The frontier programme
What to build next, and the measurement that settles it.
This site exists to grow the people who will build what comes next: the future fusion engineers, warp-drive engineers, plasma and vacuum experimentalists, and the trades around them. Every card here is one thing a person could take up — what it proposes, the published results it rests on, the experiment or build that would test it, where it stands on the maturity scale, and the number that would settle it. Take one card, run its settling measurement, and publish the answer whichever way it comes out.
39 cards · 7 sections
What it costs to start
- Bench — a school, a maker space or a well-equipped garage.
- University — a departmental laboratory with a clean room, a cryostat or a pulsed-power bay.
- National lab — a facility only a state or a large consortium builds.
Section 1 · 8 cards
Tapping the zero-point field
The reservoir is not in dispute. The engineering question is which asymmetry you build, and what pays for it.
- Published and peer-reviewed
The quantum-energy-teleportation cell
Build a small array of entangled two-qubit cells that release usable energy at one end when a measurement result arrives from the other end over an ordinary wire. Nobody pumps the ground state locally, because the ground state forbids it; instead one side measures, pays the energy cost of measuring, and sends a single bit that tells the other side exactly which operation unlocks the energy already sitting there as a suppressed fluctuation.
Quantum-information engineersSuperconducting-circuit fabricatorsFirst-time contributors
Bench, then university.
- Published and peer-reviewed
The geometry-tuned Casimir cell
Stop choosing materials and start choosing shapes. The force the vacuum exerts across a gap can be turned down about tenfold or up about threefold using nothing but the surface pattern, with the same metal and the same air.
Nanofabrication engineersMicroelectromechanical designersVacuum-metrology students
University.
- Designed, not yet built
The switchable vacuum rotor
Build a nanoscale motor whose only power supply is the vacuum, with an ordinary electrical switch on the front. Two recent results give the two halves: a voltage that flips the Casimir force from attraction to repulsion, and a magnetic field that switches on a Casimir torque between surfaces that carry no built-in direction at all.
Condensed-matter fabricatorsMagnetics engineersPrecision-mechanics engineers
University.
- Designed, not yet built
The real moving boundary versus the electrical one
Settle an open disagreement between two people building vacuum-energy hardware. One argues that every existing dynamical Casimir experiment cheats — the boundary is moved electronically, never physically — and wants to move real walls along a tapered cavity so that different sections carry different mode counts and the device has a time structure built into its shape.
Microwave engineersCryogenic engineersPrecision-mechanism designers
University.
- Published and peer-reviewed
The dark cavity as a materials engine
Change what a material is able to do by changing the empty space around it. Put a superconductor inside a resonator that carries no power at all, and its transition temperature moves.
Materials engineersTerahertz and photonics designersLow-temperature physicists
University.
- On the bench now
The Moddel cell and the thermodynamic ledger
Take the most advanced vacuum-power hardware claim in the field and settle it the way hardware claims are settled: independent fabrication, independent measurement, published artefact analysis. The device is a metal-insulator-metal tunnelling diode — palladium and nickel about two nanometres apart — with a Casimir cavity on top, so the vacuum inside the cavity is thinner than the vacuum outside.
Thin-film and diode fabricatorsPrecision electrical metrologistsStudents of artefact analysis
University.
- What to watch
Quantum friction — the vacuum as a shear medium
Slide two perfectly clean, perfectly smooth surfaces past each other in vacuum at absolute zero, with nothing touching, and there is still friction. Momentum crosses the empty gap.
TribologistsNear-field thermal engineersPrecision-mechanics engineers
University.
- What to watch
The Casimir force at nuclear separations
Follow the vacuum force down from the hundreds of nanometres where everyone measures it to the femtometre gap between two protons, and see what it does there. Two recent papers take that step and find the force is not negligible at nuclear separations: the zero-point energy in such a gap corresponds to an enormous effective temperature, that fills the gap with electron-positron pairs, and those pairs screen the vacuum force into the same mathematical shape nuclear physics writes as the short-range nuclear potential.
Nuclear physicistsHigh-field magnet engineersLifshitz-theory theorists
University, then national lab.
Section 2 · 6 cards
Fusion engineering
A ladder. Each rung has a machine somebody has built, a measurement that proves the rung was climbed, and a named next rung.
