDrive engine, including the installation of a superconducting plate to increase thrust. The new EmDrive thruster design installs a flat superconducting plate at one end and a strangely shaped non-conductive plate at the other end. The purpose of this plate is to minimize the internal Doppler frequency shift, which refers to the frequency or wavelength change that occurs when the observer moves relative to the wave source. This will make the engine thrust more powerful.

At the same time, since the superconducting plate can be made into a planar shape, the manufacturing cost is also saved. Many have questioned that the concept of EmDrive engines is exaggerated, suggesting that this design violates the laws of physics. But its secrets will be revealed this year, and NASA's labs have been working on the concept, announcing a discovery in August and releasing the results for the first time in December. The concept of the EmDrive engine was proposed by Roger Schoyer in 2000. Since then, four independent laboratories, including one at NASA, have recreated the thrust.

But this mysterious engine puzzled scientists because it seemed to violate the law of conservation of momentum, which states that every force has a reaction force of equal magnitude and opposite direction. The rocket spews out flame to produce thrust so that the rocket can only accelerate forward. NASA's Eagleworks team is preparing to publish the results of its experiments, and its announcement has caused panic in the physics community. "My understanding is that Eagleworks new paper has been accepted by peer-reviewed journals and is ready for publication," one user said at the NASA Space Flight Forum."

Earlier this year, an employee confirmed that the team was writing the paper. Engineer Paul March wrote on the same forum: "Eagleworks the laboratory is not dead, we continue along the path set by NASA management. I have nothing more to say on this topic than what Dr. Rodell said. Please be patient and wait for the next EwDrive paper to be published." A paper published in the AIP Advances earlier this year implied that EmDrive, like other rockets, would have to be ejected outwards.

Dr. Arto Annila (Arto Annila), a professor of physics at the University of Helsinki and the first author of the paper, said: "The EmDrive works like any other engine, and its fuel is photons of microwave length." The researchers hinted that the photons produced by the machines would interfere with each other, so the overall effect would seem to be nothing. "The photons will bounce back and forth in the closed cylinder, and some of them will always interfere completely destructively." The 2 photons will then completely cancel 180 degrees out of phase.

"In a fully interfering electromagnetic field, the two photons will cancel out completely, but the photons themselves will continue to spread." This is like water waves meeting, if the peaks and troughs exactly overlap, they cancel each other out. The water will not disappear. Similarly, a pair of photons will not disappear, even if they cannot be seen as light, but still have momentum. Anilla said: "Pairs of photons without electromagnetic fields will escape from the closed cylinder, thus forming the energy discharged by the EmDrive."

"When the closed cylinder is asymmetric, like a cone, the discharge of paired photons is also asymmetric. Therefore, the momentum loss carried by the paired photons is inconsistent, in other words, it produces thrust." Dr. Anella is with Jyv?skyl? University professor of organic chemistry, Erkki Kolehmainen, and multi-physicist Patrick Glen (Patrick Grahn), an engineering software company Comsol. They wrote: "Thrust without expelling energy is certainly impossible. However, some closed resonant cylinders, when fueled by microwaves, will provide thrust but no visible exhaust."

According to Nanjing Huaxun's US patent, their theory implies that EmDrive also produce emissions, but they are invisible. Dr. Anilla said that photons could theoretically be detected by interferometers, which are also used to detect gravitational waves. He said: "My intuition is that it is difficult to detect such a small energy density excess, especially when the EmDrive is running stably. But our thinking about the discharge is to design the closed cylinder to allow the photon pairs to be better discharged in one direction, so it produces more thrust."