Foundations

Insists the argument be settled with instruments and known physics first - which is exactly how a genuine anomaly would be recognised if it is there.

• Institution

• Overview of the Galileo Project (2023) — With Frank Laukien; the instrumentation and data-analysis design for all-sky anomaly search.
• Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (2023) — With Sean Kirkpatrick; works out what a high-acceleration object must emit, which is the strongest available test of any craft report.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

Before 1998 the vacuum's energy was a theorist's headache; Riess's supernova measurement turned it into something the sky is measurably doing, and everything in this fold is downstream of that.

• arXiv
• Link

• Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant (1998) — Astronomical Journal 116, 1009-1038; 16 high-redshift supernovae came in 10-15% farther than a matter-only universe allows, favouring a positive cosmological constant.

The evidence ladderThe unified picture

Jassby sharpens the question every fusion claim has to answer: after the plant powers itself, how much electricity is actually left over.

• Link
• Journal

• Fusion reactors: Not what they're cracked up to be (2017) — The standard reference for the tritium, neutron-damage and parasitic-power objections.
• Twelve Axioms of Fusion Energy R&D (2020) — A compact checklist any fusion claim can be run against.
• The Quest for Fusion Energy (2022) — A longer historical review of why the timelines keep slipping.

The evidence ladderLattice confinement fusion

With Marshall he built the most serious attempt to keep the vacuum real and local, and the precise way it strains is itself instructive.

• Stochastic optics: A local realistic analysis of optical tests of Bell inequalities (1989) — With Trevor Marshall: the central paper of stochastic optics.
• Bell's theorem: Local realism versus quantum mechanics (1990) — A pedagogical account of exactly what a real-vacuum theory has to overcome.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum is

Brings atom-level instrumentation and a strict chain of custody to physical samples - the only way material claims ever become evidence.

• Institution
• Website

• Improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis, applicable to the characterization of unusual materials with potential relevance to aerospace forensics (2022) — With Vallée, Jiang and Lemke; sets out how to analyse a claimed anomalous sample so the result means something.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

He is one of the few people asking how you could tell experimentally whether the vacuum field is real, rather than only arguing about it on paper.

• Institution
• Website

• Discrete Excitation Spectrum of a Classical Harmonic Oscillator in Zero-Point Radiation (2015) — With Wayne Huang: a purely classical oscillator bathed in zero-point radiation is shown to develop discrete-looking excitations.
• Testing Quantum Coherence in Stochastic Electrodynamics with Squeezed Schrödinger Cat States (2019) — Proposes a concrete experimental test that could separate stochastic electrodynamics from standard quantum mechanics.
• Dynamics Underlying the Gaussian Distribution of the Classical Harmonic Oscillator in Zero-Point Radiation (2013) — The simulation work behind the claim that vacuum-driven classical motion reproduces quantum ground-state statistics.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum isScalar waves and the field behind the fieldsInertia and gravity from the vacuum

Sixty years of insisting on physical measurements and case documentation rather than belief - and he publishes the null results too.

• Website

• Physical Analyses in Ten Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Material Samples (1998) — The first systematic attempt to treat claimed physical residues as a laboratory problem.
• Estimates of Optical Power Output in Six Cases of Unexplained Aerial Objects with Defined Luminosity Characteristics (1998) — Puts numbers on radiated power - directly relevant to any energy-budget argument about propulsion.
• Improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis (2022) — With Nolan; the modern methodology paper.

The evidence ladderPlasmoids, charge clusters and the orbsThe Pais effect

Mack makes the stakes vivid: whether the vacuum's energy stays constant or changes is literally the question of how everything ends, and she tells that story without losing the physics.

• Institution
• Websiteastrokatie

• The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (2020) — Five ways the universe could end, including vacuum decay and the heat death driven by dark energy — the most approachable account of why the vacuum's energy decides our cosmic fate.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum isThe unified picture

He put the whole vacuum-energy-extraction experiment on GitHub, so a reader with a free IBM Quantum account can reproduce it rather than take anyone's word for it.

• GitHubIKEDAKAZUKI· 32 followers
• GitHub

• Demonstration of Quantum Energy Teleportation on Superconducting Quantum Hardware (2023) — The first run of the energy-teleportation protocol on real IBM quantum processors, matching the exact theoretical prediction.
• Quantum-Energy-Teleportation (code repository) (2023) — Complete, runnable code for the experiment, on a laptop simulator or on IBM hardware — an unusually open invitation to reproduce the result yourself.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Shanahan sharpens the one question calorimetry cannot dodge: whether the heat is real or the calibration moved.

• Journal

• A systematic error in mass flow calorimetry demonstrated (2002) — The paper that proposes an ordinary chemical explanation for the heat measurements.
• Comments on 'Thermal behavior of polarized Pd/D electrodes prepared by co-deposition' (2005) — His direct challenge to the Navy co-deposition results.
• Reply to 'Comment on papers by K. Shanahan that propose to explain anomalous heat generation' (2006) — The published exchange, which is the clearest way to see both sides argue.

The evidence ladderLattice confinement fusion

His quantum inequalities put a number on how much negative energy you can borrow from the vacuum and for how long, which is the single most useful constraint anyone designing a vacuum engine has to meet.

• Link

• Research on Gravity and Quantum Fluctuation Effects (2015) — $50,000 from August 2015; his long-running programme on how much negative energy the vacuum will actually allow, and for how long.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Brings particle-detector discipline - blind analysis, calibration, stated systematics - to a subject that badly needed it.

• Institution
• Company

• Initial results from the first field expedition of UAPx to study unidentified anomalous phenomena (2025) — With Knuth, Kugielsky and Levy; a peer-reviewed field methodology using cameras, radar data and radiation detectors instead of testimony.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

Dittmar sharpens the question of what any fusion programme, orthodox or otherwise, would have to demonstrate before it counts as energy.

• Journal

• Fusion Illusions (2008) — The chapter-length case that fusion timelines have never been met and why.
• Nuclear energy: status and future limitations (2012) — The resource and engineering constraints, worked through.

The evidence ladderLattice confinement fusion

Turner supplied the vocabulary the whole field now uses, and the observational strategy for deciding whether 'dark energy' and 'vacuum energy' are the same thing.

• arXiv
• Link

• Prospects for probing the dark energy via supernova distance measurements (1999) — With Dragan Huterer; Phys. Rev. D 60, 081301 — an early use of the term 'dark energy' and a programme for telling a constant vacuum energy apart from an evolving field.
• The Cosmological Constant is Back (1995) — With Lawrence M. Krauss; Gen. Rel. Grav. 27, 1137-1144.

The evidence ladderThe unified picture

His geometry work sets the bar a sighting must clear before it counts as a propulsion datum - which is what makes the surviving cases interesting.

• Website
• YouTube@MickWest· 59.5K subscribers

• Sitrec - situation recreation tool (2023) — Open-source 3D reconstruction of camera geometry, so anyone can check a claimed velocity themselves.
• Quick Guide to Modern Video Analysis Techniques for UAP (and UFOs) (2024) — A practical method paper: parallax, gimbal rotation, glare, and how each fools the eye.
• Escaping the Rabbit Hole (2018) — On how to argue about evidence without losing the person you are arguing with.

The evidence ladder

He forces every claimed anomaly to survive parallax, glare and gimbal rotation first - which is exactly the filter a real propulsion signature would have to pass.

• YouTube@MickWest· 59.5K subscribers

• Gimbal UFO - A New Analysis (2022) — The glare-and-gimbal reading of the Navy footage; 206k views.
• Explained: New Navy UFO Videos (2020) — The original sensor-artefact analysis of the released videos; 283k views.
• Errors in Nimitz UFO g-force Analyses (2018) — Directly checks the acceleration numbers that propulsion arguments rest on.

The evidence ladder

Steinhardt sharpens the most consequential question in this chunk: are we reading real physics out of the supernova and survey data, or reading our own parameter choices back out of them?

• Website
• arXiv

• Assessing observational constraints on dark energy (2024) — Physics Letters B 855, 138826; shows the standard w0-wa parameterisation is nearly degenerate, so an apparent preference for evolving dark energy can be an artefact of the fitting framework rather than evidence about the vacuum.
• Rapidly Descending Dark Energy and the End of Cosmic Expansion (2022) — PNAS 119, e2200539119 — if dark energy is a rolling field rather than a constant, cosmic expansion could end far sooner than the standard picture implies.

The evidence ladderThe unified picture

Built the institution that lets careful people publish on anomalies at all - the reason a Journal of Scientific Exploration exists.

• Company

• The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence (1999) — A physicist-led review panel's attempt to say what the physical evidence does and does not support.
• Report on a survey of the membership of the American Astronomical Society concerning the UFO problem (1977) — The survey that showed working astronomers were more interested than they were willing to say publicly.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

If you read one book to understand the vacuum as physics rather than as metaphor, it is his, and he writes about zero-point energy without either hype or dismissal.

• The Quantum Vacuum: An Introduction to Quantum Electrodynamics (1994) — The standard textbook on what the quantum vacuum is and what it demonstrably does; chapters include 'Zero-Point Energy in Early Quantum Theory' and the Casimir and van der Waals treatments.
• The Casimir Effect: Physical Manifestations of Zero-Point Energy (2003) — A Physics Today piece that is the best short bridge between the technical literature and a general reader.
• Zero-Point Energy (2009) — His encyclopedia entry — a compact, authoritative definition to anchor any discussion.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

The clearest sign that anomalous-flight physics has entered the ordinary literature - and the citations are checkable.

• The new science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP) (2025) — Knuth and 33 co-authors; the field's first large peer-reviewed synthesis in a conventional aerospace journal.
• Improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis (2022) — Nolan and Vallée on how to analyse a claimed anomalous material.
• Initial results from the first field expedition of UAPx (2025) — Szydagis and colleagues; instrumented fieldwork with a pre-registered protocol.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

Turns raw case files into numbers a propulsion physicist can argue with - and says plainly when the data cannot bear the weight.

