O programa de fronteira
O que construir a seguir, e a medida que decide.
Este site existe para formar quem vai construir o que vem a seguir: os futuros engenheiros de fusão, engenheiros de dobra espacial, experimentadores de plasma e de vácuo, e os ofícios à sua volta. Cada ficha é algo que uma pessoa poderia assumir: o que propõe, os resultados publicados em que se apoia, o experimento ou a construção que o testaria, onde está na escala de maturidade e o número que decidiria a questão. Pegue uma ficha, faça a sua medida decisiva e publique a resposta, seja ela qual for.
39 fichas · 7 seções
As fichas estão em inglês enquanto o programa é traduzido.
Quanto custa começar
- Bancada: uma escola, um espaço maker ou uma garagem bem equipada.
- Universidade: um laboratório departamental com sala limpa, criostato ou uma baia de potência pulsada.
- Laboratório nacional: uma instalação que só um Estado ou um grande consórcio constrói.
Seção 1 · 8 fichas
Aproveitar o campo de ponto zero
O reservatório não está em disputa. A pergunta de engenharia é qual assimetria você constrói e o que a paga.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
The quantum-energy-teleportation cell
Build a small array of entangled two-qubit cells that release usable energy at one end when a measurement result arrives from the other end over an ordinary wire. Nobody pumps the ground state locally, because the ground state forbids it; instead one side measures, pays the energy cost of measuring, and sends a single bit that tells the other side exactly which operation unlocks the energy already sitting there as a suppressed fluctuation.
Quantum-information engineersSuperconducting-circuit fabricatorsFirst-time contributors
Bench, then university.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
The geometry-tuned Casimir cell
Stop choosing materials and start choosing shapes. The force the vacuum exerts across a gap can be turned down about tenfold or up about threefold using nothing but the surface pattern, with the same metal and the same air.
Nanofabrication engineersMicroelectromechanical designersVacuum-metrology students
University.
- Projetado, ainda não construído
The switchable vacuum rotor
Build a nanoscale motor whose only power supply is the vacuum, with an ordinary electrical switch on the front. Two recent results give the two halves: a voltage that flips the Casimir force from attraction to repulsion, and a magnetic field that switches on a Casimir torque between surfaces that carry no built-in direction at all.
Condensed-matter fabricatorsMagnetics engineersPrecision-mechanics engineers
University.
- Projetado, ainda não construído
The real moving boundary versus the electrical one
Settle an open disagreement between two people building vacuum-energy hardware. One argues that every existing dynamical Casimir experiment cheats — the boundary is moved electronically, never physically — and wants to move real walls along a tapered cavity so that different sections carry different mode counts and the device has a time structure built into its shape.
Microwave engineersCryogenic engineersPrecision-mechanism designers
University.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
The dark cavity as a materials engine
Change what a material is able to do by changing the empty space around it. Put a superconductor inside a resonator that carries no power at all, and its transition temperature moves.
Materials engineersTerahertz and photonics designersLow-temperature physicists
University.
- Na bancada agora
The Moddel cell and the thermodynamic ledger
Take the most advanced vacuum-power hardware claim in the field and settle it the way hardware claims are settled: independent fabrication, independent measurement, published artefact analysis. The device is a metal-insulator-metal tunnelling diode — palladium and nickel about two nanometres apart — with a Casimir cavity on top, so the vacuum inside the cavity is thinner than the vacuum outside.
Thin-film and diode fabricatorsPrecision electrical metrologistsStudents of artefact analysis
University.
- O que observar
Quantum friction — the vacuum as a shear medium
Slide two perfectly clean, perfectly smooth surfaces past each other in vacuum at absolute zero, with nothing touching, and there is still friction. Momentum crosses the empty gap.
TribologistsNear-field thermal engineersPrecision-mechanics engineers
University.
- O que observar
The Casimir force at nuclear separations
Follow the vacuum force down from the hundreds of nanometres where everyone measures it to the femtometre gap between two protons, and see what it does there. Two recent papers take that step and find the force is not negligible at nuclear separations: the zero-point energy in such a gap corresponds to an enormous effective temperature, that fills the gap with electron-positron pairs, and those pairs screen the vacuum force into the same mathematical shape nuclear physics writes as the short-range nuclear potential.
Nuclear physicistsHigh-field magnet engineersLifshitz-theory theorists
University, then national lab.
