In 2017, an electrical engineer called Frank Becker contacted me, saying that he'd read my papers on quantised inertia and the emdrive and he particularly noted my discussion that dielectrics placed inside an emdrive might enhance thrust. It reminded him, he said, of an experiment that he'd done years ago trying to replicate the Biefeld-Brown effect with tin foil capacitors and dielectrics. Indeed he had seen thrust towards the anode just as Biefeld & Brown did.
After he emailed me, we liaised on occasion via skype, and the following year or so he teamed up with an actor called Ankur Bhatt who also has an MSc in engineering and they did some Frank-ly (forgive the pun) brilliant experiments. I advised them as much as I could on QI. A schematic of the experiment is shown in the Figure and you can find the details in the paper below. The capacitor plates are on the right hand side (the grey lines). You can see the electrons accelerating to the right from the cathode to the anode (red arrows).
The electrons accelerate to the right over an inter-plate distance of 10 microns and a potential difference of 5000V, so their acceleration is huge (10^19 m/s^2) so they see a Rindler horizon only about 2 cm to their left (the black line). Normally in QI, when an object accelerates rightwards the Rindler horizon on its left damps the quantum vacuum on that side pulling it back against the acceleration. But, here, this is reversed since the two plates damp the vacuum to the right (a Casimir effect) more than the horizon does. The yellow shading here denotes less vacuum energy than the orange shading. So, here there is an extra push to the right and the electrons accelerate more than you'd expect, pushing the anode more when they get there.
The most crucial component of this experiment is that Becker and Bhatt also played around with putting metal plates in various positions around the setup (Edmund Blackadder - "It's not what you've got, but where you stick it!") and found that when they placed a metal plate to the right of the horizon it reduced the force (it's like a closer horizon) but when they put the plate behind the horizon (to the left) the effect of it vanished. This may be the first direct observation of a Rindler horizon and backs quantised inertia very strongly. I've just written a paper, soon to be submitted, that shows that QI predicts the thrusts they saw.
Becker & Bhatt deserve a lot of thanks for this experiment. If the thrust can be confirmed, it is one thousand times what I was hoping for from my photon-based experiments. I am now funded to reproduce their experiment at my university, starting in May.
References
Becker, F. and A. Bhatt. Electrostatic accelerated electrons within symmetric capacitors during field emission condition events exert bidirectional propellant-less thrust. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04368
