The UnLab’s Coherent Matter Wave Beam & Vacuum-Fluctuation Propulsion

August 29, 2026
|In Field Effect
|By Tim Ventura

The former Lockheed Martin Senior Tech Fellow is pursuing coherent matter beams, Casimir power and vacuum-fluctuation propulsion—while also developing practical technologies to make homes more resilient.

Charles Chase spent more than three decades at Lockheed Martin, including over 25 years inside Skunk Works, learning that serious innovation often means watching nine ideas fail so that one can change the world. Today, as co-founder, director and CTO of UnLAB, he’s carrying that tolerance for risk into a realm where the line between visionary engineering and experimental artifact may be measured in piconewtons: a patented system intended to make massive particles behave coherently like laser light, Casimir structures that might turn differences in quantum noise into electricity, and nanoscale devices designed to test whether asymmetric vacuum fluctuations can generate thrust. In a new interview with Tim Ventura, Chase offered a rare combination of enormous ambition and laboratory candor, describing not only a theoretical propulsion system that would require no conventional propellant, but also the moment an apparent positive result disappeared after his team discovered that the measuring device itself had been distorted during fabrication.

The Skunk Works Rule: Ten Percent Is Success

Chase’s résumé gives him an unusual position in the world of frontier physics. He spent more than 32 years at Lockheed Martin in aerospace research and development, including work involving advanced materials, vehicle systems, multispectral stealth and high-risk technology programs. He eventually became a Senior Tech Fellow, a distinction his professional biography describes as being reserved for the top 0.1 percent of the corporation’s technical workforce. He also helped establish and lead Revolutionary Technology Programs at Skunk Works, where multidisciplinary teams were tasked with transforming unconventional scientific ideas into systems that could be built, tested and potentially moved into operational use.

That experience taught Chase to treat failure differently from most conventional research organizations. He told Ventura that he has always wanted to work “at the edge,” but only when an idea has enough scientific grounding to justify a serious engineering effort. His Skunk Works group considered itself successful when approximately 10 percent of its projects came to fruition. The other 90 percent might fail technically, prove uneconomical, encounter an insurmountable manufacturing barrier or simply arrive before the surrounding technology was ready. To Chase, that didn’t mean the program was poorly run. It meant the team was attempting things difficult enough to matter.

UnLAB extends that philosophy outside the structure of a major aerospace corporation. The nonprofit says its mission is to turn breakthrough science into technologies that benefit people, the planet and the biome, while also increasing human understanding. Rather than maintaining a single large laboratory, UnLAB assembles distributed teams around particular problems. Chase has participated in projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation and the Limitless Space Institute, while collaborating with researchers associated with Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, Technion and national laboratories.

Chase’s management philosophy is as unconventional as some of the physics. He wants research teams to operate in an atmosphere of what he calls “joy and ease,” where creative people are given room to think, collaborate and take intelligent risks without pretending that every experiment will succeed. That culture connects projects separated by radically different technological horizons. UnLAB may investigate whether microscopic semiconductor structures can interact asymmetrically with the quantum vacuum, but it’s also developing simpler systems for refrigeration, water collection and air purification. Chase judges both kinds of work by the same question: Can it eventually help people?

A Laser Made of Matter

A conventional laser creates an organized beam of light in which photons maintain well-defined relationships in frequency and phase. Chase and his former Lockheed Martin colleague Moe J. Arman proposed creating something analogous with massive particles. Their patent, US9502202B2, “Systems and Methods for Generating Coherent Matterwave Beams,” was filed in 2011, granted in 2016 and assigned to Lockheed Martin. It describes an array of microscopic beam-generating units that produce streams of charged particles, guide them through interconnected channels and combine them into a coherent matterwave output.

The central challenge is that massive particles don’t behave exactly like photons. Changing a particle’s energy changes its momentum and de Broglie wavelength, potentially making synchronization harder rather than easier. Chase and Arman therefore proposed controlling phase without directly exchanging energy with the particles. Their concept uses the Aharonov–Bohm effect, in which an electromagnetic vector potential can alter the quantum phase of a charged particle even when the particle travels through a region without a conventional magnetic field acting on it. The current UnLAB version also invokes synchronization among coupled oscillators and resonant cavities. Chase calls the vector-potential phase shift the system’s “secret sauce.”

