DOW-UAP-D140: High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Communications - Transmitters, the Li-Baker Detector and a Roadmap to 2050

Source file: DOW-UAP-D140_AAWSAP-DIRD-High-Frequency-Gravitational-Wave-Communications-April-6-2010.pdf Originating agency: Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Defense Warning Office, under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) Document type: Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), "Acquisition Threat Support" series, control number DIA-08-1004-005 Date: 6 April 2010 (information cutoff date, ICOD: 1 December 2009) Classification: UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, with the FOUO caveat struck through on every page; released in 2026 Page count: 57 VIRIN: 260918-D-D0360-1129 PURSUE Release: 6

Summary

This DIRD asks a single engineering question: could gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein's general relativity, be generated and detected in a laboratory at frequencies high enough to carry information? On paper, the author (redacted as "AAP Person 77") answers yes. The paper proposes an infrared-driven stack of ring-shaped waveguides as the transmitter and the Li-Baker detector as the receiver, and calculates a theoretical link of about 1.9 million bits per second over 7,000 km, beamed directly through the Earth.

The paper has four main chapters: a survey of transmitter ("generator") concepts; a survey of receiver ("detector") concepts ending in a quantum-limit analysis of the Li-Baker design; "Operational Concerns" (link budget, bandwidth and a proposed frequency-and-time standard); and "Future Potential", which projects development to 2050 and beyond. Appendix B is a two-year design plan for building the Li-Baker detector. Appendix C consists of a title page only.

Every system in the paper is hypothetical. No laboratory had generated or detected a high-frequency gravitational wave, and the author concedes that the link parameters "will not be verified until a successful experiment can be performed." The paper does not mention UAP, UFOs or unidentified phenomena anywhere.

Research Article

The document and its place in AAWSAP

The cover (page 1) identifies the paper as a Defense Intelligence Reference Document in the "Acquisition Threat Support" line. It is dated 6 April 2010, with an information cutoff of 1 December 2009 and control number DIA-08-1004-005. The metamaterials DIRD issued the same day (DOW-UAP-D141) carries the next number, DIA-08-1004-006. Page 2 names the preparing office as the Acquisition Support Division (DWO-3), Defense Warning Office, Directorate for Analysis, DIA. The administrative note calls it "one in a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009" under the Defense Warning Office's AAWSA Program, and directs questions to AAP Person 1, the AAWSA Program Manager, at DIA's Bldg 6000 in Washington, D.C. A copyright warning forbids further dissemination of the photographs.

Communications is not one of the twelve technical areas in the AAWSAP Statement of Objectives (DOW-UAP-D110). The paper fits best under "supporting topics", though Section 4.4 also touches on propulsion and on effects closer to armament.

The paper uses the Douglass and Braginsky (1979) definition: high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGWs) are gravitational waves above 100 kHz. It notes that detectors built for low-frequency waves, such as LIGO, cannot sense them (page 6). For context, gravitational waves were first detected directly in 2015 by LIGO. Those came from merging black holes at frequencies of roughly a hundred hertz. High-frequency gravitational waves have still not been detected.

Page 6 makes the case for HFGWs. Gravitational waves are barely absorbed by matter, so a signal could travel "directly through the Earth from Moscow in Russia to Caracas in Venezuela" without cables, relays or satellites, and could reach "deeply submerged submarines". The same page also proposes HFGW links for future magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) aerospace vehicles, which suffer electromagnetic interference "similar to plasma interference seen at reentry."

Transmitters: from 0.28 picowatts to a 12.5-metre cylinder

The generator chapter starts from Einstein's quadrupole formula, recast in terms of the "jerk" (rate of change of force) on two masses: P = 1.76×10⁻⁵² (2rΔf/Δt)² watts. The worked example on page 8 shakes two masses 10 m apart with a force of 4×10⁸ newtons at about 5 GHz. The result is 0.28 picowatts, and the author concedes: "Clearly a very small HFGW power is generated." Pages 8-10 list ways to boost the output. Electromagnetic forces are "more than 10³⁵ larger" than gravitational ones and should be used instead. The masses can be spaced further apart and driven at a higher frequency. Above all, the number N of in-phase radiating elements should be multiplied, because power can grow as N².