- Published and peer-reviewed
The lattice ladder
Treat the Coulomb barrier as an environmental quantity rather than a constant. Pack deuterium into a metal so densely that the metal's own electrons partly cancel the charge between nuclei, then supply a small trigger.
Materials engineersNuclear physicists
University.
- On the bench now
The Lattice Energy Converter — the garage rung
The simplest device in this programme. One electrode of palladium or iron loaded with hydrogen, a second of ordinary copper or brass, gas in the gap, sealed in standard pipe fittings.
School and university studentsMakersBench experimentalists
Bench.
- Published and peer-reviewed
The benchtop fusion machines
Two architectures produce real fusion neutrons on a table. The inertial electrostatic confinement device is a wire cage in a vacuum chamber held tens of kilovolts negative, so ions fall inward and recirculate through a dense core.
Plasma experimentalistsPulsed-power engineersDiagnostics builders
Bench to university.
- On the bench now
Aneutronic fuel and the compact machines that suit it
Burn proton and boron-11 instead of deuterium and tritium. The reaction gives three helium nuclei and 8.7 million electronvolts with no neutrons in the main channel, so the products come back as charged particles you can convert straight into current instead of neutrons you must shield against and whose damage limits the life of the machine.
Plasma engineersPower-electronics designersDetector builders
University to national lab.
- On the bench now
The sheared-flow Z pinch and the repetition problem
Revive the simplest fusion geometry ever drawn — run a large current straight down a column of gas and let the column's own magnetic field squeeze it, with no external magnets and no auxiliary heating — by fixing the instability that killed it in the 1960s. Give the column a sheared axial flow, faster on the axis than at the edge, and the kinks stay suppressed.
Pulsed-power engineersPlasma-facing materials engineersLiquid-metal handling specialists
University to national lab.
- What to watch
Fusion by field conditioning rather than by heat
Every fusion machine ever built spends most of its input energy overcoming electrostatic repulsion by brute force — heat it, squeeze it, or accelerate it. A different family of proposals asks whether the form of the electromagnetic field the nuclei sit in changes the effective interaction, so that less input energy is needed for the same reaction rate.
Accelerator and beam-line engineersGauge-theory theoristsNuclear diagnosticians
University.
Section 3 · 6 cards
Metric and propulsion engineering
You do not move the ship, you engineer the distance — and the handle on the metric is the medium.
- Published and peer-reviewed
Warp Factory on a laptop
For thirty years warp drives were argued about on paper: somebody proposed a metric, somebody else did the algebra for one class of observer, and the argument continued. There is now a numerical toolkit that takes any metric, solves Einstein's field equations on a grid, and reports the energy density, pressures, momentum flows and energy conditions that metric actually demands — sampled across every observer rather than one.
Warp-metric theoristsNumerical-relativity studentsAnyone with a laptop and a semester
Bench — a laptop.
- On the bench now
The pillar cavity that already looks like a warp metric
Fabricate a micron-scale Casimir structure whose computed vacuum-energy distribution has the shape a warp metric asks for, and then measure it. This is not a warp drive and nobody involved says it is.
Nanofabrication engineersPrecision electrical metrologistsWarp-metric theorists
University.
- Designed, not yet built
Look for somebody else's warp drive
If a warp shell is built from real stress-energy and moves through the galaxy, it radiates. That means the question "has anyone built one" is an observational question with named telescopes and existing archives, not a philosophical one.
Observational astronomersData-pipeline engineersNumerical relativists
Bench, then university.
- Designed, not yet built
The superconducting gravity bench — an emitter and a mirror
Build the two components gravitational-wave engineering has never had: a laboratory source, and something that reflects. Both proposals run through the same physics — a superconductor is ordinary matter in which an enormous number of electrons move as one coherent quantum object, which is why it is the one material where a coupling to gravity might be large enough to use.
Superconducting-device fabricatorsCryogenic engineersMicrowave designers
University.
- Designed, not yet built
Condition the field, not the power
Ordinary electromagnetism couples to gravitation far too feebly to be useful. The conditioning programme says the weakness is not about how much energy you put in but about the form the field takes — give an electromagnetic field a structure closer to the one underlying gravitation and the coupling gets much louder.
Accelerator and beam-line engineersElectromagnetics designersPrecision magnetometry engineers
University.
- Published and peer-reviewed
The reversal test
Before any propellantless thrust claim can be believed, the field needs a shared instrument and a shared protocol. That protocol exists, it is published, and it is unglamorous: turn the thruster around inside the vacuum chamber without opening it, and see whether the force turns around with it.