Seção 2 · 6 fichas
Engenharia de fusão
Uma escada. Cada degrau tem uma máquina que alguém construiu, uma medida que prova que o degrau foi subido e um próximo degrau com nome.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
The lattice ladder
Treat the Coulomb barrier as an environmental quantity rather than a constant. Pack deuterium into a metal so densely that the metal's own electrons partly cancel the charge between nuclei, then supply a small trigger.
Materials engineersNuclear physicists
University.
- Na bancada agora
The Lattice Energy Converter — the garage rung
The simplest device in this programme. One electrode of palladium or iron loaded with hydrogen, a second of ordinary copper or brass, gas in the gap, sealed in standard pipe fittings.
School and university studentsMakersBench experimentalists
Bench.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
The benchtop fusion machines
Two architectures produce real fusion neutrons on a table. The inertial electrostatic confinement device is a wire cage in a vacuum chamber held tens of kilovolts negative, so ions fall inward and recirculate through a dense core.
Plasma experimentalistsPulsed-power engineersDiagnostics builders
Bench to university.
- Na bancada agora
Aneutronic fuel and the compact machines that suit it
Burn proton and boron-11 instead of deuterium and tritium. The reaction gives three helium nuclei and 8.7 million electronvolts with no neutrons in the main channel, so the products come back as charged particles you can convert straight into current instead of neutrons you must shield against and whose damage limits the life of the machine.
Plasma engineersPower-electronics designersDetector builders
University to national lab.
- Na bancada agora
The sheared-flow Z pinch and the repetition problem
Revive the simplest fusion geometry ever drawn — run a large current straight down a column of gas and let the column's own magnetic field squeeze it, with no external magnets and no auxiliary heating — by fixing the instability that killed it in the 1960s. Give the column a sheared axial flow, faster on the axis than at the edge, and the kinks stay suppressed.
Pulsed-power engineersPlasma-facing materials engineersLiquid-metal handling specialists
University to national lab.
- O que observar
Fusion by field conditioning rather than by heat
Every fusion machine ever built spends most of its input energy overcoming electrostatic repulsion by brute force — heat it, squeeze it, or accelerate it. A different family of proposals asks whether the form of the electromagnetic field the nuclei sit in changes the effective interaction, so that less input energy is needed for the same reaction rate.
Accelerator and beam-line engineersGauge-theory theoristsNuclear diagnosticians
University.
Seção 3 · 6 fichas
Engenharia da métrica e da propulsão
Você não move a nave: faz engenharia com a distância, e a alavanca sobre a métrica é o meio.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
Warp Factory on a laptop
For thirty years warp drives were argued about on paper: somebody proposed a metric, somebody else did the algebra for one class of observer, and the argument continued. There is now a numerical toolkit that takes any metric, solves Einstein's field equations on a grid, and reports the energy density, pressures, momentum flows and energy conditions that metric actually demands — sampled across every observer rather than one.
Warp-metric theoristsNumerical-relativity studentsAnyone with a laptop and a semester
Bench — a laptop.
- Na bancada agora
The pillar cavity that already looks like a warp metric
Fabricate a micron-scale Casimir structure whose computed vacuum-energy distribution has the shape a warp metric asks for, and then measure it. This is not a warp drive and nobody involved says it is.
Nanofabrication engineersPrecision electrical metrologistsWarp-metric theorists
University.
- Projetado, ainda não construído
Look for somebody else's warp drive
If a warp shell is built from real stress-energy and moves through the galaxy, it radiates. That means the question "has anyone built one" is an observational question with named telescopes and existing archives, not a philosophical one.
Observational astronomersData-pipeline engineersNumerical relativists
Bench, then university.
- Projetado, ainda não construído
The superconducting gravity bench — an emitter and a mirror
Build the two components gravitational-wave engineering has never had: a laboratory source, and something that reflects. Both proposals run through the same physics — a superconductor is ordinary matter in which an enormous number of electrons move as one coherent quantum object, which is why it is the one material where a coupling to gravity might be large enough to use.
Superconducting-device fabricatorsCryogenic engineersMicrowave designers
University.
- Projetado, ainda não construído
Condition the field, not the power
Ordinary electromagnetism couples to gravitation far too feebly to be useful. The conditioning programme says the weakness is not about how much energy you put in but about the form the field takes — give an electromagnetic field a structure closer to the one underlying gravitation and the coupling gets much louder.