The most dramatic possibility would be a streaming beam of coherent matter with far greater mass and momentum density than a beam composed only of light. Chase has described such a beam as potentially being a million times more powerful than a laser, although that comparison remains a theoretical claim and depends on exactly which measure of intensity is being compared. The nearer-term objective is less cinematic but perhaps more technologically plausible: using phase-controlled particles over a very short working distance to manipulate how atoms and molecules combine. UnLAB says its calculations indicate possible feature sizes around 0.2 nanometers, approaching the dimensions of individual atoms and chemical bonds.

That could create a new route to maskless, wafer-scale atomic manufacturing. Instead of merely depositing material and etching away what isn’t wanted, a phase-controlled matter system might help guide atomic assembly, construct new material structures or encourage chemical combinations that are difficult to produce with existing tools. The concept combines established phenomena—the wave nature of matter and the Aharonov–Bohm phase shift—with a proposed synchronization architecture that hasn’t yet been demonstrated as an operating beam generator. UnLAB is seeking funding to build a prototype. Until that hardware produces a measurable interference signature or another unambiguous marker of coherence, the system remains an inventive patent and engineering proposal rather than a demonstrated matter laser.

The Casimir Effect and the Reality of the Vacuum

The Casimir effect provides a foundation for much of the vacuum-engineering research discussed by Chase. In its classic form, two closely spaced conductive plates change the electromagnetic modes permitted in the space between them. Fewer modes fit within the narrow cavity than exist in the surrounding region, creating a measurable attractive force between the plates. The effect is well established experimentally and matters in nanotechnology, where Casimir and related van der Waals forces can influence microscopic structures.

What the Casimir effect proves about the underlying vacuum is more subtle. It’s commonly described as direct evidence that empty space contains fluctuating electromagnetic fields, but Chase emphasized that the measurable force can also be calculated using formulations based on interactions between charges and radiation reaction without treating vacuum fluctuations as a literal reservoir pushing on the plates. Quantum electrodynamics requires a ground-state structure to remain mathematically consistent, and the theory produces extraordinarily accurate predictions. Whether the fluctuating vacuum should be regarded as an engineerable physical medium, however, remains partly a question of interpretation.

The uncertainty becomes even more striking at cosmological scales. The effective dark-energy density inferred from the accelerating expansion of the universe is extremely small, while a naive quantum-field calculation using a Planck-scale cutoff produces a vacuum-energy density larger by roughly 120 orders of magnitude. That staggering mismatch is known as the cosmological-constant problem. Chase sees the discrepancy as evidence that physicists don’t yet understand the vacuum’s structure or its relationship to gravity, matter and spacetime, rather than as evidence that vacuum effects don’t exist.

There are still firm restrictions on what ordinary equilibrium systems can do. A symmetric device in thermal equilibrium shouldn’t generate sustained net force, torque or electrical power. A useful effect therefore requires breaking symmetry, creating a nonequilibrium condition or using a material whose response depends on direction. In a 2021 Physical Review B paper, Chase joined researchers from Stanford, UCLA and Princeton in predicting that a particle near a nonreciprocal material could experience a lateral force and torque when the particle and its environment were held at different temperatures. That is a peer-reviewed example of fluctuation-driven motion, but the energy comes from the temperature difference. It isn’t evidence that an isolated spacecraft can draw unlimited momentum from an otherwise uniform vacuum.

Fluctuation Flow Propulsion—and the Signal That Disappeared

UnLAB’s most direct attempt to convert vacuum asymmetry into propulsion received a $275,000 National Science Foundation Phase I SBIR award in 2024. The project, Award 2432831, “Fluctuation Flow Propulsion,” proposes a compact propulsion system whose first application could be spacecraft attitude and reaction control. Because a satellite using conventional thrusters eventually exhausts its stored propellant, even a small force that could operate for years without expelling reaction mass could allow far more extensive changes in orientation, altitude and orbital inclination.

