Rotating Casimir systems: Magnetic-field-enhanced perpetual motion, possible realization in doped nanotubes, and laws of thermodynamics

Recently, we have demonstrated that for a certain class of Casimir-type systems (“devices”) the energy of zero-point vacuum fluctuations reaches its global minimum when the device rotates about a certain axis rather than remains static. This rotational vacuum effect may lead to the emergence of permanently rotating objects provided the negative rotational energy of zero-point fluctuations cancels the positive rotational energy of the device itself. In this paper, we show that for massless electrically charged particles the rotational vacuum effect should be drastically (astronomically) enhanced in the presence of a magnetic field. As an illustration, we show that in a background of experimentally available magnetic fields the zero-point energy of massless excitations in rotating torus-shaped doped carbon nanotubes may indeed overwhelm the classical energy of rotation for certain angular frequencies so that the permanently rotating state is energetically favored. The suggested “zero-point-driven” devices—which have no internally moving parts—correspond to a perpetuum mobile of a new, fourth kind: They do not produce any work despite the fact that their equilibrium (ground) state corresponds to a permanent rotation even in the presence of an external environment. We show that our proposal is consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.