This 2004 preprint by B V Ivanov claims that static electromagnetic fields can create strong gravitational fields. He claims a capacitor charged to 100 kV loses 1% of its weight and a capacitor charged to 6 MV would levitate. This has long been claimed as the Biefeld Brownorigin of the Biefeld-Brown effect as opposed to the conventional explanation of ionic wind thrust. Ivanov seems to use a sophisticated general relativity argument to make his claims but he hasn’t managed to publish the result.
Abstract
It is argued that static electric or magnetic fields induce Weyl-Majumdar-Papapetrou solutions for the metric of spacetime. Their gravitational acceleration includes a term many orders of magnitude stronger than usual perturbative terms. It gives rise to a number of effects, which can be detected experimentally. Four electrostatic and four magnetostatic examples of physical set-ups with simple symmetries are proposed. The different ways in which mass sources enter and complicate the pure electromagnetic picture are described.
He claims that the Weyl-Majumdar-Papapetrou fields imply that the gravitational force on a test particle $g_\mu$ is given by
$$g_\mu=c^2f^{-1}\Big(\frac{B}{2}\sqrt{\frac{\kappa}{8\pi}}\bar{\phi}_\mu+\frac{\kappa}{8\pi}\bar{\phi}\bar{\phi}_\mu\Big),$$ where $\bar{\phi}$ is the electrostatic potential, $E_\mu=-\bar{\phi}_\mu$ is the electric field and $f=1+B\phi+\phi^2$ is a solution of the so-called Weyl field (see the section II Root Gravity).
He says that the coefficient of the first linear term is $10^{23}$ times bigger than the coefficient of the second quadratic term. The quadratic latter term is familiar from standard perturbation theory. This accounts for the anomalously large gravitational effect of the electrostatic field in this case.
Does his argument make sense?