Very cool stuff

Why do we need an absolute ZERO temperature
The temperature we measure with thermometers really is a measurement of the kinetic energy trapped inside the electrons and atoms shaking, spinning and dashing all over the place all the time.

At some point back in 1848 Lord Kelvin hypotized the possibility of subtracting all the kinetic energy out of atoms or molecules at which point all the motion would stop altogether.

That temperature is what we would call ZERO Kelvin, which represents a thermodynamic barrier no atom or electron can breach since it would be outlandish to assume that particle could possess a NEGATIVE kinetic energy and therefore be on the negative side of the ZERO kelvin scale, at which point said particle would behave un-causally like in the Tenet movie…

This very grave conundrum with the concept causality did not prevent a mechanical engineer from publishing a paper suggesting the possibility of having “negative energy photons” from cooling things down to 0 Kelvin and below.
Public at large should be somewhat concerned when engineers dare to venture into the domain physics, penalty ending up like Icarus, and in fact if you ask physicists and float the idea of negative energy photons they might look at you with big eyes as if you just suggested the Earth is flat.

Still if we scroll down the document and read the references, we soon realize that engineers don’t suddenly come up with such genius ideas like a bunny pops out of a meadow, and said scientific work is nothing but a small piece of a much bigger scientific puzzle, the story of a science David facing overwhelming odds against an academia Goliath 50 years in the making, which we have been covering for some time.

What follows is us falling down the rabbit hole of negative energy particles, understand the implications and show how far this technology could potentially go one day.

Understanding the Carnot coefficient
An important aspect of the ZERO Kelvin temperature is not only that it very cold, but it is basically impossible to achieve because extracting the final bits of kinetic energy from a gas or material would take an infinite amount of hard-earned mechanical energy even if we had perfect thermal insulation all around said sample.

To understand this concept we shall dive into the explanation of a Carnot thermal machine.
At the base of said theoric machine we have an HOT source (ie the hot gasses of coal or oil burning in the furnace of a power plant, or your hot gas expanding in your car ICE), and on the other side of the machine we have a COLD source, like the air available at around 15 C, or the water of a river used to cool the residue steam from said power plant.

Now that we have a hot source and a cold source, we put in between these two a Carnot machine made out of all kind of clap traps, pumps, turbines, heat exchangers, control valves, PLCs, etc that manage to transform the hot gas energy from the HOT source into electric or mechanical energy.

You will be surprised to know that the maximum amount of mechanical energy you can extract from a Carnot machine is in fact just a function of the HOT and COLD temperature (expressed in absolute temperature only!) per the relation: Eff Carnot = 1 – T cold / T hot.

However the Carnot machine is a pure theorical entity where every component works like magic at 100% efficiency. In real life our pumps, turbines, heat exchangers, etc are far from operating at perfect efficiency, so the real life thermal machine works at much lower thermal efficiencies than theoric ones.

Still the concept remains: The hotter the source, the better the machine efficiency and this is what energy engineers do in real life applications by means of reheating steam as much as reasonably possible.

The Carnot machine concept is not just useful to understand thermal machines that use heat to make electricity, but it is also very useful to understand cryogenic machines that use electricity to keep things cool.

In frigorific cycles we reverse the Carnot machine in a way that mechanical or electric energy is used to extract kinetic energy or heat from a space or material or a gas, and that heat is then dumped out in the atmospheric air.

Likewise there is a minimum amount of energy to spend for us to be able to cool things down in accordance to the relationship:
COP Carnot = Heat removed / Mechanical energy spent = Tc / (Th – Tc).

Of course we want the COP to be as high as possible, to be able remove as much heat in our fridge as we can whilst spending the least amount of electricity, but again we hit a thermodynamic limit because of the Carnot COP coefficient, and the minimum amount of energy required in our fridge is in fact a function of the cold temperature inside and the air temperature available outside.
And let us not forget that real life machines are not made of perfect components, so the actual energy required will always be higher than the ideal Carnot frigorific cycle.

Most important we notice that as we approach the absolute zero temperature, our capability to extract heat (COP) from the system also approaches zero, no matter how much mechanical energy we throw at our refrigerator.
Moreover, the heat from the surrounding environment keeps creeping in the cold space despite our best efforts and insulating materials, so our refrigerator must work very hard, consume a lot of energy just to thread the water and keep the cold space temperature the same.

Once upon a time there was a magnetic bottle
What we did above was trying to reach absolute zero with conventional thermodynamic cycles, however some researchers got creative and decided to use a laser lattice to trap some ions inside a magnetic bottle, at temperatures close to absolute zero kelvin.

Now the kinetic distribution of said ions is a gaussian distribution, so some ions are hotter and move faster, others are colder and move slower.
By relaxing the strength of the magnetic field, it was possible to sieve out the hotter ions from the group, as if a hotheaded ion had stolen some of the kinetic energy from all the other atoms in the group and then run away with it: A chilling loss!

