15 // Casimir Energy Instrumentation
The Casimir effect is not theoretical. Two conductive surfaces separated by nanometer-scale gaps experience a measurable attractive force from quantum vacuum fluctuations — photon modes excluded between the plates create a net pressure from the surrounding vacuum.
Vapor Vacuum is developing nano-engineered cavity arrays designed to characterize this pressure differential and determine whether sustained electrical output is achievable.
Architecture
Conductive pillar forests in sub-100nm cavities create voltage differentials from vacuum energy asymmetry. Current demonstration: microwatt-class output signals have been observed. Whether these represent net energy extraction or measurement artifacts of the cavity geometry remains under investigation. Scaling from anomalous signal detection to validated sustained output is the core research challenge.
Bismuth-magnesium multilayer structures behaving as anisotropic THz waveguides. These create hyperbolic dispersion regimes where the photonic density of states diverges — vacuum fluctuations couple into modes that do not exist in free space. This is macroscopic Casimir engineering: amplifying the measurable effect by orders of magnitude through geometry rather than brute force.
CAVITY GAP: Sub-100 nm
CURRENT OUTPUT: Microwatt-class (anomalous signal under investigation)
METAMATERIAL: Bi/Mg multilayer THz waveguide
MECHANISM: Photonic density of states divergence
CROSS-DIVISION: Maxwell Continuum (THz waveguide design)