Casimir Inc, a company founded and led by former DARPA-funded NASA warp drive pioneer and founder of the EagleWorks Lab, Harold G. “Sonny” White, has exited stealth mode to announce the pending 2028 commercialization of MicroSparc, a chip that the company claims uses customized microscale geometries to capture unlimited ‘free’ energy from the quantum world.
“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.
Similar sentiments were shared with The Debrief by scientists we spoke with, who declined to comment publicly on Casimir, MicroSparc, or the peer-reviewed study “Emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum,” which details the underlying physics.
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.
“This concept became a central part of our DARPA Defense Sciences Office (DSO) research effort at the Limitless Space Institute, where DARPA funded early theoretical and experimental investigations into custom Casimir cavity structures and their interaction with the quantum vacuum,” White told The Debrief.
Instead, the noted advanced propulsion physics researcher said their MicroSparc design leverages 20th-century discoveries in quantum physics, such as quantum tunneling and Casimir cavities, to capture usable energy that could fuel small, low-power electronics in the near future. The company also suggests that its technology can potentially be scaled to power cars, homes, or even entire cities without the need for harmful fossil fuels or other greener, yet costly, fuel alternatives.
“Much of modern electronics is constrained by batteries, charging cycles, wiring, maintenance, or environmental limitations,” Dr. White told The Debrief. “If this technology scales successfully, its long-term implications could extend from ultra-low-power sensors and consumer electronics to remote infrastructure, defense systems, and eventually space applications, where persistent power is especially valuable.”
100 Years of Quantum Science & Understanding “The Vacuum”
Dr. White told The Debrief that to understand how MicroSparc extracts energy from the quantum vacuum requires first understanding the properties of a vacuum.
“Most people picture a vacuum as completely empty space: a sealed chamber with all air removed,” White explained, adding that at “our everyday scale, this makes sense.”
However, in the quantum realm, empty space is not exactly empty. Instead, White told The Debrief, decades of research in quantum physics and mechanics have revealed that at the quantum level, the classically ‘empty’ vacuum is filled with “fluctuating electromagnetic fields and virtual particles that constantly appear and disappear.” White noted that the Casimir Effect, on which its company is based and for which it is named, provides clear proof of this quantum vacuum behavior.
“Place two small metallic plates inside a vacuum chamber with a separation of roughly 100 nanometers, about 1/1,000th of a human hair,” White explained. “After removing all air, the pressure on the outer sides of the plates reads zero, as expected.”
However, he noted, a quick measurement between the plates shows that the pressure is negative. In traditionally constructed Casimir cavities, this region of negative pressure pulls the plates together. Dr. White told The Debrief that this happens because of “wave-particle duality.”
“Outside the plates, fluctuations of every wavelength are possible,” he explained. However, he also noted, inside the narrow gap of a Casimir cavity, only wavelengths narrow enough to fit can exist.
“Longer wavelengths are excluded, so the energy density between the plates is lower than outside them,” White said. “The resulting imbalance produces the measurable Casimir force. Hendrik Casimir predicted this in 1948.”
Although the pressure imbalance due to the limitation of some potential wavelengths between the conductive plates was first experimentally confirmed in the 1990s and has been observed several times since, engineers have struggled to convert the “work” performed by the cavities into usable energy when the unequal pressure causes the plates to collapse. According to Dr. White, the issue lies in the often-cited conservation of momentum.
“In a conventional Casimir setup, the force does perform work as the plates are pulled together,” the Casimir Inc. founder explained. “Once they collapse, however, no further energy can be extracted; you must use external energy to separate the plates again and reset the system.”
White noted that this limitation makes a traditionally constructed Casimir cavity operate more like a battery than a genuine energy-generation device. However, he also noted that his team’s work designing MicroSparc was focused on creating a ‘static’ Casimir cavity that “overcomes this limitation.”
“The underlying physics itself is not new,” White told The Debrief. “The Casimir effect has been part of established quantum mechanics since the mid-20th century and has been experimentally verified by laboratories around the world.”
How the MicroSparc Custom Casimir Cavity “Overcomes” Traditional Limitations
In their design, Casimir Inc’s scientists placed the two walls of their cavity on a substrate so that it cannot move and therefore cannot collapse under negative internal pressure. Notably, the two plates are also electrically connected.
Along the midplane of the cavity, White’s team placed a series of what they described as ‘micropillars’, or antennas. Similar to the conductive plates, these intentionally placed pillars are also electrically connected to one another. Critically, MicroSparc’s micropillars are electrically isolated from the cavity walls and also anchored so that they remain completely stationary under pressure.
