Experimental Evidence for the Attraction of Matter by Electromagnetic Waves

TL;DR

This study provides experimental evidence that electromagnetic infrared waves can exert an attractive force on a conducting lead sphere, challenging the conventional view of electromagnetic forces being primarily repulsive.

Contribution

It demonstrates, through reproducible Cavendish torsion-balance experiments, that IR electromagnetic waves can produce a measurable attractive force on matter, with a quantified power law relation.

Findings

Attractive force increases with irradiative energy.

Force follows a power law relation with incident energy, approximately F=2.8×10^-10 W^1.1.

Experiments are reproducible and can be verified using standard setups.

Abstract

We present measurement results demonstrating that a conducting lead sphere exposed to electromagnetic (e/m) waves in the infrared (IR) regime, is attracted by e/m waves. The result may seem surprising and against conventional wisdom that electromagnetic wave forcing should lead to a repulsive force. Nonetheless, all our experiments show that the attractive force can be determined quantitatively, and that they are reproducible. Our experiment setup is a Cavendish torsion-balance experiment with lead spheres, one of the spheres intermittently irradiated by IR light. Because the Cavendish experiment is well known, simple, and readily available, the results can be easily verified or falsified. However, to avoid Bernoulli and other external forcing effects, the entire experimental setup should be placed in a vacuum chamber. In our case the experiments were performed at \approx 4 \cdot 10^-7 mbar. One of the 20 g lead spheres was intermittently irradiated by infrared radiation from a lamp covered by an aluminium foil. Two independent experiments (V1 and V2) are described. Besides showing that wave energy and momentum transfer leads to attraction, we also describe some experimental requirements and constraints. The lamp was powered on during 10 or 12 s, the power changing between 8, 16, and 26 W. All measurements, including those affected by lamp out-gassing, shows that the attracting force on the lead sphere increases with increasing irradiative energy. From the V2 experiment, preceded by lamp "baking" to eliminate repulsive out-gassing forces, the irradiative energy 8.7 Ws on the sphere resulted in a total force 2.9+/-0.5\cdot 10^-9 (N). From the V2 experiment we also derive a power law relation between incident radiation energy (W) and the attractive force, corresponding to F=2.8\cdot 10^-10 W^1.1, with R^2=0.95.