Chase’s proposed device is based on resonant tunneling structures. A resonant tunneling diode contains extremely thin semiconductor barriers surrounding a quantum well, which Chase described as being on the order of two nanometers in one design. Electrons that don’t have enough classical energy to cross the barriers can still tunnel through them quantum mechanically. When an applied voltage creates an asymmetric potential across the structure, Chase predicts that fluctuations coupling to the tunneling current will develop a preferred direction and transfer net momentum to the device.

The theoretical performance is extraordinary. Chase estimates that a sufficiently dense array could generate approximately nine newtons of force per kilogram of active device. Because the device wouldn’t consume propellant in the conventional sense, its formal specific impulse would be infinite, while its total operating impulse would be limited by electrical power, heat rejection, material degradation and device lifetime. Chase compares the goal to combining the endurance of a solar sail with thrust approaching that of chemical propulsion. No experiment has yet demonstrated that level of performance, and there is not yet a publicly established thrust-to-power value for a complete practical system.

The first tests revealed how treacherous the path from calculation to measurement can be. Chase’s team fabricated asymmetric structures on the tips of micron-scale cantilevers and used white-light interferometry to measure tiny deflections. The controls bent downward under gravity as expected, while some cantilevers carrying asymmetric devices appeared to move in the opposite direction. Chase recalled the team’s immediate reaction: “shit, it’s working!” Further analysis showed that mechanical stress introduced while depositing the structures had warped the cantilevers and contaminated the result. The experiment couldn’t support a propulsion claim. Chase said new structures were being fabricated with Sandia National Laboratories for another round of testing—an example of frontier research becoming more credible, not less, when an exciting result is discarded because the controls aren’t good enough.

Three Routes to Vacuum Power

Garret Moddel, an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, is pursuing a related idea through electrical devices rather than propulsion. His patent US11258379B2, “Quantum Noise Power Devices,” describes circuits intended to exploit a difference between the quantum-noise environment near a Casimir structure and the environment in free space. The proposed architecture combines electrical components exposed to different fluctuation densities so that the imbalance can drive a current through a circuit.

Moddel and his collaborators reported experimental results in a 2021 paper in Physical Review Research. Metal-insulator-metal devices connected to Casimir cavities showed changes in differential conductance that increased as the cavities became thinner, along with anomalous voltage and current offsets. The authors interpreted the measurements in terms of an imbalance in hot-carrier injection associated with suppressed vacuum modes. Those findings are intriguing, but they don’t by themselves establish a continuously operating source of useful net power. Conductance changes, voltage offsets and extractable energy delivered through a complete cycle are different evidentiary thresholds.

Chase regards Moddel’s work seriously while emphasizing how easily tiny solid-state currents can mislead an experimenter. Contact potentials, trapped charge, thermoelectric gradients, dielectric relaxation and slow electrochemical reactions can behave like microscopic batteries and produce signals for long periods. A result becomes persuasive only when those conventional mechanisms are measured and excluded. Chase’s position is deliberately cautious: the data may be showing something important, but the interpretation isn’t settled merely because the signal appears correlated with cavity geometry.

Harold “Sonny” White is taking another route through US12302769B2, “Casimir Power Cell,” assigned to the Limitless Space Institute. The patent describes conductive cavity walls with a conductive antenna positioned between them, intended to detect and harvest a proposed polarization field within the cavity. White’s earlier worldline-numerics research modeled a custom Casimir geometry whose calculated negative-energy distribution qualitatively resembled a two-dimensional cross-section of the energy distribution associated with an Alcubierre warp metric. That was a theoretical and numerical result, not a demonstration of a warp field. Chase sees his resonant-tunneling device, Moddel’s quantum-noise circuits and White’s Casimir cell as variations on one broad strategy: create an asymmetric fluctuation environment and attempt to convert the difference into work. As Chase put it, “proof is always in the pudding.”

Why Replication Is the Real Frontier

The history of advanced propulsion is crowded with devices that have generated exciting signals without producing broad scientific agreement. Electromagnetic cavity thrusters, asymmetric capacitors, Mach-effect devices, Quantised Inertia experiments, gravitational coupling proposals and other systems have all produced reported anomalies. Independent teams have also reported null results or identified thermal, electromagnetic and mechanical artifacts capable of imitating thrust. Chase offered a concise assessment of the field: “lots of ideas, nothing really proven yet.”

