Dr Ardavan is confident that, if the machine can be coaxed into doing this, it will radiate in exactly the way he predicts, providing a tuneable and compact source of high-frequency microwaves in effect, a tabletop pulsar, without the neutron star.

ECONOMIST: Physics

Bombard an ordinary hydrogen atom with microwaves of the right frequency and you will lift it out of its ground state by flipping the spin of its electron.

ECONOMIST: Are matter and antimatter truly opposites?

Unfortunately, no one is really sure what causes materials to absorb microwaves over too wide a frequency.

ECONOMIST: MONITOR

These leads will have to be sufficiently short to transmit very high frequency signals, which tend to radiate away as microwaves if the lead is too long (by 2015, chips will work high in the gigahertz band).

ECONOMIST: MONITOR