A falsifiable experimental roadmap for testing whether semiconductor fabrication and atomically thin barrier systems can act as passive, state-dependent material recorders.
This is a research roadmap, not a demonstrated capability. Its central unknown is the coupling coefficient η, which maps a source perturbation to a measurable material contrast. Nothing here claims that quantum-state recording has been achieved. It defines the experiments — and the go/no-go gates — that would determine whether the idea works.
Author: Charles Walter Dowd Jr. · opensourcepatents@gmail.com Status: Concept / perspective, May 2026
The Quantum Fossil Concept asks a narrow, testable question: when two chips are processed as a matched differential pair, can a calibrated electrostatic, work-function, or buried-field perturbation leave a recoverable imprint in the deposited material after common-mode process noise is rejected? Any reproducible residual correlated with that perturbation is called a quantum fossil.
The work is organized into three maturity tiers, each gated by an explicit falsification criterion:
- Tier I — Activated deposition (near-term). Can calibrated electrostatic / work-function contrast measurably alter a deposited film above the differential noise floor? Buildable with existing fab and characterization tools.
- Tier II — Membrane barrier transduction (medium-term). Can atomically thin pore transport convert tiny barrier-energy changes into measurable transmission contrast, amplifying the Tier I response?
- Tier III — Phenomenology outlook (speculative). Only if a recorder validates: could it ever match a cumulative low-energy signal class discussed in quantum-gravity phenomenology? Subordinate to validated ordinary physics.
If the calibrated response is absent, the program terminates or pivots rather than advancing to speculative claims. A null result still yields publishable upper bounds on electrostatic sensitivity in deposition and barrier transport.
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
FOSSIL_PHYSICS_QFC.md |
The main report: framework, transfer-function formalism, sensitivity analysis, device stacks, readout methods, the tiered experimental program, and the go/no-go roadmap. |
VERIFICATION_DOSSIER.md |
Claim-by-claim verification matrix (C1–C47), formula register (F1–F14), reproduced numerical checks (N1–N10), open experimental unknowns (U1–U7), and the verification verdict. |
SOURCES.md |
Standalone, independently re-verified source list with direct links, organized by topic, for reader self-verification. |
verify_numbers.py |
A dependency-free Python script that reproduces every numerical figure in the dossier from CODATA physical constants. |
The math. All quantitative results were independently recomputed from physical constants. To reproduce them:
python3 scripts/verify_numbers.pyThis regenerates the thermal-energy scale, the ALD sensitivity coefficient, the detectability thresholds, the helium-membrane transmission sensitivity, the membrane-vs-baseline gain, and the shot-noise count requirements (checks N1–N10), and prints each against the value stated in the dossier.
The sources. Every external claim is mapped to a primary source in SOURCES.md, with status labels and direct links. Where the report makes a caution (for example, that a room-temperature topological gap is a DFT prediction rather than a measurement, or that volt-scale ALD bias does not imply μeV-scale sensitivity), the source list flags the scope limit explicitly.
- Not passive wavefunction tomography.
- Not zero back-action — any coupling that records information is a measurement interaction.
- Not survival of a fragile quantum state through thermal deposition.
- Not direct phase reconstruction from morphology.
- Not access to sub-Planck structure.
These limits are stated up front and carried through the analysis.
The supporting platform claims — High-NA EUV resolution, CMOS-compatible quantum photonics, low-temperature and electric-potential-assisted ALD, 4D-STEM electrostatic mapping, angstrom-scale graphene pore transport, the Planck-length value, Fermi-LAT and Holometer constraints, and the current LiteBIRD schedule — are supported by primary sources. The formulas and arithmetic check out under independent recomputation.
The unresolved risk is not the math. It is experimental existence: whether η is nonzero at a useful scale, and whether the process-level noise floor is low enough to see it. The roadmap converts that risk into a sequence of falsifiable gates.
This project is dual-licensed to separate code from documentation:
- Code — everything in
scripts/is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE. - Documentation — all files in
docs/, and the prose in this README, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). See LICENSE-CC-BY-4.0.
"Quantum Fossil Concept" (QFC) and "OSP" are project and organization names, not license terms.
Fossil Physics: Quantum Fossil Concept (QFC) — Final Copy, May 2026.