• Company

• Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles (2019) — With Knuth and Reali; the acceleration and power estimates, with stated uncertainties.
• UFOs: A Scientist Explains What We Know (And Don't Know) (2021) — A careful separation of what the data supports from what it does not.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

Durrer sharpens the evidence question underneath everything else here: how many independent measurements really point at dark energy, and what would it take to add a genuinely new one?

• arXiv
• Link

• What do we really know about Dark Energy? (2011) — Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 369, 5102-5114; an invited Kavli Royal Society talk arguing that supernovae, the microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillations all rest on the same single distance-redshift observation.

The evidence ladderThe unified picture

Names the specific conservation law or measurement error a claim has to survive - the fastest way to find the weak joint in any proposal.

• YouTube@SabineHossenfelder· 1.79M subscribers

• Backreaction blog (2026) — Where the technical objections are stated at length, with references.
• Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) — Useful context: her critique cuts at mainstream theory too, not only at outsiders.
• Some UAPs Might Be Warp Drives, Physicists Say (2026) — Covers the recent warp-signature literature; 583k views in under a week.

The evidence ladderInertial mass reduction and transmedium craftThe metric, warp drives and wormholesWhat the vacuum is

Carroll wrote one of the standard open-access reviews and then spent two decades explaining it out loud — the shortest path from curiosity about empty space to the actual physics literature.

• Website
• PodcastMindscape
• arXiv

• The Cosmological Constant (2001) — Living Reviews in Relativity 4:1 — a pedagogical overview of cosmology with a cosmological constant, the observational limits on it, and the physics of a small non-zero vacuum energy.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum isThe unified picture

Sharpens the question every propulsion claim must answer: if it accelerates like that, where is the heat, the shock and the radio signature?

• Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (2023) — With Loeb; the known-physics boundary conditions any propulsion claim has to satisfy.
• Testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee (2023) — The official statement of what the US government's own review did and did not find.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

He works on the exact point where the real-vacuum picture either succeeds or breaks — whether it can hold an atom together — and reports the result either way.

• Stochastic Electrodynamics: Renormalized Noise in the Hydrogen Ground-State Problem (2020) — Tackles the problem that has defeated stochastic electrodynamics for decades — keeping a classical hydrogen atom stable in a vacuum field.
• Simulation of the hydrogen ground state in stochastic electrodynamics (2015) — With Liska: the direct numerical attempt, reported honestly including where it fails.
• Stochastic Electrodynamics: Lessons from Regularizing the Harmonic Oscillator (2019) — Draws out what the solvable case teaches about the unsolved one.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum is

He pressed the hardest question you can ask of the real-vacuum picture — whether it survives Bell's theorem — and published the attempt rather than avoiding it.

• Stochastic optics: A local realistic analysis of optical tests of Bell inequalities (1989) — With Emilio Santos: asks how far a real zero-point field can reproduce the results usually taken as proof that no such field exists.
• Bell's theorem: Local realism versus quantum mechanics (1990) — With Ferrero and Santos, written for the American Journal of Physics and therefore unusually readable.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum is

His paper sharpens the central question of this chapter — whether the zero-point field really produces the reaction force we call inertia — by checking the derivation step by step rather than arguing about it.

• Inertia as a zero-point-field force: Critical analysis of the Haisch-Rueda-Puthoff inertia theory (2009) — A line-by-line examination of the vacuum-inertia derivation, published in the same journal as the original claim.

The evidence ladderInertia and gravity from the vacuumEnergy from the vacuum

The official counterweight: knowing what the government says it found is part of reading the propulsion documents honestly. Site blocked automated access on the date checked.

• Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I (2024) — The government's own account of programmes including AAWSAP, which commissioned the propulsion DIRDs.
• Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (2024) — The official case-resolution statistics, useful as a baseline for how many reports are explained.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

This is the experiment that turns the whole argument into a measurement: put a Casimir cavity on a balance, switch its vacuum modes on and off, and see whether gravity notices. Whatever the answer, it is data rather than debate.

• arXiv
• Link

• The Archimedes experiment (2015) — Enrico Calloni and 16 collaborators; sets out the plan to measure the gravitational force on a Casimir cavity whose vacuum energy is modulated by a superconducting transition.
• Thermal noise-limited beam balance as prototype of the Archimedes vacuum weight experiment (2024) — Eur. Phys. J. Plus 139, 158, first author A. Allocca — the prototype balance reaching thermal-noise-limited sensitivity.
• Weighing the Quantum Vacuum: Latest Progress and Experimental Status of the Archimedes Experiment (2026) — Most recent status report found; arXiv identifier not confirmed on the pages opened.

The evidence ladderWhat the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumEnergy from the vacuum

If dark energy turns out to change with time, it cannot simply be the constant energy of empty space — DESI is the instrument currently deciding that, and its DR2 numbers are the ones to watch.

• arXiv
• Institution

• DESI DR2 Results II: Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and Cosmological Constraints (2025) — Nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars; a time-evolving dark energy model is preferred over a plain cosmological constant at 3.1 sigma with the cosmic microwave background, and 2.8-4.2 sigma once supernovae are added.

The evidence ladderThe unified picture

Where the raw radar, video and witness material gets turned into something a physicist can put numbers on.

• Company
• Website
• YouTube@scientificcoalitionforuaps· 14.4K subscribers

• A Forensic Analysis of Navy Carrier Strike Group Eleven's Encounter with an Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (2019) — The Nimitz analysis that Knuth's flight-characteristics papers build on.
• The Flight Characteristics and Physics of UAP - Kevin Knuth (AIAA AV21 UAP session) (2021) — Knuth's acceleration and power analysis presented at an AIAA session.
• Kevin Knuth: The Scientific Study of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (2026) — Updated version of the same analysis.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effectInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft

Signals that this subject can carry ordinary academic apparatus - review, citation, disagreement in print.

• Company

• Limina: The Journal of UAP Studies (2023) — A peer-reviewed venue explicitly open to the physics of anomalous flight.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

Replaces argument with a data pipeline - if there is an anomalous flight signature to find, this is the kind of instrument that would find it. Site blocked automated access on the date checked.

• Overview of the Galileo Project (2023) — The design document: infrared, optical, radio and audio, all-sky, with machine-learning outlier detection.
• Galileo Project publications (2026) — The project's peer-reviewed output on instrumented sky surveys.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

The place where the physics of anomalous flight is discussed alongside what would follow if any of it is real.

• Company
• YouTube@_SolFoundation· 65.9K subscribers

• Sol Foundation Inaugural Symposium proceedings (2023) — Brought physicists, historians and policy people into one recorded programme on the propulsion question.
• The Sol Forum - with Hal Puthoff, Jacques Vallée, and Larry Lemke (2025) — Puthoff, Vallée and former NASA engineer Larry Lemke in one conversation; 38k views.
• Sol Foundation Symposium archive (2026) — Academic talks from the annual symposium.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effectInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft

Demonstrates that this subject can be done as instrumented fieldwork with a published protocol - the standard the site should hold everyone to.

• Company

• Initial results from the first field expedition of UAPx (2025) — The Laguna Beach 2021 campaign, with the data-handling protocol written down in advance.

The evidence ladderThe Pais effect

He turned Casimir physics into a design problem: tell the computer what force you want, and it tells you what shape to build.

• Casimir forces in the time domain: Theory (2009) — With McCauley, Joannopoulos and Johnson — the FDTD algorithm that let anyone compute Casimir forces in arbitrary geometries (arXiv:0904.0267).
• The Casimir effect in microstructured geometries (2011) — Nature Photonics review with Capasso and Johnson on designing the vacuum force through geometry.
• Measurement of non-monotonic Casimir forces between silicon nanostructures (2017) — Co-author on the HKUST experiment his group's theory predicted (arXiv:1701.02351).

What the vacuum is

He led the measurement that put temperature into the Casimir story — the strand of the vacuum force that theory still argues about.

• Institution

• Observation of the thermal Casimir force (2011) — Lead author on the Nature Physics report of the temperature-dependent Casimir force, with Kim, Dalvit and Lamoreaux (arXiv:1011.5219).

What the vacuum is

He did the hard mathematics behind the claim that mass and weight are things the vacuum does to matter, and he published it in mainstream journals.

• Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force (1994) — With Haisch and Puthoff: the Physical Review A paper proposing inertia as a vacuum reaction force.
• Vacuum zero-point field pressure instability in astrophysical plasmas and the formation of cosmic voids (1995) — Takes the vacuum-pressure idea to astrophysical scale in The Astrophysical Journal.
• Stochastic nonrelativistic approach to gravity as originating from vacuum zero-point field van der Waals forces (2001) — With Cole and Danley: gravity modelled as a residual vacuum force.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumEnergy from the vacuum

His group did the thing that sounds impossible: measured the electric field of empty space directly, without absorbing a single photon.

• Link

• Direct sampling of electric-field vacuum fluctuations (2015) — Science, with Riek, Seletskiy, Moskalenko and colleagues — reads out the vacuum's own electric field with femtosecond pulses, no cavity and no photon absorption.
• Back action in quantum electro-optic sampling of electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations (2023) — How the measurement itself disturbs the vacuum it is measuring (arXiv:2202.03353).
• Realizing a rapidly switched Unruh-DeWitt detector through electro-optic sampling (2022) — Turns the sampling technique into a laboratory version of a relativistic particle detector (arXiv:2103.14360).

What the vacuum is

This is the 2026 paper to hand a student: it does the vacuum-energy calculation three different ways, in the open, so the reader can see exactly where the famous mismatch comes from and how big it honestly is.

• arXiv
• Link

• The Cosmological Constant Problem: An Accessible Introduction (2026) — With Adam Lahey; accepted by the American Journal of Physics. Works the vacuum energy of a massive scalar field in flat space and in an expanding universe, with dimensional, cutoff and adiabatic regularisation shown in full, and notes that the famous 120-order-of-magnitude figure does not account for renormalisation.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuum

Half of the partnership that produced the most complete book-length case that the vacuum field is what makes matter behave quantum-mechanically.

