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“Think: no batteries, no cords, and no charging—just continuous power from harvested quantum vacuum fields,” a company spokesperson explained in an email to The Debrief.

While several previous efforts have attempted to exploit the unusual, sometimes counterintuitive properties of the quantum realm to generate “free energy,” these attempts have consistently been met with skepticism or labeled pseudoscience due to their seeming violations of the law of conservation of momentum.

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In an email to The Debrief, Dr. White, who recently added his partner from the non-profit Limitless Space Institute, Kam Ghaffarian (Intuitive Machines, Axiom Space, and X-energy) as a Casimir investor and board member, explained that MicroSparc’s use of customized Casimir cavities, which his team had researched with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), does not violate the laws of physics.

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To understand how this MicroSparc chip set-up generates seemingly free energy from nowhere, Dr. White told The Debrief that readers should “consider an atoll in the Pacific Ocean.” Specifically, White pointed out that powerful waves constantly batter the atoll’s outer shore, “while the lagoon inside remains much calmer,” because many of the large waves cannot enter.

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“In our device, the quantum vacuum outside the cavity walls vigorously stimulates electrons in the wall atoms,” Dr. White explained. “Occasionally, an electron will quantum tunnel from the wall to one of the central pillars.”

For clarification, quantum tunneling is a still-unexplained process in which an electron or other quantum particle can seemingly pass through a barrier without the classically required energy to do so. Like Casimir cavities, this phenomenon has been repeatedly demonstrated in various experimental setups.

“Once inside the protected cavity, the environment is far quieter, (so) the probability of the electron tunneling back to the wall is orders of magnitude lower,” White told The Debrief.

White said this phenomenon creates a one-way flow of electrons toward the pillars, a process he compared to “a kind of quantum ratchet.” By fabricating millions of these microscopic cavities on a single chip, White said his team was able to produce “a continuous electrical current drawn from the quantum vacuum.”

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“Across these tests, we observed device outputs ranging from millivolts to volts at picoamp current levels, well above our instrumentation’s noise floor,” White told The Debrief.

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“The purpose of the current seed round is not to move from theory to a first proof of concept,” White told The Debrief. “We already have functioning prototype devices fabricated and tested in research nanofabrication environments.”

Instead, he said that the Casimir team will use the next phase of development and the new infusion of capital to focus on rapid design iteration, material system optimization, and facilitate a transition toward scalable semiconductor manufacturing.

“Over the next two years, we plan to work across multiple nanofabrication partners and material approaches aimed at increasing tunnel current magnitude and overall device performance, while developing the commercial pathway for first-generation products,” White explained.

As part of the announcement, the team said its primary target is a 5mm × 5mm semiconductor chip capable of producing approximately 1.5 volts at 25 microamps. Dr. White said this goal represents “roughly 40 microwatts of continuous power.”

“This output level is well suited for ultra-low-power electronics and sensor applications,” White explained, adding that the team’s “current target for initial commercial availability” is sometime in 2028.

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When asked if this approach is limited to powering smaller, less energy-intensive devices, or if it could be scaled for cars, homes, or industrial applications, Dr. White told The Debrief that “there are no inherent quantum or physical limits that make large-scale energy harvesting from the vacuum impractical.”

“Once we reach our minimum viable performance target of 1.5 volts and 25 microamps from a 5mm × 5mm chip, we can multiply output through multi-layer chips, die stacking, and chip aggregation,” White explained, adding that a single, identically sized chip “can deliver roughly 200 times the power, moving us into the milliwatt range.”

From there, White said that the Casimir team could simply aggregate numerous chips onto printed circuit boards “to reach higher power levels.”