One field. Three modes.
Everything the Replicator does is the same field used three ways. Assemble and dissolve are the same drive separated by one sign flip; scan is the same physics at a millionth of the power — which is why the machine ships scanning first, and why every build checks its own work.
Assemble
Six steps run as a loop: slice, feed, trap, move, weld, check — with nothing touching the part and no tool inside the chamber. The field holds each grain from all sides like a marble in a bowl, carries it to where the pattern says, and focuses to bond it there. Heat is the price — paid only at the weld, never as a bath the whole volume sits in.
Scan
No camera, no lens — the walls sing to the object and listen to how it sings back. Coded milliwatt chirps and radio pulses wash over the workpiece; everything returned is recorded with its phase and folded into the pattern. Because scan is the same physics as build at a millionth of the power, every instant of fabrication is also a scan.
Dissolve
Noise-cancelling headphones, for matter. Play the object's echo backwards from every side at once and every incoming wave meets its perfect opposite: nothing reflects, and the energy lands — by design — on the joints. Grains release in reverse build order and ride the trap pockets back to the stores. Nothing is destroyed; the cup returns to being next week's cup.
Scan ships on day one.
Powered below every assembly threshold, the first build of the machine is already a complete desktop 3D scanner — milliwatt-class, reading geometry and material composition in one operation, with no passive camera anywhere: appearance is computed from composition. The sharpness ladder climbs from wavelength-limited imaging to localization far below the wavelength, because the machine's real question — where is this grain, this feature, this beacon? — is a localization question, and localization is limited by signal quality, not by λ.
Read the field. Or drive it.
Scan is call-and-response; build is call-and-response run until the response matches. The chord list is not only the drive recipe — it is the acceptance criterion.
Scan loop
- 01IlluminateThe plates transmit coded broadband pulses; every point in the volume gets its own frequency signature.
- 02RecordThe boundary listens with its phase intact, from every port, across the band. That recording is the holographic pattern.
- 03ReconstructGeometry, material map, and interior come out together — the object stored as the chords it rings at, about a megabyte for a mug.
- 04ExportYou get a printable pattern. Load feedstock and the same machine plays it back.
Build loop
- 01FeedGrains rise through the axis bore on a traveling field — no belts, no augers.
- 02TrapThe plates drive a standing acoustic hologram with a pressure pocket at every target voxel. Grains fall in and stay.
- 03MovePhase and amplitude update in real time; the pockets — and their cargo — glide to where the pattern says.
- 04WeldAt the voxel, the drive focuses into a hot spot. The grain bonds to its neighbours and the field moves on.
- 05CheckDrop to listening power, compare the ring against the target chord, correct, continue. The build is done when the object rings true.
The model may propose. Only the aperture asserts.
Every claim in our papers carries a register: measured, derived, or open. Every chord the scanner stores is tagged measured or inferred, and inferred content is excluded from the build's acceptance criterion by default — you may look at it, you may not fabricate to it. Coverage is tracked in three states — observed occupied, observed empty, never observed — and never interpolated away.
The deepest modeDissolve is where the most discovery remains: its physics — time reversal and coherent absorption — is measured in the linear regime, and quantifying the fidelity at full unbinding power is precisely the experiment this machine is built to run. Nothing in the mode requires new physics; the machine that scans and assembles is already the instrument that answers the question.
Each mode has its own paper, written to the same rule: the campfire story first, then the physics, then a precise account of what is measured and what is still open.