• The Emerging Quantum: The Physics Behind Quantum Mechanics (2015) — The standard modern reference for the zero-point-field derivation of quantum mechanics.
• Linear stochastic electrodynamics: Looking for the physics behind quantum theory (1999) — A clear statement of what the programme is trying to explain and why.
• Completing the Quantum Ontology with the Electromagnetic Zero-Point Field (2024) — Places the zero-point field alongside pilot-wave approaches as a candidate account of what is physically going on.

What the vacuum isThe unified picture

He established that superconductivity is something you can induce and enhance by controlling a material's electromagnetic environment, which is exactly what the dark-cavity experiments now do with no light at all.

• Institution

• Light-Induced Superconductivity in a Stripe-Ordered Cuprate (2011) — Showed superconductivity can be switched on by driving a material's lattice, opening the whole programme of engineering superconductivity rather than merely finding it.
• Nonlinear lattice dynamics as a basis for enhanced superconductivity in YBa2Cu3O6.5 (2014) — Extended the effect to a high-temperature cuprate, establishing the field the later vacuum-cavity work grew out of.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

She carries the zero-point-field programme into its hardest test, entanglement, which is where most classical-vacuum accounts are expected to fail.

• The Emerging Quantum: The Physics Behind Quantum Mechanics (2015) — Third author of the school's central book, and the one who carried the programme into questions of entanglement.
• Quantum Mechanics as an Emergent Property of Ergodic Systems Embedded in the Zero-point Radiation Field (2009) — Sets out the ergodic argument for how a system immersed in vacuum radiation acquires quantum statistics.

What the vacuum isThe unified picture

One of the most respected theorists of superconductivity now puts his name to cavity-vacuum engineering, which tells a reader how seriously the field is being taken.

• Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate (2026) — Co-author; his involvement signals that vacuum-cavity engineering has entered mainstream correlated-electron theory.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

He built the computational machinery (QEDFT) that lets you predict, from first principles, what a material will do when you change the vacuum around it.

• arXiv

• Cavity-enhanced superconductivity in the two-dimensional limit of NbSe2 (2026) — Supplied the first-principles theory showing cavity coupling redistributes spectral weight in the Eliashberg function, which explains the non-monotonic frequency dependence.
• Macroscopic Polarization and Magnetization from Cavity Vacuum Fluctuations (2026) — Vacuum fluctuations alone are shown to induce macroscopic polarization in a material — a bulk effect from empty space.
• Symmetry Rules for Cavity Materials Engineering with Linearly Polarized Vacuum Fields (2026) — Gives the symmetry conditions that say which materials will respond to a shaped vacuum, turning trial-and-error into design.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

Padilla is the rare theorist who both proposes a concrete mechanism for hiding vacuum energy from gravity and can explain the whole puzzle to a general audience in twelve minutes on YouTube.

• Institution
• arXiv
• Link
• Link
• Link

• Lectures on the Cosmological Constant Problem (2015) — 31-page graduate lectures covering radiative instability, Weinberg's no-go theorem, and the sequestering proposal.
• Sequestering the Standard Model Vacuum Energy (2014) — With Nemanja Kaloper; Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 091304 — a reformulation of general relativity in which Standard Model vacuum energy, loops included, never sources spacetime curvature.
• The Cosmological Constant Problem (and its sequester) (2015) — Perimeter Institute seminar, 10 April 2015, calling it 'the worst fine tuning problem in Physics'.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

She is pushing the Casimir force somewhere unexpected — biology — asking whether the vacuum helps hold living structures together.

• Link

• Casimir effect with dielectric matter in salted water and implications at the cell scale (2026) — Takes the Casimir force out of the vacuum chamber and into salty biological fluid (arXiv:2601.09020).
• Universal Casimir attraction between filaments at the cell scale (2024) — New J. Phys. 26, 013009 — argues the vacuum force is strong enough to matter inside cells (arXiv:2306.14059).
• Universal Casimir interactions in the sphere–sphere geometry (2022) — The scattering approach applied to the geometry experiments actually use.

What the vacuum is

He has argued for decades that the same vacuum-fluctuation forces measured between mirrors are quietly running chemistry and biology — a claim that makes the Casimir effect feel much closer to home.

• Institution

• ANU research profile: dispersion potentials, Hofmeister effects and polarizability (2025) — The profile page documenting his continuing programme on dispersion (Lifshitz-Casimir-type) forces in real chemistry.
• Matthew Flinders Medal and Lecture, Australian Academy of Science (2017) — Recognition of a career spent insisting that Lifshitz-Casimir forces govern ordinary colloid and biological chemistry.

What the vacuum is

He is doing the careful theory behind the headline Casimir-torque and repulsion experiments — the quiet half of how those results get believed.

• Website

• Thermal Effects in the Casimir Torque between Birefringent Plates (2025) — Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 013602 — first author on the thermal theory of the Casimir torque.
• Enhanced repulsive Casimir forces between gold and thin magnetodielectric plates (2023) — Shows how magnetic response can be engineered to push, not pull.
• Recent developments on the Casimir torque (2022) — Compact review of the twisting side of the vacuum force.

What the vacuum is

He is the bridge between the two halves of this chapter — the theory that mass itself comes from the vacuum, and the patent that tries to draw power from it.

• Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force (1994) — With Alfonso Rueda and Harold Puthoff: the proposal that inertia is a reaction force from the zero-point field rather than an intrinsic property of matter.
• Physics of the zero-point field: implications for inertia, gravitation and mass (1997) — The fuller statement of the programme connecting vacuum energy to mass and gravity.
• Quantum vacuum energy extraction (2008) — With Garret Moddel: the Casimir-cavity power-conversion patent, filed 2005 and granted 2008.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumEnergy from the vacuum

She works on the most vivid version of the idea — a mirror moved fast enough that empty space itself glows — and on the detectors sensitive enough to catch it.

• Link

• MIR: An experiment for the measurement of the dynamical Casimir effect (2009) — The experiment built to convert vacuum fluctuations into detectable microwave photons by rapidly modulating a mirror.
• Optomechanical Rydberg-atom excitation via dynamic Casimir-Polder coupling (2014) — A proposal to see the dynamical Casimir-Polder force by coupling an oscillating mirror to Rydberg atoms.

What the vacuum is

He co-led the 2026 result that turned the vacuum from a passive backdrop into an engineering variable you can tune to make a material superconduct better.

• Evidence for vacuum-enhanced superconductivity in NbSe2 (2026) — Co-led the first experiment in which the vacuum field alone, with no light applied, raised a superconductor's transition temperature.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

He is the experimentalist who made empty space emit light on demand, so his papers are the place to see what the vacuum actually does when you shake it.

• Institution
• Scholar

• Observation of the Dynamical Casimir Effect in a Superconducting Circuit (2011) — The first laboratory conversion of vacuum fluctuations into real, detectable photons, using a SQUID as a mirror moved at a large fraction of light speed.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Burgess gives you the referee's rulebook: read him and you can tell for yourself whether a new claim about vacuum energy actually solves anything.

• Institution
• arXiv

• The Cosmological Constant Problem: Why it's hard to get Dark Energy from Micro-physics (2013) — 52 pages of Les Houches lectures that define naturalness carefully and set out the criteria any proposed solution has to meet.
• Yoga Dark Energy: Natural Relaxation and Other Dark Implications of a Supersymmetric Gravity Sector (2022) — With Danielle Dineen and Fernando Quevedo; JCAP — a framework in which the gravitational response of heavy-particle vacuum energies is strongly suppressed.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

He is the person who takes the thermodynamics seriously — if energy can be drawn from the vacuum, his papers are where you find out under what conditions and at what cost.

• Stochastic Electric Dipole Oscillator in a Nonuniform, Static Electric Field, used to Derive the Classical Electromagnetic Zero-point Radiation Spectrum (2026) — A 2026 derivation of the zero-point spectrum from classical thermodynamic reasoning.
• Applying the thermodynamics of a stochastic classical point charge in a spherical charge to derive classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation (2026) — Companion 2026 result reaching the same spectrum by a second route.
• Entropy Considerations in Stochastic Electrodynamics (2024) — Confronts the hardest question for any vacuum-energy scheme — what the second law permits.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumEnergy from the vacuum

His group extends vacuum-cavity enhancement from simple superconductors to the cuprates, the hardest and most consequential case.

• Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate (2026) — Senior author: an underdoped YBCO film inside a tunable terahertz cavity shows increased superfluid weight and a higher superconducting onset, and the effect strengthens as the cavity is made shorter.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

He works on the theory side of engineering materials through their electromagnetic environment, and writes the reviews that make the field legible.

• Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate (2026) — Co-author on the modelling of cavity-strengthened superconducting phase stiffness.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

He is trying to turn vacuum photon creation from a demonstration into a tool — a source of entangled light — which is how a curiosity becomes a technology.

• Link

• EAGER: Entangled Light Generation via the Dynamical Casimir Effect (2024) — $158,500 from August 2024: an NSF-funded attempt to generate entangled light directly from vacuum fluctuations, which would make the dynamical Casimir effect a usable quantum-optics resource.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He co-authored the direct measurement of vacuum fluctuations and now runs the lab pushing that time-domain view of quantum fields further.

• Link

• Direct sampling of electric-field vacuum fluctuations (2015) — Science, as second author with Riek and Leitenstorfer — the first direct read-out of vacuum electric-field fluctuations.
• Time-domain perspective on quantum fields: role of indistinguishability (2026) — CLEO paper from femtoQ on how to think about quantum fields in the time domain.
• Kerr-induced non-Gaussianity of a bright ultrafast quantum state (2026) — Optica 13, 1232–1237 — engineering the quantum statistics of light itself (arXiv:2512.17797).