Pages 9-11 review 45 years of proposals, starting with the "gaser" of 1964. They include electromagnetic cavities, nuclear explosions (1974), fissioning nuclear isomers, superconductor junctions, lasers and piezoelectric crystals, sorted into five families. Two designs are selected:

• Piezoelectric approach (proof of concept). This uses 1.8×10⁸ film bulk acoustic resonators (FBARs, the filters in mobile phones) energised by 10,000 microwave magnetrons. In its naive layout the device would be 19.8 km long and radiate 0.066 W, giving a spacetime strain amplitude of 4.9×10⁻²⁸ at 6.1 cm. Staggering the elements and slicing them to nanometre widths shrinks the design on paper to 198 m, then about 198 cm, then about 2 cm. The paper settles on a "preferred compromise" of about 20 cm and an amplitude of 4×10⁻²⁷ (pages 11-12).
• IR-excited molecules (operational transmitter). This design, which the paper calls "very theoretical", fills ring-shaped infrared waveguides with pentane molecules. Millions of ring plates are stacked and fired in sequence at light speed, so the wave builds up as nN². An operational unit would be a cylinder 12.5 m long and 10 m in radius with 10⁷ plates. At one metre it would produce a flux of 1.48×10¹⁴ W/m² in a needle beam 2.3×10⁻⁴ radians wide (pages 12-16). The paper flags the unsolved problem itself: "how to drive them all in correct phase."

At 7,000 km the beam would be 1.6 km wide, with a flux of 3 W/m² and an amplitude of 1.8×10⁻³². According to the paper, that "would be detectable by the currently designed Li-Baker HFGW detector" (page 16).

Receivers: the Li-effect and the Li-Baker detector

The detector chapter (pages 17-26) reviews receiver proposals made since 1978 and three instruments that had been built: at Birmingham University in England, at INFN Genoa in Italy, and a 100 MHz interferometer with 75 cm arms at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. The author concedes that their sensitivities are "orders of magnitude less" than needed to detect relic gravitational waves from the Big Bang. The paper prefers the Li-Baker detector, based on the "Li-effect" theory of Li, Tang and Zhao (1992). In a strong static magnetic field, a gravitational wave travelling alongside a microwave beam of the same frequency and phase (a condition the paper calls "synchro-resonance") would produce a faint flux of new photons moving at 90 degrees to the beam. Receivers placed off-axis could catch those photons away from the beam's own noise. To answer doubts that the effect is untested, the paper lists nine follow-on publications on the theory.

Section 2.2.3 then calculates the Standard Quantum Limit, the measurement floor set by quantum back-action. It multiplies three quality factors: 10¹³ from 1,000 seconds of averaging at 10 GHz, 3.4×10²¹ from radial selectivity, and 6.3×10⁴ from angular focusing. The product is Q = 2.1×10³⁹, which gives a limit of 1.8×10⁻³⁷, far below the target sensitivity of 10⁻³² (page 24). That is the basis for the headline claim that the detector is "photon-signal limited, not quantum-noise limited." The hardware (pages 25-26, Figure 14) comprises:

• a 10 GHz Gaussian microwave beam;
• superconducting magnets like those in MRI scanners;
• paraboloid "fractal membrane" reflectors;
• two shielded receivers about a metre off-axis;
• cooling to below about 48 mK, in a vacuum of 7.5×10⁻⁷ Torr.

Appendix B (pages 50-56) is a two-year work plan by a partnership between a university and a California company, both named in the appendix: about 18 months of detector design followed by about 8 months of plans and specifications. It goes as far as naming candidate suppliers for vacuum chambers, klystrons and dilution refrigerators, and proposes a custom magnet of up to 35 tesla.

Link budget, bandwidth and a gravitational time standard

"Operational Concerns" (pages 27-36) treats the concept as a telecommunications engineer would, with signal-to-noise diagrams (Figure 16) and a link-budget block diagram (Figure 17). The 1.9×10⁶ bits-per-second headline comes from Shannon's capacity formula. It assumes a 3 W/m² signal, a noise level of 10⁻⁸ W/m² and a bandwidth "arbitrarily taken to be 100 kHz for a future advanced system." The same page adds that large quality factors currently limit early systems to bandwidths of "a few Hz" (page 30). Taken as written, the formula actually gives about 2.8 million bits per second. The printed 1.9 million corresponds to a natural logarithm, a small slip that does not change the order of magnitude.

The most modest proposal is a frequency and time standard (FTS). At least three ground transmitters (four for redundancy) would be phase-locked to a common source "such as the US Naval Observatory". Users would locate themselves by time difference of arrival, "akin to the GPS system" (page 31), and a 300 GHz carrier would give 3-picosecond timing. The paper concedes that "navigational benefits alone would not justify the cost" (page 32), so it justifies the standard by the gains for telecommunications:

• signal acquisition time cut from 1.8 seconds to 5 microseconds;
• 25-50 percent channel savings for VoIP and TCP/IP;
• a factor of 2 to 4 from denser phase coding;
• recovery of guard bands that "often consume 30 to 50 percent" of assigned spectrum.