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.
“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.”
When asked if MicroSparc would constitute a “zero-point” energy device like those featured in science fiction, including the extended Stargate universe, Dr. White appeared to agree in general terms, while noting that “Zero-point energy (German: Nullpunktsenergie) is a term Einstein coined in 1913 connected to the community discussion on the topic.”
“I suspect sci-fi happily made use of the term,” White added, having previously conceded to The Debrief a general lack of specific knowledge about the appearances in science fiction of such scientific concepts.
“We Already Have Functioning Prototype Devices”
When asked if the newly completed round of capital investment is intended to advance theoretical designs to the prototype phase, Dr. White told The Debrief that the Casimir team has already fabricated “hundreds of prototype chips” in several university nanofabrication facilities, including the Texas A&M AggieFab facility and MIT.nano.
Once a prototype MicroSparc chip is fabricated, the Casimir team tests it using low-noise experimental setups designed to reduce electromagnetic interference. Dr. White said these tests were performed in dark, RF (radio frequency)-sealed enclosures over several weeks “using precision electrometers capable of measuring signals down to microvolt and attoamp sensitivities.”
“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.
The team also directly measured polarization fields at the microscale in individual custom Casimir cavities using Atomic Force Microscopy, which White noted was operating in “Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy mode.”
“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.
Scaling for Large Scale Applications: “The Primary Constraints” are not Physics
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.”
In one proposed example, the researcher stated that a 0.5-watt Casimir generator based on their design could provide a continuous trickle charge to a smartphone battery. In this scenario, White said that the phone would be fully recharged in roughly 24 hours under normal use, “effectively making the device immortal for typical daily operation.”
“Imagine five years from today, when you upgrade your favorite smartphone, there is a radio button option labeled “immortal phone upgrade — $500,” White hypothesized to The Debrief. “You might take advantage of that.”
When scaling to larger applications, the advanced propulsion physics pioneer noted that once his team successfully reduces costs to “around $100 per watt,” which they presently see as a viable target, Casimir could construct a 500-watt charging assembly approximately the size of a loaf of bread capable of delivering around 12 kilowatt-hours per day. White told The Debrief that this output level would be “sufficient for most daily driving needs, excluding long trips.”
Should the team reach its next goal of achieving a $10-per-watt threshold, Casimir’s founder said his company hopes to offer systems capable of powering homes and businesses “entirely off the grid.”
“Our roadmap begins with ultra-low-power applications such as IoT sensors, wearables, and tire pressure monitors, where the initial chips already fit the power profile,” White told The Debrief when describing his company’s larger vision. “From there, we expand into consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and eventually larger residential and commercial systems.”
“The primary constraints today are engineering and manufacturing maturity, not fundamental physics,” he added.
Expanding Humanity’s Reach Beyond the Solar System
When discussing the personal impact of this potentially historic accomplishment, Dr. White told The Debrief that his roughly 20 years in the space industry, “and much of my career,” have been shaped by trying to understand what it will take for humanity to reach the outer solar system, and eventually another star system. He said that the search has revealed two critical “needs” that science must address.
“First, we need a deeper understanding of fundamental physics,” Dr. White said. “Second, we need persistent power systems that can operate for extremely long durations in difficult environments.”
Although the current generation of Casimir prototypes operates at microwatt levels and is designed to fuel low-power electronics, the Casimir founder told The Debrief that he believes the device’s architecture is “fundamentally scalable over time.” White also noted the unusual connection between the negative vacuum energy generated in his team’s work and research in the advanced spacetime physics literature, including space-time warp metrics designed to propel a spacecraft to faster-than-light speeds.
Fundamentally, when asked about the most important part of his team’s work that he hopes curious readers will understand, White said that his company’s design is new, but the underlying physics is not.
“The Casimir effect and the quantum vacuum have been part of mainstream quantum mechanics for decades and have been experimentally studied by laboratories around the world,” White told The Debrief. “What is new is the attempt to engineer these effects into practical semiconductor devices using modern nanofabrication techniques.”
“The second important point is that even very small amounts of continuous power can be highly disruptive when delivered in the right applications,” White said.
When discussing MicroSparc’s potential applications, including scaling the technology to fulfill his personal dreams, White noted that the company’s achievement could mark an important advancement toward capabilities that may one day carry humans farther from Earth than present technologies allow.
“While a microwatt-scale chip may seem far removed from deep-space exploration to us,” White conceded, “it represents a small but meaningful step toward technologies that could ultimately expand humanity’s reach into the solar system and beyond.”
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.