Precision-measurement engineersMetrologistsExperiment designers
University.
Section 4 · 4 cards
Inertia, gravity and the vacuum
If inertia and gravity are things the vacuum does to matter, these are the measurements that would tell the accounts apart.
- What to watch
Settle the inertia correlation function
The 1994 result that inertia is a Lorentz force exerted by the zero-point field on accelerating matter has a specific, published technical objection, and that objection names its own resolution. The dispute comes down to a single mathematical object: which correlation function actually describes zero-point radiation as seen by a uniformly accelerated detector.
Ultrafast-optics experimentalistsQuantum-field theorists
University.
- On the bench now
Weigh the vacuum
Quantum theory fills empty space with energy. General relativity says energy has weight.
Precision-mechanics engineersLow-noise metrology engineersCryogenic materials peopleSeismologists
National lab for the full experiment; university for the useful contribution.
- What to watch
Angular acceleration, not rotation rate
The rotating-superconductor gravity experiments have a thirty-year replication problem, and one specific parameter has never been systematically varied: the rate at which the disc is spun up. If the effect depends on angular acceleration rather than on steady angular velocity, then every replication that ramped gently was testing the wrong variable, and the thesis's own emphasis on acceleration transients — rather than speeds — says exactly that.
Cryogenic mechanical engineersPrecision-balance metrologistsCeramic-superconductor fabricators
University.
- Settled physics
The analogue-gravity bench
Curved-spacetime physics genuinely emerges from ordinary matter in a laboratory. Push a fluid past its own speed of sound and waves inside cannot fight their way back out; the sound field then obeys exactly the wave equation of a massless field on a curved metric assembled from the fluid's density, flow speed and sound speed.
Photonics engineersCold-atom experimentalistsWarp-metric theorists
Bench for the water tank, university for the fibre or the condensate.
Section 5 · 5 cards
Plasmoids, orbs and self-organising plasma
A knot of plasma that makes its own magnetic cage. The gap between the ones laboratories make and the ones people report is a programme.
- Designed, not yet built
Build a Nachamkin plasmoid on purpose
There is a family of solutions to Maxwell's equations, in a partially ionised gas, that behaves like electromagnetic energy trapped in a ball and holding itself together — with a calculable critical frequency and calculable resonant sizes at which the object exchanges no energy at all with its surroundings. Nobody has built one to the specification and measured it.
Plasma experimentalistsRadio-frequency engineersComputational electromagnetics engineers
University.
- Published and peer-reviewed
The plasmoid lifetime ladder
Laboratory plasmoids are millimetre-scale and last nanoseconds to microseconds. The objects this site is interested in are metres wide and persist for minutes.
Plasma diagnosticiansHigh-speed imaging specialistsCross-literature synthesists
University, using machines that already exist.
- Published and peer-reviewed
Make ball lightning and instrument it
Long-lived luminous balls can be produced on a bench with an ordinary electric arc, and one natural example has been caught in spectrum. The subject therefore has everything it needs to stop being a collection of stories: a laboratory recipe, a natural measurement, and a growing structured observation channel cross-checked against professional lightning-location data.
Plasma chemistsSpectroscopistsSchool and university laboratories
Bench.
- What to watch
The EVO crater — two accounts, one micrograph
A granted 1991 patent family describes micrometre-scale bundles of electrons that hold themselves together, travel along grooves cut in a dielectric, and leave characteristic craters and streaks. A 2022 paper from a former Naval Research Laboratory materials physicist offers a conventional account of the same craters.
Pulsed-power engineersMaterials-characterisation specialistsHydrodynamic modellers
University.
- On the bench now
Calibrated sky, not footage
Every argument about anomalous objects in the sky is really an argument about instrumentation. A passive electro-optical or infrared sensor cannot supply range, so a size and a speed derived from one camera depend entirely on an assumed distance.
Instrumentation engineersOptical and infrared systems designersData-pipeline builders
Bench to university.
Section 6 · 5 cards
Instruments and metrology
Every claim above is limited by a measurement nobody has built well enough yet. These are the missing instruments.
- Settled physics
Vacuum field sampling as a student instrument
For most of a century the zero-point motion of the electromagnetic field was inferred — from spontaneous emission, from the Lamb shift, from the Casimir force. It is now read directly, with a laser pulse shorter than one cycle of the field it probes.