What the vacuum is

He sits between theory and experiment — the person co-authoring both the big reviews and the measurements they explain.

• Scholar

• Materials perspective on Casimir and van der Waals interactions (2016) — Reviews of Modern Physics with Woods, Tkatchenko, Rodriguez-Lopez, Rodriguez and Podgornik — the materials-eye view of the vacuum force (arXiv:1509.03338).
• Observation of the thermal Casimir force (2011) — Co-author on the Nature Physics measurement of the temperature-dependent Casimir force.
• Casimir Physics (2011) — Edited Springer Lecture Notes in Physics volume (372 citations on Scholar) that collects the modern methods in one place.

What the vacuum is

His field, entanglement harvesting, is the study of how much correlation and energy two detectors can pull out of the bare vacuum simply by switching on — the theoretical backbone of this whole chapter.

• Institution
• Website

• Experimental Activation of Strong Local Passive States with Quantum Information (2023) — Co-author on the first NMR realisation of the energy-teleportation protocol.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuumThe unified picture

Every claim about 'how much energy the vacuum carries' depends on a choice of regularisation, and Elizalde is the person who has spent a career making that choice rigorous rather than hand-waved.

• Link

• Zeta Functions and the Cosmos - A Basic Brief Review (2021) — Universe 7(1), article 5, open access; a plain-language survey of how zeta regularisation turns an infinite sum of zero-point energies into a finite, physical number, and where that method meets cosmology.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuumThe unified picture

Still actively publishing the strongest technical case that the vacuum is a real stochastic field, and honest about the gaps.

• arXiv

• Stochastic electrodynamics and the interpretation of quantum theory (2012) — A working physicist's survey of what SED explains and what still defeats it.
• Stochastic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Assuming That Vacuum Fields Are Real (2022) — States the case that the vacuum fields are physically real, with atomic size and Casimir force as evidence.
• On the analogy between stochastic electrodynamics and nonrelativistic quantum electrodynamics (2022) — Maps SED onto QED in the Weyl-Wigner representation to first order in Planck's constant.

What the vacuum isThe unified picture

Archimedes asks the single most interesting question about the vacuum — does it weigh anything? — and Calloni is the person building the balance to find out.

• arXiv

• Archimedes: a feasibility study of an experiment to weigh the electromagnetic vacuum (2015) — Lead author on the scheme to measure the Earth's gravitational pull on a Casimir cavity — literally weighing the vacuum.
• The Archimedes project: a feasibility study for weighing the vacuum energy (2014) — The earlier project outline, using a high-precision balance and superconducting layers that expel or absorb vacuum energy.
• Progress in a Vacuum Weight Search Experiment (2020) — Status report on the balance and its noise budget in the journal Physics.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuum

He has spent his career on the practical question the rest of the field skirts: how do you get the Casimir force to do mechanical work on demand?

• Membrane actuation by Casimir force manipulation (2008) — Works out how to move a real mechanical membrane using the Casimir force — a concrete step from vacuum energy to mechanical work.
• Casimir forces in relativistic metrology: Fundamental physical tests and aerospace applications (2016) — Sets out what a spacecraft engineer would actually need from Casimir physics.
• The Casimir effect and its role in nanotechnology applications (2018) — A survey of where vacuum forces already matter in real devices.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He is the applied physicist who kept asking what you can build with the vacuum force — a moving micromachine, then a repulsive force — and then went and built it.

• Institution

• Quantum Mechanical Actuation of Microelectromechanical Systems by the Casimir Force (2001) — Science paper (with Chan, Aksyuk, Kleiman, Bishop) that made a micromachine move using nothing but vacuum fluctuations.
• Measured long-range repulsive Casimir–Lifshitz forces (2009) — Nature paper with Munday and Parsegian: the first measurement of a Casimir force that pushes apart instead of pulling together.
• The Casimir effect in microstructured geometries (2011) — Nature Photonics review with Rodriguez and Johnson on shaping the vacuum force by shaping the surfaces.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Quantum friction — the idea that empty space can drag on something that moves — is his speciality, and it is the strangest testable consequence of vacuum fluctuations.

• Institution

• Casimir-Polder interaction between atoms and hollow-core fibers (2026) — Latest listed work: the vacuum force on an atom inside a hollow optical fibre.
• The power-spectrum tensor in steady-state systems and its role in quantum friction (2026) — Formal machinery for the drag a body feels moving through the vacuum near a surface.
• High-accuracy Casimir-Polder force calculations using the Discontinuous Galerkin Time-Domain method (2023) — Numerics good enough to predict vacuum forces in realistic nanostructures.

What the vacuum is

He works out what happens when a whole many-body system, not a single atom, is coupled to the vacuum of a cavity — which is where collective vacuum effects become large enough to matter.

• Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate (2026) — Co-author on the theoretical interpretation of cavity-strengthened superconductivity.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

His group writes the review articles that map the whole landscape of vacuum-fluctuation effects in engineered circuits, which is the fastest way into the field.

• arXiv

• Observation of the Dynamical Casimir Effect in a Superconducting Circuit (2011) — Co-author on the first observation; his group also produced much of the theoretical groundwork for circuit-based vacuum photon generation.
• Quantum Vacuum Radiation Near a Critical Point (2026) — Shows that driving a system non-adiabatically through a critical point converts virtual excitations into real photons, a fresh route to vacuum radiation.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

A Nobel laureate who says openly that empty space is a material with properties, and who is now co-authoring the experiments that put that claim to work.

• Institution

• Evidence for vacuum-enhanced superconductivity in NbSe2 (2026) — Co-developed the Ginzburg-Landau model in which the superconducting state exchanges virtual photons with the dark cavity, lowering its energy.
• Chiral Casimir Forces: Repulsive, Enhanced, Tunable (2019) — With Qing-Dong Jiang, showed how to make the Casimir force push instead of pull.
• Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality (2021) — His plain-language account of what the modern vacuum actually is — a material with properties, not an absence.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuumGravity control and superconductorsThe unified picture

He wrote both the classic calculation that made Casimir energy respectable and the engineering papers on how cavity geometry lets you steer it.

• Company

• Vacuum stress between conducting plates: an image solution (1969) — Written with his doctoral adviser Lowell Brown, this is the calculation that reframed the Casimir effect in modern quantum field theory terms, and it is still cited constantly.
• Unusual properties of conductive rectangular cavities in the zero point electromagnetic field (1999) — Shows that changing a Casimir cavity's shape changes the sign and size of the vacuum energy inside it, which is the design principle every Casimir device depends on.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

She has spent a career on the awkward part of the story — that the standard theory and the best measurements do not fully agree — and she keeps publishing the tests that could settle it.

• Scholar

• The Casimir force between real materials: Experiment and theory (2009) — Reviews of Modern Physics, with Mohideen and Mostepanenko — the canonical account of why real materials complicate the ideal Casimir picture.
• Advances in the Casimir Effect (2009) — Oxford monograph with Bordag, Mohideen and Mostepanenko; her most-cited work (1,817 citations on her Scholar profile).
• Thermal effect in the Casimir force for graphene and graphene-coated substrates (2017) — With Bimonte and Mostepanenko — graphene as the cleanest testbed for the thermal Casimir puzzle (arXiv:1709.02628).

What the vacuum is

A tenured engineering professor at a major university who lists zero-point energy conversion as an official research area and holds the foundational patent, which is the clearest sign that this is an engineering question and not only a philosophical one.

• Institution
• Institution
• arXiv

• Quantum vacuum energy extraction (2008) — With Bernard Haisch: suppressing vacuum energy at chosen frequencies inside Casimir cavities so that electron energy-level changes release extractable power; filed 2005, granted 2008, now assigned to the Regents of the University of Colorado.
• Extraction of Zero-Point Energy from the Vacuum: Assessment of Stochastic Electrodynamics-Based Approach as Compared to Other Methods (2009) — With Dmitriyeva; separates the proposed extraction routes and shows which ones violate thermodynamics and which do not.
• Quantum vacuum energy extraction (patent) (2008) — The device concept behind the Casimir-cavity approach he assessed.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He runs the meeting where everyone who thinks quantum mechanics emerges from a deeper vacuum medium actually argues it out in public.

• Sub-Quantum Thermodynamics as a Basis of Emergent Quantum Mechanics (2010) — Treats the vacuum as a thermodynamic medium whose fluctuations produce quantum behaviour, published open access in Entropy.

What the vacuum isThe unified picture

His Josephson-metamaterial version of the experiment shows the vacuum can be made to radiate by changing a medium's refractive index, not just by moving walls.

• Institution

• Dynamical Casimir effect in a Josephson metamaterial (2013) — A second, independent route to vacuum photon creation: modulating the speed of light in a Josephson metamaterial rather than moving a mirror.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He builds the adjustable cavities that let experimenters dial the vacuum and watch a material respond, which is how a vacuum effect gets separated from everything else.

• Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate (2026) — Co-author on the cuprate cavity result; his tunable cavity design is what makes the length-dependence test possible.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

He is part of the Italian group that went after the harder prize: not just measuring the vacuum's pull, but trying to make the vacuum emit light.

• Link

• Measurement of the Casimir force between parallel metallic surfaces (2002) — With Bressi, Onofrio and Ruoso — the parallel-plate Casimir measurement closest to Casimir's original picture.
• MIR: An experiment for the measurement of the dynamical Casimir effect (2009) — The Padova/Legnaro attempt to shake real photons out of the vacuum using a semiconductor mirror inside a superconducting cavity.

What the vacuum is

He is the theorist writing down what to look for next — including whether the vacuum force visibly changes the moment a metal becomes a superconductor.

• arXiv

• Surface scattering expansion of the Casimir-Polder interaction for magneto-dielectric bodies (2023) — With Thorsten Emig — a scattering method for real, rough, magnetic surfaces.
• Thermal effect in the Casimir force for graphene and graphene-coated substrates (2017) — With Klimchitskaya and Mostepanenko — graphene is where the disputed thermal Casimir effect should be largest (arXiv:1709.02628).
• Proposal to measure the Casimir effect across the superconducting transition (2025) — Predicts a jump in the Casimir force when a film goes superconducting — a measurable link between the vacuum and superconductivity.

