No. It was simply a re-adaption of the jump drive physics. The premise was to have matter enter a partial jump field effect so it didn't fully go into another universe, and instead was converted directly to energy, in this case, lots of photons. The same thing, de-focused, was the propulsion for the human ship. I have a joke cartoon about a super-bright flashlight, and the owner was disappointed that it didn't have any recoil. There has been discussions of things like laser thrusters, not just ablative impulse propulsion, but using laser light as thrust.