William Beatty on the vortex-l mailing list posted a link to a video titled “Unlocking Zero-Point Energy” made by Garret Moddel, Professor Emeritus of Photonics and Quantum Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Radanta Corporation.
He talks about a device that he claims is harvesting energy from the vacuum, violating the second law of thermodynamics, in which the apparent gain is generated through the use of a Casimir cavity created within a device using nickel and palladium electrodes.
Moddel describes his device in the video, and states that they were generating power leves of 70 Watts per square meter (compare to 200 W per square meter produced by typical solar cells)
Moddel and his colleagues have published two papers about their experimental work:
“Optical-Cavity-Induced Current” Moddel, Garret, Ayendra Weerakkody, David Doroski, and Dylan Bartusiak. 2021.Symmetry 13, no. 3: 517. https://doi.org/10.3390/sym13030517
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/13/3/517
“Casimir-cavity-induced conductance changes”
Garret Moddel, Ayendra Weerakkody, David Doroski, and Dylan Bartusiak
Phys. Rev. Research 3, L022007 – Published 20 April 2021
https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.L022007
Moddel says that there has been zero interest or response to these papers from the scientific community so far. He supposes that the lack of response is due to the controversial claim that the second law of thermodynamics, held to be involate, has been violated.