What the vacuum is

Few people have tried to measure so many different faces of the vacuum — its pull, its glow, and whether it can act like a birefringent material.

• Link

• Measurement of the Casimir force between parallel metallic surfaces (2002) — Co-author of the parallel-plate Casimir measurement (arXiv:quant-ph/0203002).
• The PVLAS experiment: A 25 year effort to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence (2020) — Physics Reports 871, 1–74 — the full account of trying to see the vacuum bend light in a magnetic field (arXiv:2005.12913).

What the vacuum is

He supplies the theory that tells you how to recognise a genuine vacuum-conversion signal, which is the hardest part of any energy-from-the-vacuum claim.

• Observation of the Dynamical Casimir Effect in a Superconducting Circuit (2011) — Provided the circuit-QED theory that let the team identify the emitted radiation as vacuum-converted photons rather than ordinary noise.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He built the dark cavity — a resonator that contains no light, only reshaped vacuum — and measured the superconductor inside it getting stronger.

• Evidence for vacuum-enhanced superconductivity in NbSe2 (2026) — Led the experiment: NbSe2 inside a metallic split-ring terahertz dark cavity, with the critical temperature rising by up to 5.4% in a six-layer device and the enhancement peaking at the cavity resonance.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

PVLAS chased the other great prediction about the vacuum — that a strong magnetic field makes empty space bend light — and the 25-year write-up is a masterclass in honest precision physics.

• Link

• The PVLAS experiment: A 25 year effort to measure vacuum magnetic birefringence (2020) — Physics Reports 871, 1–74 — the complete account of a quarter-century attempt to see the vacuum behave like a birefringent material (arXiv:2005.12913).
• The PVLAS experiment: measuring vacuum magnetic birefringence and dichroism with a birefringent Fabry–Perot cavity (2016) — Eur. Phys. J. C 76, 24 — the apparatus and method (arXiv:1510.08052).
• First results from the new PVLAS apparatus: a new limit on vacuum magnetic birefringence (2014) — Phys. Rev. D 90, 092003 — the headline limit on the vacuum's optical response to a magnetic field (arXiv:1406.6518).

What the vacuum is

He has kept a working laboratory pointed at the quantum vacuum for four decades, and EarthTech's publication record is the longest continuous thread in this subject.

• Company
• ORCID0000-0002-3373-3353
• Link· 66 works, 2,370 citations indexed

• Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force (1994) — With Haisch and Rueda: the paper that put vacuum-derived inertia into Physical Review A.
• Physics of the zero-point field: implications for inertia, gravitation and mass (1997) — Sets out how far the zero-point field can be pushed as an explanation for mass and gravitation.
• Polarizable-Vacuum (PV) representation of general relativity (2002) — Recasts curved spacetime as a vacuum with variable optical properties, which turns metric engineering into a materials question.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe metric, warp drives and wormholesEnergy from the vacuum

He is the working engineer who moved from thinking about the vacuum to fabricating cavities meant to draw power from it, with public funding and a public deliverable.

• Company

• SBIR Phase I: Development of devices to manipulate the structure of quantum field energy for use in electric power generation (2024) — The federally funded project in which he sets out to turn Casimir cavities into continuous electrical power cells.
• Anomalous Thrust Production from an RF Test Device Measured on a Low-Thrust Torsion Pendulum (2014) — With Brady, March, Lawrence and Davies; the NASA measurement that made the EmDrive a mainstream argument - and that later work attributed to thermal effects.
• Eagleworks Laboratories: Advanced Propulsion Physics Research (2011) — The lab's own statement of what it was set up to test and how.

What the vacuum isThe metric, warp drives and wormholesEnergy from the vacuumInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft

Kragh shows the vacuum-energy idea is a century old and arrived by a much stranger route than the textbooks suggest — useful context for judging which modern claims are genuinely new.

• arXiv

• Preludes to dark energy: Zero-point energy and vacuum speculations (2011) — 69 pages, submitted to Archive for History of Exact Sciences; follows the trail from Walther Nernst's 1916 cosmological zero-point energy hypothesis to the moment in the late 1960s when vacuum energy and the cosmological constant were finally joined.

What the vacuum isThe unified picture

He shows the vacuum force is engineerable: carve the silicon differently and the force between two chips behaves in a way flat plates never could.

• Institution

• Quantum Mechanical Actuation of Microelectromechanical Systems by the Casimir Force (2001) — As lead author with Capasso's group: the vacuum force made to drive a real micromechanical device.
• Measurement of non-monotonic Casimir forces between silicon nanostructures (2017) — Nature Photonics: nanostructured silicon makes the Casimir force change slope with distance — geometry, not just material, reshapes the vacuum (arXiv:1701.02351).

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Nikolić supplies a model small enough to check by hand, which is exactly what the 'is the vacuum energy real?' argument needs — a place where both answers can be computed and compared.

• arXiv
• Link

• Is zero-point energy physical? A toy model for Casimir-like effect (2017) — Annals of Physics 383, 181-195; a three-degree-of-freedom model showing the Casimir vacuum is not a photon-free ground state, and arguing the force is best read as van der Waals attraction.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

His lab is the place to watch if you want the vacuum force turned into a control knob — repulsive, switchable, twistable — rather than a nuisance that sticks nanomachines together.

• Website
• Website

• Measured long-range repulsive Casimir–Lifshitz forces (2009) — With Capasso and Parsegian — the first measurement of a repulsive Casimir force, in fluid.
• Casimir Force Control Enabled by 3D Nanostructures (2025) — Nano Letters: dramatic tuning of the vacuum force using 3D nanostructures, with no liquid and no exotic materials.
• Thermal Effects in the Casimir Torque between Birefringent Plates (2025) — Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 013602 — the vacuum can twist as well as pull, and temperature changes the twist.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Martin does the arithmetic nobody else shows you — including the surprise that the headline mismatch shrinks a lot once the vacuum energy is renormalised properly.

• arXiv
• Link

• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About The Cosmological Constant Problem (But Were Afraid To Ask) (2012) — 89 pages, published in Comptes Rendus Physique 13, 566; works through regularisation in flat and curved spacetime and shows that the famous '122 orders of magnitude' figure is not what a careful renormalisation actually gives.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

The founder of metamaterials also asks whether two surfaces sliding past each other in a vacuum feel friction from nothing at all — and he is still arguing it out in print.

• Institution
• Institution

• Stable-to-unstable transition in quantum friction (2024) — Physical Review Research, with Oue and Silveirinha — when vacuum drag stops being a mild damping and goes unstable.
• QED in space–time varying materials (2024) — APL Quantum, with Horsley — quantum electrodynamics in media whose properties change in time, the setting for dynamical Casimir effects.
• Shearing the vacuum – quantum friction (1997) — J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 9, 10301 — the paper that started the modern quantum-friction debate.

What the vacuum is

The word in her grant title is 'engineering' — she works on making vacuum fluctuations do what you want at the nanoscale.

• Link

• Engineering Quantum Fluctuation Phenomena in Nanoscale Quantum Optical Systems (2024) — $240,000 each at Arizona and Arizona State: a continuing programme whose explicit aim is to engineer, not merely observe, the effects of vacuum fluctuations.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He writes about zero-point energy for people who want to understand it rather than be sold it — including the negative forces and entropy puzzles that make it interesting.

• Institution
• Scholar

• The Casimir Effect: Physical Manifestations of Zero-Point Energy (2001) — His most-cited work (1,635 citations on Scholar) and still the clearest book-length statement of what zero-point energy does in the real world.
• The Casimir effect: recent controversies and progress (2004) — A frank review of what the field argues about — useful precisely because it does not paper over disagreements.
• Casimir effect in dielectrics (1978) — Early work with Schwinger and DeRaad, 698 citations on Scholar; the Schwinger-school foundation of modern Casimir theory.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Krauss has spent thirty years arguing in public that empty space is not empty and that its energy dominates the universe — the popular framing most readers meet first.

• arXiv

• The Cosmological Constant is Back (1995) — With Michael S. Turner; Gen. Rel. Grav. 27, 1137-1144 — argued from pre-supernova data that the universe has a non-zero cosmological constant, and framed it explicitly as vacuum energy density.
• The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology (2007) — With Robert J. Scherrer; in a vacuum-energy-dominated future all evidence of expansion disappears from view — a striking argument about what vacuum energy does to knowledge itself.

What the vacuum isThe unified picture

She wrote the review that connects 'what the vacuum does' to 'what the material is made of' — the bridge a curious reader actually needs.

• Institution

• Materials perspective on Casimir and van der Waals interactions (2016) — Lead author of the Reviews of Modern Physics survey linking material properties to the strength and sign of the vacuum force (arXiv:1509.03338).

What the vacuum is

He spent a career arguing that the quantum weirdness of matter is what a real vacuum field looks like from the inside, and he made the case rigorously enough to publish it as a Springer book.

• The Emerging Quantum: The Physics Behind Quantum Mechanics (2015) — With Cetto and Valdés-Hernández: the fullest modern statement of the zero-point-field account of quantum mechanics.
• The Planck Distribution — a Necessary Consequence of the Fluctuating Zero-Point Field (2014) — Derives the Planck spectrum from the vacuum field rather than assuming it.
• Quantum Theory and Linear Stochastic Electrodynamics (2001) — The programme stated compactly in Foundations of Physics.

What the vacuum isThe unified picture

An NSF CAREER award in cavity quantum materials is a sign that shaping the vacuum to change what matter does is now a mainstream research career, not a fringe interest.