Accelerator and beam-line engineersElectromagnetics designersPrecision magnetometry engineers
University.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
The reversal test
Before any propellantless thrust claim can be believed, the field needs a shared instrument and a shared protocol. That protocol exists, it is published, and it is unglamorous: turn the thruster around inside the vacuum chamber without opening it, and see whether the force turns around with it.
Precision-measurement engineersMetrologistsExperiment designers
University.
Seção 4 · 4 fichas
Inércia, gravidade e vácuo
Se a inércia e a gravidade são coisas que o vácuo faz à matéria, estas são as medidas que separariam as explicações.
- O que observar
Settle the inertia correlation function
The 1994 result that inertia is a Lorentz force exerted by the zero-point field on accelerating matter has a specific, published technical objection, and that objection names its own resolution. The dispute comes down to a single mathematical object: which correlation function actually describes zero-point radiation as seen by a uniformly accelerated detector.
Ultrafast-optics experimentalistsQuantum-field theorists
University.
- Na bancada agora
Weigh the vacuum
Quantum theory fills empty space with energy. General relativity says energy has weight.
Precision-mechanics engineersLow-noise metrology engineersCryogenic materials peopleSeismologists
National lab for the full experiment; university for the useful contribution.
- O que observar
Angular acceleration, not rotation rate
The rotating-superconductor gravity experiments have a thirty-year replication problem, and one specific parameter has never been systematically varied: the rate at which the disc is spun up. If the effect depends on angular acceleration rather than on steady angular velocity, then every replication that ramped gently was testing the wrong variable, and the thesis's own emphasis on acceleration transients — rather than speeds — says exactly that.
Cryogenic mechanical engineersPrecision-balance metrologistsCeramic-superconductor fabricators
University.
- Física estabelecida
The analogue-gravity bench
Curved-spacetime physics genuinely emerges from ordinary matter in a laboratory. Push a fluid past its own speed of sound and waves inside cannot fight their way back out; the sound field then obeys exactly the wave equation of a massless field on a curved metric assembled from the fluid's density, flow speed and sound speed.
Photonics engineersCold-atom experimentalistsWarp-metric theorists
Bench for the water tank, university for the fibre or the condensate.
Seção 5 · 5 fichas
Plasmoides, orbes e plasma auto-organizado
Um nó de plasma que faz a própria gaiola magnética. A distância entre os de laboratório e os que as pessoas relatam é um programa.
- Projetado, ainda não construído
Build a Nachamkin plasmoid on purpose
There is a family of solutions to Maxwell's equations, in a partially ionised gas, that behaves like electromagnetic energy trapped in a ball and holding itself together — with a calculable critical frequency and calculable resonant sizes at which the object exchanges no energy at all with its surroundings. Nobody has built one to the specification and measured it.
Plasma experimentalistsRadio-frequency engineersComputational electromagnetics engineers
University.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
The plasmoid lifetime ladder
Laboratory plasmoids are millimetre-scale and last nanoseconds to microseconds. The objects this site is interested in are metres wide and persist for minutes.
Plasma diagnosticiansHigh-speed imaging specialistsCross-literature synthesists
University, using machines that already exist.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
Make ball lightning and instrument it
Long-lived luminous balls can be produced on a bench with an ordinary electric arc, and one natural example has been caught in spectrum. The subject therefore has everything it needs to stop being a collection of stories: a laboratory recipe, a natural measurement, and a growing structured observation channel cross-checked against professional lightning-location data.
Plasma chemistsSpectroscopistsSchool and university laboratories
Bench.
- O que observar
The EVO crater — two accounts, one micrograph
A granted 1991 patent family describes micrometre-scale bundles of electrons that hold themselves together, travel along grooves cut in a dielectric, and leave characteristic craters and streaks. A 2022 paper from a former Naval Research Laboratory materials physicist offers a conventional account of the same craters.
Pulsed-power engineersMaterials-characterisation specialistsHydrodynamic modellers
University.
- Na bancada agora
Calibrated sky, not footage
Every argument about anomalous objects in the sky is really an argument about instrumentation. A passive electro-optical or infrared sensor cannot supply range, so a size and a speed derived from one camera depend entirely on an assumed distance.
Instrumentation engineersOptical and infrared systems designersData-pipeline builders
Bench to university.
Seção 6 · 5 fichas
Instrumentos e metrologia
Cada afirmação acima é limitada por uma medida que ninguém construiu bem o bastante ainda. Estes são os instrumentos que faltam.