Section 3.4 adds optical lattice clocks, and the use of gravitational "geoids" to chart Lagrangian points.

Roadmap to 2050 and the speculative horizon

Figure 24 (page 37) sets out the following timeline:

• experimental research from 2009;
• a prototype go-ahead in 2020;
• device development from about 2025 to 2035;
• a first delivery of applications in 2035;
• an interplanetary upgrade in the 2040s;
• a first space-system delivery by 2050.

The text calls for ten to twelve years of university research coordinated by the National Science Foundation, and warns: "Without early confirmation the technology will not gain widespread acceptance and move forward." For 2050 the paper foresees millimetre-sized, milliwatt HFGW transceivers and "HFGW ID" nanochip tags (page 38). It also proposes beacon pairs on the Earth, Moon and Mars for interplanetary navigation (pages 39-40), while granting that "stellar tracking will remain the primary source of navigation."

Section 4.4 (page 41) predicts that "the most stunning advances" will come not in communications but in three other areas:

• remote fusion: a high-intensity HFGW pulse might trigger nuclear fusion "at a remote location, or mass disruption";
• propulsion and control: steering "missiles, missile warheads, spacecraft, and asteroids";
• surveillance: imaging within structures, the Earth and its oceans.

Section 4.5 divides the future into four "Epochs" of exploration, ending with "Universal Exploration". It cites unpublished "trispace" models in which gravitational waves might couple into a faster-than-light "parallel universe", and closes: "Universal communication holds the lofty promise of universal peace."

What the paper does not show

The paper reports no experimental result. Every transmitter power, detector sensitivity and data rate is a calculation. Most of the figures rest on conference proceedings (STAIF 2005-2008, and SPESIF 2009 papers listed as "in press") and on patents from the small group of researchers developing the Li-Baker and ring-generator concepts. The paper cites a 2008 JASON study prepared for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (Eardley et al., JSR-08-506), but only for the weakness of Gertsenshtein-type detectors. It does not engage with that study's broadly skeptical public assessment of laboratory HFGW generation or of the Li-Baker detector's claimed sensitivity.

There are internal loose ends:

• The labels in Figure 14 (a 9-tesla magnet, a 10 W transmitter, "<480mK") do not match the nominal values the text uses (3 tesla, a 1,000 W beam, below 48 mK).
• Appendix B refers to "Sections 4.4, 4.5 and 4.6" and a "Fig. 4.1a" that do not exist in this DIRD.
• Appendix C is a single title page; the paper it names is not reproduced.

The remote-fusion, propulsion and faster-than-light passages are the author's speculation. None of them has a demonstrated mechanism in established physics.

Significance

This DIRD is one of the most detailed engineering proposals in the AAWSAP series. It sets out a complete communications architecture, from transmitters and receivers to link budget, a timing network and a forty-year roadmap. Its own numbers show how far that architecture was from reality: 0.28 picowatts from a laboratory-scale example, and detector sensitivities "orders of magnitude" short of the target. It has no UAP content. Its only connection to the UAP story is institutional: it was produced for the program that the DIRD series documents. For readers of the archive, it shows how widely AAWSAP cast its net in 2009-2010, and how much of the resulting work rested on unverified theoretical claims.

Key People

Locations

Key Concepts

Notable Quotes

"HFGWs pass through all ordinary material things without attenuation and represent the ultimate wireless system." -- page 6

"Clearly a very small HFGW power is generated." -- page 8

"The practical difficulties would be how to drive them all in correct phase, but it is a challenge for future research in the IR-ring approach." -- page 15

"Because HFGW communications are carried on an extremely narrow beam directly through the Earth, there is a very low probability of interception." -- page 5

"Many of these parameters have been predicted for the components reviewed in prior sections, however, they will not be verified until a successful experiment can be performed." -- page 29

"Given that the GPS already provides adequate navigation services for most applications, navigational benefits alone would not justify the cost of an HFGW FTS system." -- page 32

"Without early confirmation the technology will not gain widespread acceptance and move forward." -- page 37

"The most stunning advances in HFGW applications will probably not be in communications, but in the remotely HFGW-generated nuclear fusion, HFGW propulsion and HFGW surveillance." -- page 41