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From the edge of physics to a new dawn in power
Casimir’s innovation began with a bold question: could the quantum vacuum, the seething foundation of reality first identified by Hendrick Casimir, be harnessed as a source of useful energy? That inquiry took shape over nearly two decades of Sonny’s work at NASA, where his passion was always advanced power and propulsion, finding ways to move humans beyond Mars and, one day, to the stars.
The world needs revolutionary power sources
The world’s power sources have historically depended on combustion and power storage via batteries. Which is why Casimir was founded.
Pursuing that dream brought Sonny to the frontiers of science, from fusion propulsion to the concept of space warps. A space warp would require negative vacuum energy density, a rare state of nature that exists only inside a Casimir cavity. In studying the quantum vacuum, Sonny realized it must be mutable and degradable, not fixed and immutable as conventionally believed.
That insight led to a series of breakthroughs. First, he showed that atomic orbitals are acoustic resonances in the quantum field around the atom. Then, he drew a striking parallel: the average energy density around a hydrogen atom’s ground state matches the density predicted for a Casimir cavity with a separation equal to the Bohr radius. This analogy suggested that the vacuum inside a Casimir cavity has structure and is not isotropic.
Inspired by this asymmetry, Sonny designed cavities with midplane pillars to test whether electrons would preferentially flow from the walls to the pillars. DARPA DSO funded pioneering nanofabrication work to build such structures. Using Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy, the Casimir team confirmed that the pillars indeed sat at a lower voltage potential, as predicted.
Today, the team has advanced from theory to hardware, aggregating custom Casimir structures in series and parallel, producing voltages and currents detectable in dark, RF-shielded enclosures.
The Casimir Mission
To bring clean, safe, affordable, abundant power for everyone, anywhere.
Casimir is built by industry pioneers
Andre Sylvester
Jan Campbell
What could you do with unlimited power?
