Turns out there's a paper
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1803.pdf
By these 2 guys
https://www.phys.ksu.edu/personal/westmore/
http://www.math.ksu.edu/people/personnel_detail?person_id=1330
I'm willing to trust someone who's phd dissertation was called "Optical black holes and solitons" on the matter as qualified to answer.
They outline the design for a ship and roughly outline the theoretical machines needed to produce small black holes.
tl;dr: Yes it is possible but you need to point particle beams at the black hole both to keep it's size stable and to control it's position.
Design requirements for a BH starship
- use the Hawking radiation to drive the vessel
- drive the BH at the same acceleration
- feed the BH to maintain its temperature
Item 3 is not absolutely necessary. We could manufacture a SB H, use it to drive a ship one
way, and release the remnant at the destina tion. However this would
limit us greatly as to performance, and be very dis appointing in the
powerplant application discussed below.
We shall discuss these three
problems in outline only here; a t the level of engineering they will
each require an extended discussion. It is not hard to see how we
might satisfy requirement 1. We sim ply position the SBH at the focus
of a parabolic reflector attached to the bo dy of the ship. Since the
SBH will radiate gamma rays and a mix of particles an d antiparticles,
this is not simple. The proposal has been made in the context o f
antimatter rockets, to make a gamma ray reflector out of an electron
gas [11].
It is not clear if this is feasible (e.g., [2]).
Alternatively, we could allow the gamma rays to escape and di rect
only the charged particle part of the Hawking radiation (cf. [2]), al
though this produces a less capable ship. To improve the performance,
we could add a thick layer of matter which would absorb the gamma
rays, reradiate in opt ical frequencies, and focus the resulting light
rays. An absorber which stops o nly gamma rays heading towards the
front of the ship and allows the rest to es cape out the back causes
gamma rays to radiate from the ship asymmetrically. I n this way, even
the escaping non-absorbed gamma rays contribute some thrus t (cf. [12]
or [13]). Modulo safety concerns, one would not want the absorber to
be too massive. An extremely massive absorber could burden the mass of
vehic le so much that the extra thrust it helps to deliver does not
lead to an improv ed acceleration.
Yet another idea for the
utilization of gamma ray energy is to exploit pair production
phenomena. By interacting with the electric fiel d of atomic nuclei,
high energy gamma rays can be converted into charged particl
e-antiparticle pairs such as electrons and positrons. These particles
can b e directed by elec- tromagnetic fields. It is not likely that
even half of the gamm a ray energy can be utilized in this manner
however (see Vulpetti [14], [15]).
It might be advantageous to use
the Hawking radiation to ener gize a sec- ondary working substance
which can then be ejected as exhaus t (as is done in thermal and ion
rockets). However, the working substance mu st be ejected at 10
relativistic speeds so that the specific impulse will be high enough
for interstellar travel.
The most optimistic approach is to solve
requirements 2 and 3 together by attaching particle beams to the body
of the ship behind the BH and beaming in matter. This would both
accelerate the SBH, since BHs “move w hen you push them”(see [3]
p270), and add mass to the SBH, extending the li fetime.
The delicate
thing here is the absorption cross section for a particle going into a
BH. We intend to investigate this question in the futur e. If simply
aiming the beam at the SBH doesn’t work, we can try forming an accreti
on disk near the SBH and rely on particles to tunnel into it.
Alternativel y, we could use a small cluster of SBHs instead of just
one to create a larger e ffective target, charge the SBH etc. It is
also possible that because of quantu m effects SBHs have larger than
classical radii, due to the analog of zero po int energy. This point
must remain as a challenge for the future.