• Link

• CAREER: Quantum Optics of Correlated Electrons in Cavity Quantum Materials (2026) — $334,132 from September 2026: an NSF CAREER award, meaning the agency is funding a whole early career around engineering matter with cavity vacuum fields.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

He is the physicist who wrote down a concrete, experimentally tested recipe for drawing energy out of the zero-point field, and it has now been run on real hardware twice.

• Institution

• Quantum Energy Teleportation: An Introductory Review (2011) — The accessible entry point to his protocol for extracting usable energy from the ground state of a quantum field using entanglement plus classical communication.
• Quantum Energy Teleportation (2008) — The founding proposal, showing that measurement at one point plus a classical message lets a distant party draw energy out of the zero-point field.
• Exceeding the maximum classical energy density in fully charged quantum batteries (2025) — Recent work extending the same energy-from-correlations idea to quantum battery design.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He keeps proposing concrete, buildable ways to make the vacuum force do something new — including flipping its sign with a magnetic fluid.

• Link

• Prediction of a measurable sign change in the Casimir force using a magnetic fluid (2026) — Phys. Rev. Materials — a concrete, testable recipe for flipping the vacuum force from attraction to repulsion (arXiv:2601.00483).
• High-Temperature Plasma in Casimir Physics (2026) — Extends Casimir theory into plasma conditions (arXiv:2510.26312).
• Casimir forces across magnetic plasmas at nuclear separations (2025) — Annals of Physics 481 — pushes the Casimir framework down to nuclear length scales (arXiv:2505.07860).

What the vacuum is

He put the Casimir force in its proper company: one of many forces that appear whenever fluctuations are confined, which makes it far less mysterious and far more general.

• Website

• Casimir forces between arbitrary compact objects (2007) — Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 170403 with Emig, Graham and Jaffe — an exact scattering method for the vacuum force between any two shapes.
• The 'friction' of vacuum, and other fluctuation-induced forces (1999) — Reviews of Modern Physics with Golestanian — the paper that framed Casimir forces as one member of a whole family of fluctuation effects.

What the vacuum is

He is one of the theorists who named and mapped 'cavity quantum materials', the discipline of designing matter by designing the vacuum it sits in.

• arXiv

• Cavity-enhanced superconducting response in an underdoped cuprate (2026) — Co-author on the theory that cavity engineering strengthens phase stiffness in a superconductor.
• Fluctuation engineering in cavity quantum materials (2026) — States the programme plainly: tailored vacuum and thermal spectra can shift a material's phase boundaries.
• Cavity Quantum Materials (2021) — The review that named the field of engineering matter through strong coupling to a cavity's vacuum.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

He is the field's librarian and organiser — the person whose book and workshops made Casimir physics into a coherent discipline rather than scattered papers.

• Link

• Advances in the Casimir Effect (2009) — Lead author of the Oxford monograph distilled from hundreds of Casimir papers — the field's standard sourcebook.
• New developments in the Casimir effect (2001) — Physics Reports review with Mohideen and Mostepanenko; listed at 2,032 citations on Mohideen's Scholar profile.
• The Casimir effect as scattering problem (2007) — Reframes Casimir energy in the scattering language the whole modern field now uses.

What the vacuum is

One of the few people who does SED theory and then designs a bench test of it in the same building.

• Company

• Electrodynamics in the zero-point field: on the equilibrium spectral energy distribution and the origin of inertial mass (2001) — An electromagnetic account of inertial mass built strictly inside SED.
• Investigation of the Effect of Casimir Cavities on the Decay Rates of Radioactive Isotopes (2010) — An EarthTech experiment testing whether suppressing vacuum modes changes nuclear behaviour.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuum

She led the first bench experiment showing that a state which looks completely drained of energy can still be made to give some up, once you hold the right information about it.

• Experimental Activation of Strong Local Passive States with Quantum Information (2023) — The first physical realisation of energy teleportation, using nuclear magnetic resonance on trans-crotonic acid, published in Physical Review Letters.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Kaloper supplies the mathematical machinery for the boldest live idea in this corner: that gravity can be rewritten so it simply never sees the vacuum's energy, at any loop order.

• arXiv
• LinkN.Kaloper.1

• Sequestering the Standard Model Vacuum Energy (2014) — With Antonio Padilla; Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 091304 — makes dimensionful parameters in the matter sector depend on the four-volume of spacetime, which requires the universe to be finite and eventually to recollapse.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

He teaches the actual calculation of vacuum energy to undergraduates, which makes his papers unusually readable for someone learning the subject.

• Link

• RUI: Quantum and Thermal Fluctuations in Monopoles, Spacetime, and Materials (2022) — $135,000 from August 2022; an NSF Research in Undergraduate Institutions grant, meaning students learn to compute vacuum energies directly.

What the vacuum is

He asks the question that matters most for any 'energy from the vacuum' claim — what is the absolute upper limit? — and derives it rigorously.

• Scholar

• Shape-independent limits to near-field radiative heat transfer (2015) — Sets a ceiling on how strong near-field fluctuation effects can possibly be, whatever you build.
• Fundamental Limits to Near-Field Optical Response over Any Bandwidth (2019) — Phys. Rev. X — the bounds framework that also constrains fluctuational (Casimir-type) interactions.
• Fundamental limits in photonics and electromagnetics: a tutorial (2026) — Tutorial with Francesco Monticone on how to ask 'how good could this possibly get?' in wave physics.

What the vacuum is

His graphene work is the most careful published attempt to draw usable current from ambient fluctuations, and it is worth understanding precisely because it is thermal rather than vacuum energy — it shows what a rigorous version of this claim looks like.

• Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene (2020) — The central result: the spontaneous rippling of freestanding graphene drives a measurable current through a circuit, without violating thermodynamics.
• Graphene ripples as a realization of a two-dimensional Ising model: a scanning tunneling microscope study (2015) — The microscopy that first characterised the ripples he later turned into a power source.
• Spectrum Analysis of Thermally Driven Curvature Inversion in Strained Graphene Ripples for Energy Conversion Applications (2025) — Shows the programme is still active and still being refined a decade on.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

His Chalmers laboratory built the circuit in which the vacuum was first made to radiate, and it remains one of the few places on earth with that capability.

• Institution
• ORCID0000-0002-1222-3506

• Observation of the Dynamical Casimir Effect in a Superconducting Circuit (2011) — Senior author on the experiment that produced real photons out of the vacuum in a superconducting transmission line.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He runs the ultra-cold laboratory where the vacuum's own noise is quiet enough to be measured directly, which is the precondition for every experiment in this chapter.

• Dynamical Casimir effect in a Josephson metamaterial (2013) — Senior author on the Aalto demonstration of vacuum photon creation at 5.4 GHz.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He is the theorist turning the quantum vacuum into something with adjustable settings — repulsive, enhanced, tunable, switchable — and he supplied the theory for the 2026 vacuum-superconductivity result.

• Website

• Chiral Casimir Forces: Repulsive, Enhanced, Tunable (2019) — With Frank Wilczek, found the loophole in the no-go theorem that had made repulsive Casimir forces seem impossible — a prerequisite for any Casimir machine.
• Axial Casimir force (2019) — Extends the vacuum force catalogue to axial couplings, widening the design space for engineered vacuum forces.
• Quantum atmospherics for materials diagnosis (2019) — Proposes reading a material's hidden order from the 'quantum atmosphere' of vacuum fluctuations it projects into the space around it.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuumGravity control and superconductors

Wang's calculation is the clearest worked example of a live idea worth following: that the vacuum's energy is real and gigantic, and that its violent fluctuation is precisely why the universe expands so gently.

• arXiv
• Link

• How the huge energy of quantum vacuum gravitates to drive the slow accelerating expansion of the Universe (2017) — First author with Zhen Zhu and W. G. Unruh; Phys. Rev. D 95, 103504. A published Comment by Mazzitelli and Trombetta (Phys. Rev. D 97, 068301, arXiv:1801.00138) and the authors' Reply are part of the same open exchange.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

The terahertz resonator is the actual machine in these experiments, and he is the photonics specialist who makes it work.

• Cavity-enhanced superconductivity in the two-dimensional limit of NbSe2 (2026) — Co-author; the terahertz resonator design is the instrument that shapes the vacuum modes the superconductor feels.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

Bousso is the clearest classroom voice on 'the energy of empty space' — his TASI notes turn a famously slippery problem into something a determined reader can actually follow.

• Institution
• Website
• arXiv

• TASI Lectures on the Cosmological Constant (2008) — Published in Gen. Rel. Grav. 40, 607-637; opens with the plain statement that the vacuum's energy density is at least 60 orders of magnitude smaller than known contributions to it.
• The Cosmological Constant Problem, Dark Energy, and the Landscape of String Theory (2012) — A colloquium-level account arguing dark energy almost certainly is vacuum energy, and that a landscape of vacua could explain its size.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

He brought the precision NMR toolkit that turned a vacuum-energy thought experiment into a measurement with error bars.

• Experimental Activation of Strong Local Passive States with Quantum Information (2023) — Senior author on the NMR demonstration that information can unlock energy from an apparently exhausted state.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

His micro-oscillator measurements are the sharpest ruler the field has for asking whether anything beyond the known vacuum force is hiding at sub-micron distances.

• Scholar

• Tests of new physics from precise measurements of the Casimir pressure between two gold-coated plates (2007) — His most-cited paper: micro-torsional-oscillator Casimir pressure used to bound extra dimensions and new forces (arXiv:hep-ph/0703290).
• Novel constraints on light elementary particles and extra-dimensional physics from the Casimir effect (2007) — Shows how a benchtop vacuum-force measurement becomes a particle-physics constraint.
• Capacitance measurements and electrostatic calibrations in experiments measuring the Casimir force (2009) — The calibration methodology that decides whether a Casimir measurement is trustworthy.

What the vacuum is

His microchip platform is the new hardware that could finally test whether superconductivity changes the vacuum force — a question open since the 1960s.

• arXiv

• High-resolution Casimir force sensing across a superconducting transition (2025) — Suspended nanoscale plates with area-to-separation ratios three orders of magnitude beyond prior work, read out by scanning tunnelling microscopy.