Measuring extremely small forces is brutally difficult. Heating can expand a component and shift the center of mass. Current flowing through wires can create magnetic forces. Residual gas can produce radiometric effects. Electric fields can interact with grounded chamber walls. Patch potentials can arise on imperfect metal surfaces. Outgassing can create a tiny jet. Vibration can travel through a building, vacuum pump or support table. Even the tension in a power cable can be larger than the effect being sought. Chase’s warped cantilevers provide a nearly perfect case study: the fabrication process altered the sensor before the proposed force was ever applied.

A convincing vacuum-propulsion experiment would therefore need much more than an apparent deflection. It would require symmetric control devices, inert dummy loads, reversal of the proposed asymmetry, operation at multiple voltages and temperatures, continuous monitoring of magnetic and electric fields, and enough thermal diagnostics to model every relevant expansion and gradient. The force should change sign when the device is physically reversed, vanish when the asymmetry is removed and follow a quantitative scaling law predicted in advance. Ideally, the protocol would be preregistered and the data independently analyzed before anyone knew which runs contained active devices.

Chase also argues that accepted models can become “mode-closing” when researchers use conservation laws and symmetry assumptions to dismiss unfamiliar mechanisms before conducting an experiment. There is a provocative truth in that warning: every theory is a representation of observed nature, not nature itself. But conservation of energy and momentum aren’t arbitrary academic preferences; they’re supported by enormous bodies of successful measurement. A new propulsion effect wouldn’t make careful accounting irrelevant. It would require identifying the previously unknown field, reservoir or interaction that completes the accounting. Chase’s willingness to tolerate failure matters most when it is paired with an equally strong willingness to let a cherished hypothesis die.

Unlimited Abundance Begins at Home

When Ventura asked Chase which current project excited him most, the answer wasn’t quantum propulsion, Casimir energy or a coherent beam of matter. It was household resilience. Chase is exploring comparatively straightforward technologies that could help families cope with hurricanes, extended electrical outages, interruptions in municipal water and future climate-related disruptions. The objective is to begin with one home, expand to a neighborhood and ultimately strengthen the surrounding community.

One concept would connect a dedicated solar panel more directly to a refrigerator or freezer, reducing the conversion equipment required to keep food cold during an outage. Chase recalled power failures lasting roughly two weeks in Savannah, Georgia—long enough for an ordinary household to lose refrigerated food and basic independence. UnLAB is also investigating compact systems for gathering water from atmospheric moisture and a quiet plasma-vortex filtration device intended to remove airborne contaminants while functioning as an attractive household object rather than a noisy industrial appliance.

These projects may sound almost mundane beside a propellantless spacecraft, but they reveal the moral center of Chase’s work. “UnLAB” refers partly to an organization without a single central laboratory, but Chase also uses it as shorthand for “unlimited abundance.” He believes scarcity isn’t always an unavoidable physical fact; it can also be the result of limited imagination, poor distribution, inefficient systems and a failure to collaborate. Abundant clean energy would transform civilization, but so would a modest device that keeps medicine cold, produces safe water or reduces respiratory disease in a vulnerable community.

Chase’s portfolio spans an almost absurd range of scale: angstrom-level manufacturing, microscopic Casimir cavities, spacecraft propulsion, refrigerators, clean water and the social conditions that allow unusual ideas to survive long enough to be tested. What connects them is the Skunk Works habit of identifying a consequential problem, assembling people from different disciplines and building the smallest experiment capable of producing a meaningful answer. Quantum propulsion may fail. Casimir power may turn out to be a subtle solid-state artifact. A coherent matter beam may encounter insurmountable decoherence. But Chase’s argument is that civilization can’t discover the transformative 10 percent without giving serious people permission to explore the other 90—and insisting that, when the data arrives, they tell the truth about what it says.

References

Interview and Background

Coherent Matter Waves

Fluctuation Flow Propulsion

Garret Moddel and Quantum-Noise Power

Harold “Sonny” White and the Casimir Power Cell