Ultrafast-optics engineersPhotonics integratorsMetrologists
University.
- Published and peer-reviewed
Quantum atmospherics
A material does not stop at its surface. If the matter inside breaks a symmetry, the quantum fluctuations just outside inherit that lopsidedness — a quantum atmosphere.
Scanning-probe engineersQuantum-sensing specialistsCondensed-matter characterisation engineers
University.
- On the bench now
The calorimetry and neutron scorecard
Adopt, publicly and as a matter of course, the two disciplines that decide whether any energy claim in section 2 means anything. First: a fusion concept that cannot produce measurable deuterium-deuterium neutrons from the plasma or the target — rather than from stray ions hitting the vessel wall — is not doing fusion.
Thermal and instrumentation engineersStudents of measurement discipline
Bench to university.
- Published and peer-reviewed
Isotopic forensics
Make it standard practice to open the device afterwards and ask what the material became. A stray impurity arrives with its ordinary isotope ratio, so a ratio that is wrong points at a nuclear process rather than at contamination — which makes isotope mapping the single most decisive after-the-fact measurement available to this field, and one that modern instruments can now do point by point across a sample.
Analytical chemistsMass-spectrometry specialistsMaterials-characterisation engineers
University, using an existing facility.
- On the bench now
The megahertz-to-gigahertz gravitational-wave receiver
Listen for gravitational waves far above the band the big interferometers cover. Nothing in the known astrophysical catalogue is small and dense enough to ring at megahertz to gigahertz, so anything found there is new physics — and, for this site specifically, that band is exactly where the laboratory emitter proposals of section 3 would radiate.
Microwave and cryogenic engineersSignal-processing specialistsData analysts
University, on existing hardware.
Section 7 · 5 cards
New theories to test
Hypotheses the library implies but nobody has written down as a test. Each is written the same way: if X, then measure Y.
- What to watch
If a cavity changes electron-phonon coupling, then it changes the screening energy
Two settled facts have never been put in the same room. First: an unpowered resonator placed near a superconductor changes its transition temperature, and first-principles calculations trace the effect to the vacuum field reshuffling how electrons trade energy with lattice vibrations.
Nuclear physicistsTerahertz photonics engineers
University.
- What to watch
If Planck's constant measures the field's density, then find the test that separates it from the fine-structure constant
One strand of this subject holds that Planck's constant is a measure of the zero-point field's energy density — deeper ocean, larger constant — and that changing the density changes the vacuum's permittivity and permeability and therefore the local speed of light. The people who hold that view also state its own falsifier plainly, and it is a sharp one: measuring the fine-structure constant alone cannot detect any of this, because its terms compensate, so a null result on the fine-structure constant is not evidence either way.
Precision metrologistsClassical and quantum electrodynamics theoristsAstronomers with catalogue skills
Bench for the theory, national lab for the measurement.
- Published and peer-reviewed
If entanglement is the vacuum's fuel line, then the cell array has a scaling law
Quantum energy teleportation is the only route to ground-state energy that has been run on hardware, and the accounting stays ordinary throughout: the measurement pays. Everyone therefore treats it as a curiosity rather than as an energy technology, and stops.
Quantum-information engineersThermodynamicists
Bench, then university.
- What to watch
If a plasmoid is vacuum-coupled, then its lifetime tracks the boundary around it
The central puzzle of section 5 is lifetime: laboratory plasmoids last microseconds and the objects this site is interested in are reported to last minutes. One reading of the thesis is that a long-lived plasmoid is coupled to the vacuum — that its boundary modulation and its energy source are the same thing.
Plasma experimentalistsMicrowave-structure designers
University.
- What to watch
If the zero-point field carved the voids, then the void edges carry its fingerprint
One published model says the zero-point field does something visible at the largest scale there is: because the field's spectrum looks identical from every moving frame there is no drag to damp its kicks, so an isolated proton in near-empty space slowly gains energy, the emptiest regions are energised most, they push outward, and they compress their surroundings into sheets until trapped magnetic fields lock the structure. If that is right, then the foam of voids and walls redshift surveys actually show is a zero-point-field signature, and it should differ in a specific, statistical way from the structure gravity alone would build.
CosmologistsPlasma astrophysicistsData-analysis students
Bench — a workstation and public data.