What the vacuum is

Jaffe asks the question that has to be answered before any claim about extracting or weighing vacuum energy: does the Casimir plate experiment actually demonstrate that zero-point energy is real, or only that charged matter attracts? Anyone building on the vacuum should be able to answer him.

• Institution
• arXiv

• The Casimir Effect and the Quantum Vacuum (2005) — Phys. Rev. D 72, 021301(R); shows the Casimir force can be derived entirely from charges and currents, and that it vanishes as the fine structure constant goes to zero.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

He connects the Casimir force to the biggest open question a reader will have: does the vacuum tell us anything new about gravity at short distances?

• Institution
• arXiv

• Measurement of the Casimir force between parallel metallic surfaces (2002) — With Bressi, Carugno and Ruoso — the rare experiment that used Casimir's own flat parallel-plate geometry (arXiv:quant-ph/0203002).
• Casimir forces and non-Newtonian gravitation (2006) — New Journal of Physics: how Casimir measurements bound deviations from Newtonian gravity at short range.
• Towards a precision measurement of the Casimir force in a cylinder-plane geometry (2005) — With Dalvit and Mazzitelli — a geometry chosen to expose thermal Casimir effects and the limits of the usual approximation.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuum

He works on the regime where light and matter couple so strongly that the ground state is already full of virtual photons waiting to be released.

• Quantum Vacuum Radiation Near a Critical Point (2026) — Non-adiabatic modulation through a critical point converts virtual excitations into real photons — a lower-threshold cousin of the dynamical Casimir effect.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

His LKB page states the theme plainly — Casimir forces and vacuum fluctuations, alongside gravity and quantum physics — and his scattering framework is how most people now calculate the effect.

• Institution

• The Casimir effect within scattering theory (2006) — With Lambrecht and Maia Neto — the scattering formulation that made arbitrary geometries and real materials computable.
• Casimir force and the quantum theory of lossy optical cavities (2003) — Treats the two mirrors and the gap as a quantum optical network — a clean way to see where the force comes from.
• Casimir forces (2015) — An accessible overview of the effect, its theory and its experiments.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuum

Macroscopic QED is the language in which the Casimir effect stops being a special case and becomes ordinary quantum optics in real materials — and he helped write it.

• Link

• Macroscopic quantum electrodynamics and duality (2009) — Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 140404 with Buhmann — an electric-magnetic duality that constrains Casimir and Casimir-Polder forces (arXiv:0806.2211).
• Macroscopic quantum electrodynamics in nonlocal and nonreciprocal media (2012) — New J. Phys. 14, 083034 — extends the framework to exotic media where the usual assumptions fail (arXiv:1109.6193).

What the vacuum is

He works on the general theory behind every version of the vacuum force — atoms, surfaces, moving bodies — and is now involved in experiments that isolate the vacuum's own contribution.

• Link

• Experimentally separating vacuum fluctuations from source radiation (2026) — Nature Communications with Herter, Lindel, Gabriel and Faist — separates what the vacuum does from what the source emits (arXiv:2502.18208).
• Self-assembly of metallic MEMS using Casimir forces (2025) — Uses the vacuum force as an assembly tool rather than a nuisance.
• Macroscopic quantum electrodynamics and duality (2009) — Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 140404 with Stefan Scheel — a symmetry that constrains all dispersion forces (arXiv:0806.2211).

What the vacuum is

He is the person who turned 'the vacuum pushes on mirrors' from a chalkboard result into a measured force, and he still runs the tabletop lab where those measurements get sharper.

• Website

• Demonstration of the Casimir Force in the 0.6 to 6 μm Range (1997) — The torsion-pendulum experiment that reopened Casimir measurement as a modern precision science.
• The Casimir force: background, experiments, and applications (2005) — The standard entry-point review for anyone who wants the whole experimental landscape in one place.
• Observation of the thermal Casimir force (2011) — First reported observation of the temperature-dependent (thermal) part of the Casimir force, with Sushkov, Kim and Dalvit.

What the vacuum is

Because of him you do not need a torsion balance to explore the Casimir force — you can simulate it in free software on a laptop.

• Website

• Numerical methods for computing Casimir interactions (2011) — Casimir Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics 834, ch. 6 — the review that made computing vacuum forces a standard engineering task.
• Casimir forces in the time domain: Theory (2009) — The algorithm behind Meep's Casimir solver, with Rodriguez, McCauley and Joannopoulos.
• The Casimir effect in microstructured geometries (2011) — Nature Photonics review with Rodriguez and Capasso.

What the vacuum is

If you read one thing before anything else about vacuum energy and gravity, read Weinberg 1989 — it is the map of the whole territory, written by the person who drew it, and every proposal since is measured against it.

• Link
• Link

• The cosmological constant problem (1989) — Rev. Mod. Phys. 61, 1-23; lays out why quantum field theory's estimate of the vacuum's energy overshoots what gravity actually feels, and surveys five families of possible answers.
• Anthropic bound on the cosmological constant (1987) — Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 2607; argued a bound on Lambda from the requirement that galaxies form at all — the paper that made selection arguments respectable in cosmology.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

He is the careful voice on quantum friction and vacuum states — the person who checks whether an exciting vacuum effect survives a rigorous calculation.

• arXiv
• Link

• Casimir-Lifshitz force between moving plates at different temperatures (2009) — With Ulf Leonhardt — finds a lateral force from thermal radiation but no quantum-vacuum friction between the plates.
• Damped vacuum states of light (2016) — J. Opt. 18, 095201 — what the vacuum state actually looks like in a lossy medium (arXiv:1603.00233).
• Reflection and transmission in nonlocal susceptibility models with multiple resonances (2017) — The material response that any honest Casimir calculation depends on (arXiv:1702.05058).

What the vacuum is

He proved, years before the 2026 superconductivity results, that simply coupling molecules to the electromagnetic vacuum of a cavity changes how they behave and react.

• Institution

• Exploring Superconductivity under Strong Coupling with the Vacuum Electromagnetic Field (2019) — Reported Rb3C60's superconducting transition rising from 30 K to 45 K at ordinary pressure under vibrational strong coupling, with a clear Meissner effect — an early and striking vacuum-field result.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

If you have ever wondered whether the vacuum force could be cancelled or steered by shaping objects, he is the theorist who was funded to find out.

• Website

• Casimir forces between arbitrary compact objects (2007) — Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 170403 — first author on the exact multipole/scattering method for any pair of shapes.
• Surface scattering expansion of the Casimir-Polder interaction for magneto-dielectric bodies (2023) — With Bimonte — extends the method to rough, magnetic real-world surfaces.

What the vacuum is

He is the living founder of the picture in which the vacuum is a real, physical, fluctuating field that things move in — and he was still publishing it in 2026.

• Institution

• Random electrodynamics: The theory of classical electrodynamics with classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation (1975) — The founding paper of stochastic electrodynamics: keep classical physics, add a real random zero-point field, and much of quantum behaviour follows.
• The classical linear oscillator in classical electrodynamics with classical zero-point radiation (2026) — Published in 2026, more than fifty years after his founding paper — evidence the programme is alive, not historical.
• A Brief Survey of Stochastic Electrodynamics (1980) — His own short introduction to the field, still the cleanest way in.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumEnergy from the vacuum

He is the clearest thinker on the biggest version of the question: if vacuum energy is real, what does it do to spacetime — and can we watch a laboratory version of it?

• Link
• Institution
• arXiv
• Link· 289 works, 16,125 citations indexed

• Backreaction of stimulated Hawking radiation in an optical analogue (2026) — Nature 655, 336–341 — vacuum-driven radiation in a laboratory analogue of a black-hole horizon (arXiv:2607.01118).
• Quantum noise in time-dependent media and cosmic expansion (2024) — Connects vacuum noise in changing media to the physics of an expanding universe (arXiv:2501.02495).
• Einstein's equations in electromagnetic media (2026) — EPL 154, 16003 — the geometry-as-material idea that connects vacuum physics to spacetime (arXiv:2508.11300).

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumEnergy from the vacuumThe unified pictureThe vacuum as a quantum fluid

If you want to know what the Casimir force actually measures — not what it is supposed to be — his experiments and his monograph are where the numbers come from.

• Institution
• Scholar

• Precision Measurement of the Casimir Force from 0.1 to 0.9 μm (1998) — The atomic-force-microscope measurement that gave the Casimir force percent-level precision (arXiv:physics/9805038).
• New developments in the Casimir effect (2001) — Physics Reports review with Bordag and Mostepanenko — his most-cited paper (2,032 citations on his Scholar profile).
• The Casimir force between real materials: Experiment and theory (2009) — Reviews of Modern Physics survey of how real metals, not ideal mirrors, shape the measured force (arXiv:0902.4022).

What the vacuum is

If you read one document to understand how far the science of making photons from nothing has actually come, this open-access review is it.

• arXiv

• Fifty Years of the Dynamical Casimir Effect (2020) — The standard open-access survey of everything achieved in vacuum photon creation across five decades, with emphasis on post-2010 results.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Together with Klimchitskaya he wrote most of the theory that experimenters compare their data against — and he is candid about where it does not fit.

• Link

• The Casimir force between real materials: Experiment and theory (2009) — The Reviews of Modern Physics account that defined how the field talks about material effects (arXiv:0902.4022).
• Advances in the Casimir Effect (2009) — Co-author of the Oxford reference monograph on the Casimir effect.
• Tests of new physics from precise measurements of the Casimir pressure between two gold-coated plates (2007) — With Decca and collaborators — turning a Casimir measurement into limits on new forces and extra dimensions.

What the vacuum is

His simulations are the clearest demonstration of the central SED claim — that classical matter in a real vacuum field starts behaving quantum-mechanically.

