[N0B0DY]

Lloyd, I said I would look into low-temp experiments more and came across the following I thought might interest you. I'm thinking that superconductivity is universal at near-zero temperatures and wondered if you would support that, if all materials can be considered ferrimagnetic.

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Argyris proposed that the hypothesised gravity particle, the graviton, might have mass, rather than being massless as traditional theories of quantum gravity had assumed.

Argyris's idea piqued de Matos and Tajmar's interest because of the parallel with the normally massless photon, which inside a superconductor develops a mass when the temperature drops below the critical temperature and the substance becomes superconducting. Tajmar and de Matos wondered what would happen if the gravitons inside a superconductor behaved like photons and gained mass as well.

Their calculations showed that the more massive the graviton becomes in a superconductor, the stronger the gravitomagnetic field becomes when the material's rotation speeds up. In turn, that should increase the magnetic field by altering the movement of the Cooper pairs. Could that explain Tate's measurement? To fit her findings, de Matos and Tajmar found they had to set the graviton mass to be 10-54 kilograms (Physica C, vol 432, p 167). By comparison, an electron's mass is about 10-30 kilograms. Although that makes the graviton sound like a lightweight, it would give superconductors a gravitomagnetic force 17 orders of magnitude greater than that produced by normal matter.

At that level, they realised, it should be possible to measure the field in a laboratory. So they designed an experiment to test the idea, and built it with funding from the US air force and the European Space Agency. Last year Tajmar's team began to look for evidence of their extraordinary prediction - not really expecting to find it. They set a ring of superconducting niobium spinning, and positioned accelerometers around the ring. Any gravitomagnetic field produced by the spinning superconductor should tug on these sensors.

Initially, they ran tests at room temperature, where niobium is not superconducting, and saw no anomalous readings. That was expected, consistent with the immeasurably tiny field predicted by general relativity. Then as they dropped the temperature, Cooper pairs formed in the niobium and it lost its electrical resistance. Suddenly the accelerometers produced a signal. It was exactly as they hoped: as soon as the niobium became superconducting, the instruments appeared to feel a strong gravitomagnetic field pulling on them (www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0603033).

It seemed too good to be true. Tajmar's team knew how heretical such a large gravitomagnetic field would seem to other physicists (see "The attraction of gravity"). So they began running their experiment time and time again, looking for any hint of instrumental problems that might be fooling them. Next, they swapped the niobium for other superconducting materials, making predictions about the gravitomagnetic field they expected from each. They included extra sensors to improve the accuracy of their results and added two laser gyroscopes to their set-up to best measure the twist (www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0610015). Every time, the experiment gave them the right answers.

After 250 runs, they began to believe that perhaps the signals were real after all. It seemed they had found a way to generate a large gravitomagnetic field unanticipated by Einstein or anyone else. They have submitted a paper to the journal Physica C and have been attending conferences to talk about their work - and met a sceptical response.
James Overduin, a theorist from Stanford University is doubtful about the claims. He points to the remarkable strength of the supposed gravitomagnetic field. "Seventeen orders of magnitude is not to be sniffed at." At that strength, says Overduin, we would expect to see gravitomagnetic effects throughout the cosmos. To make the graviton massive would limit the distance it can travel, and since all astronomical observations suggest that gravity travels the entire breadth of the universe, there is a big conflict to resolve.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...ys-secret.html