Torsion field (pseudoscience)  A torsion field (also called axion field, spin field, spinor field, and microlepton field) is a feature of pseudoscientific proposals that the quantum spin of particles can be used to cause emanations to carry information through vacuum orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. This theory is the basis of a number of unfounded claims and scams. The first torsion field proposals were proposed in the late Soviet Union by a group of physicists in the 1980s who loosely based their ideas on Einstein–Cartan theory and some variant solutions of Maxwell's equations that do not have a solid grounding in scientific fact. The group, led by Anatoly Akimov and Gennady Shipov, began the research as the state-sponsored Center for Nontraditional Technologies. They disbanded in 1991 when their research was exposed by physicist as a fraud and an embezzlement of government funding. Despite the fraudulent nature of the research having been exposed, Akimov and Shipov received financing for torsion field research from the Russian Ministry of Science from 1992 to 1995 and from the Russian Ministry of Defense from 1996 to 1997, and secretly continued their research, with a private enterprise called The International Institute for Theoretical and Applied Physics (later called UVITOR). Presently championed exclusively outside of reputable scientific research due to its lack of evidence and absence of sound theoretical underpinning, the theory has been used to proclaim faster-than-light travel (FTL), extra-sensory perception (ESP), homeopathy, levitation, and other paranormal phenomena, and has been used to provide a rationale for the purported functioning of miracle cures and similar products. These claims have no independent backing. In physics, a field is an assignment of a quantity (vector, tensor, or spinor) to every point of the space containing it. The word "torsion" refers to any variable that describes rotation. Thus, torsion fields (i.e., fields of any physical value reasonably described as "torsion") do exist in established physics aside from in this pseudoscientific case, where the terms have been misappropriated. For example, an electromagnetic wave with circular polarization or the stress tensor of a solid body under torsion stress can be described as torsion fields, although such usage is rare. The torsion tensor is a quantity in general relativity, and plays an important role in Einstein–Cartan theory.