• Discrete Excitation Spectrum of a Classical Harmonic Oscillator in Zero-Point Radiation (2015) — Shows a classical oscillator in a real vacuum field producing something that looks like quantised energy levels.
• Dynamics Underlying the Gaussian Distribution of the Classical Harmonic Oscillator in Zero-Point Radiation (2013) — Traces exactly how the vacuum field shapes the motion into the quantum ground-state distribution.
• Testing Quantum Coherence in Stochastic Electrodynamics with Squeezed Schrödinger Cat States (2019) — Finds SED does not reproduce double-slit-type interference - the clearest published limit on the theory.

What the vacuum isScalar waves and the field behind the fields

His group produced the second, independent 2026 measurement of cavity-enhanced superconductivity, and the effect grew stronger the thinner the material got.

• Cavity-enhanced superconductivity in the two-dimensional limit of NbSe2 (2026) — Senior author on the independent confirmation that a terahertz cavity raises NbSe2's transition temperature, with bilayer Tc rising 10% from 3.02 K to 3.41 K at 0.92 THz.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

Unruh's group refuses the usual escape route of cancelling the vacuum energy away, and instead asks what an enormous, wildly fluctuating vacuum would really do to spacetime.

• Institution
• arXiv
• Link· 241 works, 18,387 citations indexed

• How the huge energy of quantum vacuum gravitates to drive the slow accelerating expansion of the Universe (2017) — With Qingdi Wang and Zhen Zhu; Phys. Rev. D 95, 103504, a PRD Editors' Suggestion — take the enormous vacuum energy density seriously, let it fluctuate, and the net effect is a slow expansion rather than an instant catastrophe.
• Experimental Black-Hole Evaporation? (1981) — The paper that started analogue gravity: sound in a flowing fluid obeys the same equations as light near a horizon.
• Measurement of Stimulated Hawking Emission in an Analogue System (2011) — With Weinfurtner and colleagues, the water-tank experiment that measured the effect he predicted thirty years earlier.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified pictureThe vacuum as a quantum fluid

He designs materials whose whole purpose is to change what the vacuum does inside them, which is the engineering side of the Casimir story.

• Link

• Engineering Long-Range Dipole-Dipole Interactions (2016) — $461,877 from December 2016; work on reshaping the vacuum modes that mediate forces between distant atoms.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

This is what it looks like when vacuum-energy conversion is taken seriously by a national funding agency: a named company, a named investigator, a dollar figure and a deliverable you can look up.

• Link

• SBIR Phase I: Development of devices to manipulate the structure of quantum field energy for use in electric power generation (2024) — $274,920, 1 May to 30 November 2024, PI Harold White: Casimir cavities augmented with electrically connected conducting pillars, with the objective of predicting tunnelling current across metal-insulator-metal stacks and fabricating prototype cells.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

The strongest academic case that the quantum vacuum is a real physical medium rather than a bookkeeping device - which is the premise the whole site rests on.

• Institution

• The Emerging Quantum: The Physics Behind Quantum Mechanics (2015) — Derives quantisation as an emergent property of matter in permanent contact with the zero-point field.
• The Quantum Dice: An Introduction to Stochastic Electrodynamics (1996) — The standard textbook treatment of SED before the newer synthesis.
• Completing the Quantum Ontology with the Electromagnetic Zero-Point Field (2024) — Their current statement of why the vacuum field belongs in the ontology, not just the maths.

What the vacuum isInertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

One institute holds both the experimental and theoretical halves of vacuum-field materials engineering, so its output is the single best feed to follow for this chapter.

• Cavity-enhanced superconductivity in the two-dimensional limit of NbSe2 (2026) — MPSD theory (Rubio group) underpins one of the two independent 2026 cavity-superconductivity results.

What the vacuum isGravity control and superconductors

A company founded expressly to work on Casimir forces and vacuum energy, whose publication list is a compact reading course in the subject.

• Company

• Quantum Fields LLC publication list (2026) — A working catalogue of Casimir-effect and vacuum-energy papers from a company set up specifically to pursue them.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

Their paper sharpens a question the equations cannot answer on their own: what would it actually mean for the vacuum's energy to be physically real, rather than a bookkeeping choice?

• Website
• LinkS.E.Rugh.1

• The quantum vacuum and the cosmological constant problem (2002) — Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 33, 663-705 (arXiv hep-th/0012253); traces where the problem came from and asks which assumptions about general relativity and quantum field theory are needed to make it even well-posed.

What the vacuum isThe unified picture

Their honest published sequence — first measurement defeated by stray stress, then a better instrument built to reach piconewtons — is a model of how this kind of claim should be tested.

• Company
• Link

• SBIR Phase I: Fluctuation Flow Propulsion (2024) — $275,000, 15 August 2024 to 30 November 2025: asymmetric nanostructures such as resonant tunnelling diodes on cantilever beams, with a diamagnetic-levitation measurement built to resolve piconewton forces after residual stress swamped the interferometric attempt.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuum

This is the group that moved the vacuum from theory to instrument — they changed nothing but the shape of empty space around a superconductor, and the superconductor improved.

• Evidence for vacuum-enhanced superconductivity in NbSe2 (2026) — Published in Nature on 19 August 2026: a van der Waals superconductor in a metallic split-ring terahertz dark cavity, with critical temperature, critical current and critical field all rising, and the enhancement peaking at the cavity's resonant frequency.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuumGravity control and superconductors

A named centre where the deliberate engineering of vacuum forces is the research programme rather than a side interest.

• Institution

• Evidence for vacuum-enhanced superconductivity in NbSe2 (2026) — The theory for the first vacuum-enhanced superconductor came from this centre, jointly with Frank Wilczek.

What the vacuum isEnergy from the vacuumGravity control and superconductors

The single thread connecting stochastic electrodynamics, metric engineering and the Pentagon propulsion reports - and he posts the papers free.

• Company
• Website
• Company

• Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force (1994) — With Haisch and Rueda; the founding paper of the idea that inertia is a vacuum reaction force.
• Can the vacuum be engineered for spaceflight applications? Overview of theory and experiments (1998) — The programme statement for treating the vacuum as an engineering medium.
• Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering (2010) — Published in JBIS and later issued as a Defense Intelligence Reference Document.

Inertia and gravity from the vacuumEnergy from the vacuumThe metric, warp drives and wormholesInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft

Carries Woodward's programme forward and is unusually clear about which measurements would kill it.

• Institution
• Company

• Mach Effect Gravitational Assist Drive (2018) — The design and theory of the PZT-stack MEGA thruster.
• Mach Effects for In Space Propulsion: Interstellar Mission (NIAC Phase II) (2018) — The NASA-funded study that took Mach-effect propulsion into a formal advanced-concepts programme.
• New Stick-Slip Tests of the Mach Effect Gravitational Assist (MEGA) Drive (2018) — Presented at an APS meeting - the effort to rule out mechanical artefacts.

Inertia and gravity from the vacuumInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft

The one propellantless-thrust proposal derived from accepted physics rather than around it - and he wrote down exactly how to falsify it.

• Institution
• Company

• Making Starships and Stargates: The Science of Interstellar Transport and Absurdly Benign Wormholes (2013) — The full argument that transient mass fluctuations, allowed by Mach's principle, make propellantless thrust legal.
• Mach's principle, mass fluctuations, and rapid spacetime transport (1994) — The original derivation of the transient mass fluctuation term.
• Mach Effect Gravitational Assist Drive (SSI report) (2018) — With Fearn; the NIAC-era statement of the MEGA drive design.

Inertia and gravity from the vacuumInertial mass reduction and transmedium craftThe metric, warp drives and wormholes

Turns 'inertia comes from the vacuum and the horizon' into numbers you can test on a galaxy and on a bench - and DARPA funded the test.

• Institution
• Website

• Minimum accelerations from quantised inertia (2010) — The core prediction: inertia weakens at very low acceleration because the Unruh wavelength no longer fits the observable horizon.
• Testing quantised inertia on the emdrive (2016) — Turns QI into a concrete thruster prediction, which is what made hardware programmes possible.
• Physics from the Edge: A New Cosmological Model for Inertia (2014) — The book-length statement of horizon-based inertia for a general technical reader.

Inertia and gravity from the vacuumInertial mass reduction and transmedium craft

The cleanest worked example on this whole site of how a radical claim gets made, tested and argued in the open literature.

• Inertia as a zero-point-field Lorentz force (1994) — Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff make the claim.
• Inertia as a zero-point-field force: Critical analysis of the Haisch-Rueda-Puthoff inertia theory (2009) — Levin answers it in the same journal - read the pair together.

Inertia and gravity from the vacuumThe evidence ladder

Banks flips the usual question: instead of asking why vacuum energy is small, he asks what a universe with a small positive Lambda tells us about how many quantum states spacetime can hold.

• Institution
• arXiv

• My Personal History With the Quantum Theory of de Sitter Space (2023) — An 11-page first-person account of how the quantum theory of de Sitter space developed — an unusually readable way into why Banks thinks Lambda is an input, not an accident.

Inertia and gravity from the vacuumThe unified picture

The point-by-point technical reply that any reader of the inertia-from-the-vacuum papers should read next - it sharpens exactly which step is load-bearing.

• Inertia as a zero-point-field force: Critical analysis of the Haisch-Rueda-Puthoff inertia theory (2009) — Published in the same journal as the original; works through the derivation step by step and identifies where it fails.

Inertia and gravity from the vacuumThe evidence ladder

A rare thing: a privately funded laboratory that has taken the quantum vacuum seriously as an energy and propulsion question for forty years and publishes what it finds.

• Company

• Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin research programme (1991) — A standing private laboratory whose declared interests are the quantum vacuum, modifications to electrodynamics, spacetime and gravity, and interstellar flight.
• EarthTech publications list (2026) — The institute's own bibliography of vacuum, gravity and propulsion papers.
• Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (1985) — Founded by Harold Puthoff in 1985; incorporated under EarthTech International in 1991.

Inertia and gravity from the vacuumThe metric, warp drives and wormholesEnergy from the vacuumWhat the vacuum is