Shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Solem led a U.S./Russia joint collaboration of scientists in an effort to obtain good science and to improve US/Russia relations.

While a consultant to the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA (1987-2005), he conducted research on antimatter technology and microrobotics, as well as national security issues.

[5][6][7] At the behest of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, Solem investigated whether a nuclear external pulsed plasma propelled (EPPP) interstellar probe could reach Alpha Centauri in 40 years, the average length of a scientist's career.

[8] Solem discovered a strange polarization of the hydrogen atom that, contrary to intuition, drove electron orbits perpendicular to an applied electric field (1987).

He elucidated the interpretation of geometric phase in quantum mechanics by showing the invalidity of superposition of quantal states, the distinction between rays and vectors in projective Hilbert space, and the meaning of resultant singularities (1993b).

Solem provided leadership for a series of pioneering experiments, known as the Dirac Project,[2] that used capacitor banks and Russian designed and built high-explosive-driven flux compression devices to investigate physical and chemical phenomena at extremely high magnetic fields and pressures (1997b).

These experiments were an international collaboration of scientists from Russia, Germany, Japan, Australia, Belgium, several American universities, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Solem observed that by using intense, pulsed coherent x-ray sources, it is possible to obtain magnified three-dimensional images of elementary biological structures in the living state (1996a).

He showed unique mechanisms for self-assembly of motile microrobots based on Platonic solids, in particular the dodecahedron, which can assemble into a helix appropriate for propulsion at high-Reynolds number (2002).

Solem worked out techniques to use very small quantities of antiprotons stored in a Penning trap, or similar charged-particle storage device, to perform Lilliputian experiments in high energy density physics, including opacity and equation-of-state measurements (1988b, 1990).

Solem collaborated on the development of pseudo characteristic functions of convex polyhedra, a result providing rapid regional particle location in Monte Carlo calculations (2003b).