At the end of this delicate experiment a handful of ions was left into the magnetic bottle, with an average temperature (kinetic energy) of few billionth of a degree BELOW the absolute zero mark!
So what happened to these ions at said temperature?
As a starter these remaining ions gathered toward the top of the magnetic bottle as opposed to the bottom, as if they were experiencing anti-gravity, and this is as much as we officially know about stuff getting cooled just a bit below zero.

Cooling stuff using cold light
As far as physicists are concerned, photons carry energy with them, and you can tell this because your hand warms up when getting closer to a light bulb.
Also photons are their own anti particle as far as academia is concerned, so there is no such a thing as an anti-photon carrying negative energy and capable of cooling things as opposed to warming things.

So how do we make anti-photons carrying a negative cooling energy?
According to the paper, we need to use positrons, which are also assumed to have negative mass which notably yields even more reputable physicists rolling their eyes backward at least until we resolve the issue for good.

As we feed positrons into an undulator, we effectively convert the (negative) positron kinetic energy into a (negative) cyclotron/synchrotron electromagnetic radiation which is subsequently focused toward a target for cooling.

To note here there is no thermodynamical lower limit to how much cooling can be impinged into the cold target, potentially we could cool it quite a bit below zero Kelvin, with the only limit being the insulating materials to prevent the warm environment from heating up the target along with the positron beam power available since these don’t come cheap.

AD 2025 limits of cold photon technology
Whilst we have used in the past well focused electron beams and undulators to produce very powerful bursts of x-ray lasers, the production of powerful and well focused positrons for negative energy lasers cooling is a totally different game because positrons are rare and when a few are produced in nuclear decay processes they quickly annihilate with nearby electrons.

The paper did not venture far enough in trying to surpass the challenges of current technology and we therefore had to mobilize the Foundation powerful engineering and particle physicist resources (?) to optimize the setup and bring it somewhat closer to a commercial setup.

Until someone out there figures out a smarter machine than this, we believe the best way to produce cold photon lasers is to use the brake radiation of a powerful electron beam to produce gamma rays and the ensuing electron-positron pair production shower with subsequent annihilation would produce plenty of anti-gamma rays for use in a number of cool applications.

This setup also indirectly verifies the assumption of negative mass positrons or at the very least it will baffle said reputable scientists discussed before with a very unexpected experimental result.

Crossing the Rubicon of energy conservation
Being capable of cooling stuff below ZERO Kelvin opens up a number of interesting possibilities, as an example we could use our super cold matter as the cold reservoir of our Carnot thermal machine with astounding results.

As you can see from the setup, we now have a free energy loop where our Carnot machine does not even need a furnace, it can work with ambient air as a heat source.
Also the cold source at negative absolute temperature is cooled even further in a sort of runaway cooling feedback and we must ensure some heat is leaked into it to prevent it going ever colder forever.

This is what we call a free energy machine (or more appropriately a free ENTHROPY machine) where the natural high entropy ambient heat is helplessly reverted into a low entropy electrical energy within a closed loop system.

Rest assured the scientific community is very much against said machines since the principle of energy conservation and entropy increase is at the very foundation of everything that has been hypothized and built in the past +100 years.
The closest a physicist will ever come to admitting an apparent violation of energy conservation is the quantum tunnel effect, where energy is not created out of nothing (penalty being looked at like a flat Earther!) but is stolen from somewhere else outside our experimental horizon.

There are however some machines called hydrogen plasma focus (with subsequent optimizations and commercializations) that are stubbornly operating at the fringe of what is canonically accepted by the academic community.
These machines pose an intriguing threat to the scientific construct because they seemingly defy energy conservation axioms.

Academia uses a Deus Ex Machina explanation (or better say an Adam fig leaf), of a mysterious and unverified “plasma pinch effect” to keep the energy conservation axiom standing but the explanation has many inconsistencies, chiefly the impossibility of the gas to heat up so much without flashing out said heat in a burst of gamma rays well before reaching fusion ignition temperatures.

Other processes that blatantly don’t conserve energy are galaxies and the Universe at large,
Its very existence is non energy conservative and its expansion and subsequent dark energy conjecture are even more offending.
But as long as breach of energy conservation happens on galactic scales and not on earthbound processes the current physics should be safe.

Accepting that certain processes break axioms of energy conservation or positive energy masses, etc would require the history of science of the past century to be rewritten along with many textbooks, many Nobel prizes to be embarrassingly erased from the record, a bit of a scientific hullaballoo…

Likewise, the acceptance of new axioms would also require droves of physics professors to be ushered out to the park and feed pigeons until further notice, and this prospect is notably bound to cause some friction and resistance by the old guard.