- Física estabelecida
Vacuum field sampling as a student instrument
For most of a century the zero-point motion of the electromagnetic field was inferred — from spontaneous emission, from the Lamb shift, from the Casimir force. It is now read directly, with a laser pulse shorter than one cycle of the field it probes.
Ultrafast-optics engineersPhotonics integratorsMetrologists
University.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
Quantum atmospherics
A material does not stop at its surface. If the matter inside breaks a symmetry, the quantum fluctuations just outside inherit that lopsidedness — a quantum atmosphere.
Scanning-probe engineersQuantum-sensing specialistsCondensed-matter characterisation engineers
University.
- Na bancada agora
The calorimetry and neutron scorecard
Adopt, publicly and as a matter of course, the two disciplines that decide whether any energy claim in section 2 means anything. First: a fusion concept that cannot produce measurable deuterium-deuterium neutrons from the plasma or the target — rather than from stray ions hitting the vessel wall — is not doing fusion.
Thermal and instrumentation engineersStudents of measurement discipline
Bench to university.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
Isotopic forensics
Make it standard practice to open the device afterwards and ask what the material became. A stray impurity arrives with its ordinary isotope ratio, so a ratio that is wrong points at a nuclear process rather than at contamination — which makes isotope mapping the single most decisive after-the-fact measurement available to this field, and one that modern instruments can now do point by point across a sample.
Analytical chemistsMass-spectrometry specialistsMaterials-characterisation engineers
University, using an existing facility.
- Na bancada agora
The megahertz-to-gigahertz gravitational-wave receiver
Listen for gravitational waves far above the band the big interferometers cover. Nothing in the known astrophysical catalogue is small and dense enough to ring at megahertz to gigahertz, so anything found there is new physics — and, for this site specifically, that band is exactly where the laboratory emitter proposals of section 3 would radiate.
Microwave and cryogenic engineersSignal-processing specialistsData analysts
University, on existing hardware.
Seção 7 · 5 fichas
Teorias novas para testar
Hipóteses que a biblioteca implica mas que ninguém escreveu como teste. Todas seguem a mesma gramática: se X, então meça Y.
- O que observar
If a cavity changes electron-phonon coupling, then it changes the screening energy
Two settled facts have never been put in the same room. First: an unpowered resonator placed near a superconductor changes its transition temperature, and first-principles calculations trace the effect to the vacuum field reshuffling how electrons trade energy with lattice vibrations.
Nuclear physicistsTerahertz photonics engineers
University.
- O que observar
If Planck's constant measures the field's density, then find the test that separates it from the fine-structure constant
One strand of this subject holds that Planck's constant is a measure of the zero-point field's energy density — deeper ocean, larger constant — and that changing the density changes the vacuum's permittivity and permeability and therefore the local speed of light. The people who hold that view also state its own falsifier plainly, and it is a sharp one: measuring the fine-structure constant alone cannot detect any of this, because its terms compensate, so a null result on the fine-structure constant is not evidence either way.
Precision metrologistsClassical and quantum electrodynamics theoristsAstronomers with catalogue skills
Bench for the theory, national lab for the measurement.
- Publicado e revisado por pares
If entanglement is the vacuum's fuel line, then the cell array has a scaling law
Quantum energy teleportation is the only route to ground-state energy that has been run on hardware, and the accounting stays ordinary throughout: the measurement pays. Everyone therefore treats it as a curiosity rather than as an energy technology, and stops.
Quantum-information engineersThermodynamicists
Bench, then university.
- O que observar
If a plasmoid is vacuum-coupled, then its lifetime tracks the boundary around it
The central puzzle of section 5 is lifetime: laboratory plasmoids last microseconds and the objects this site is interested in are reported to last minutes. One reading of the thesis is that a long-lived plasmoid is coupled to the vacuum — that its boundary modulation and its energy source are the same thing.
Plasma experimentalistsMicrowave-structure designers
University.
- O que observar
If the zero-point field carved the voids, then the void edges carry its fingerprint
One published model says the zero-point field does something visible at the largest scale there is: because the field's spectrum looks identical from every moving frame there is no drag to damp its kicks, so an isolated proton in near-empty space slowly gains energy, the emptiest regions are energised most, they push outward, and they compress their surroundings into sheets until trapped magnetic fields lock the structure. If that is right, then the foam of voids and walls redshift surveys actually show is a zero-point-field signature, and it should differ in a specific, statistical way from the structure gravity alone would build.
CosmologistsPlasma astrophysicistsData-analysis students
Bench — a workstation and public data.