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Canadian quantum companies chase US DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) $$$ and RIP Raymond Laflamme

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Canada’s quantum community, i.e., three companies, are currently ‘competing’ for US science funding. It seems like an odd choice given all of the news about science funding cuts and funding freezes along with the Trump administration’s chaotic and, increasingly, untrustworthy government management.

On April 3, 2025 the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that approximately 20 companies were embarked on what they describe as Stage A of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) ‘challenge’,

Here’s more from that April 3, 2025 DARPA notice,

Nearly 20 quantum computing companies have been chosen to enter the initial stage of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), in which they will characterize their unique concepts for creating a useful, fault-tolerant quantum computer within a decade.

QBI, which kicked off in July 2024, aims to determine whether it’s possible to build such a computer much faster than conventional predictions. Specifically, QBI is designed to rigorously verify and validate whether any quantum computing approach can achieve utility-scale operation — meaning its computational value exceeds its cost — by the year 2033.

“We selected these companies for Stage A following a review of their written abstracts and daylong oral presentations before a team of U.S. quantum experts to determine whether their proposed concepts might be able to reach industrial utility,” said Joe Altepeter, DARPA QBI program manager. “For the chosen companies, now the real work begins. Stage A is a six-month sprint in which they’ll provide comprehensive technical details of their concepts to show that they hold water and could plausibly lead to a transformative, fault-tolerant quantum computer in under 10 years.”

The following companies* are pursuing a variety of technologies for creating quantum bits (qubits) — the building block for quantum computers — including superconducting qubits, trapped ion qubits, neutral atom qubits, photonic qubits, semiconductor spin qubits, and other novel approaches listed below:

  • Alice & Bob — Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Paris, France (superconducting cat qubits)
  • Atlantic Quantum — Cambridge, Massachusetts (fluxonium qubits with co-located cryogenic controls)
  • Atom Computing — Boulder, Colorado (scalable arrays of neutral atoms)
  • Diraq — Sydney, Australia, with operations in Palo Alto, California, and Boston, Massachusetts (silicon CMOS spin qubits)
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise — Houston, Texas (superconducting qubits with advanced fabrication)
  • IBM — Yorktown Heights, NY (quantum computing with modular superconducting processors)
  • IonQ — College Park, Maryland (trapped-ion quantum computing)
  • Nord Quantique — Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada (superconducting qubits with bosonic error correction)
  • Oxford Ionics — Oxford, UK and Boulder, Colorado (trapped-ions)
  • Photonic Inc. — Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (optically-linked silicon spin qubits)
  • Quantinuum — Broomfield, Colorado (trapped-ion quantum charged coupled device (QCCD) architecture)
  • Quantum Motion — London, UK (MOS-based silicon spin qubits)
  • QuEra Computing — Boston, Massachusetts (neutral atom qubits)
  • Rigetti Computing — Berkeley, California (superconducting tunable transmon qubits)
  • Silicon Quantum Computing Pty. Ltd. — Sydney, Australia (precision atom qubits in silicon)
  • Xanadu — Toronto, Canada (photonic quantum computing)

Companies that successfully complete Stage A will move to a yearlong Stage B, during which DARPA will rigorously examine their research and development approach, followed by a final Stage C where the QBI independent verification and validation (IV&V) team will test the companies’ computer hardware.

“During Stage B we’ll thoroughly review all aspects of their R&D plans to see if they can go the distance — not just meet next year’s milestones — and stand the test of trying to build a transformative technology on this kind of a timeline,” Altepeter explained. “Those who make it through Stages A and B will enter the final portion of the program, Stage C, where a full-size IV&V team will conduct real-time, rigorous evaluation of the components, subsystems, and algorithms – everything that goes into building a fault-tolerant quantum computer for real. And we’ll do all these evaluations without slowing the companies down.”

QBI is not a competition between companies [emphasis mine]; rather, it aims to scan the landscape of commercial quantum computing efforts to spot every company on a plausible path to a useful quantum computer.

DARPA recently announced that Microsoft and PsiQuantum are entering the third and final phase of the Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program, a pilot effort that was expanded to become QBI. Both companies were participating in the second phase of US2QC when the QBI expansion was announced. The final Phase of US2QC has the same technical goals as Stage C of QBI – verification and validation of an industrially useful quantum computer.

“We’ve built and are expanding our world-class IV&V team of U.S. quantum experts, leveraging federal and state test facilities to separate hype from reality in quantum computing,” Altepeter said. “Our team is eager to scrutinize the commercial concepts, designs, R&D plans, and prototype hardware — all with the goal of helping the U.S. government identify and support efforts that are genuinely advancing toward transformative, fault-tolerant quantum computing.”

For more information on QBI visit: www.darpa.mil/QBI.

*16 of the 18 companies are being announced; two are still in negotiations. DARPA will update this announcement once their agreements are signed.

Editor’s Note: This update was edited on April 29, 2025 to add QuEra Computing to the list of companies selected for Stage A.

This sounds like DARPA will pick and choose which bits of technology it may want to develop. Also, who owns the technology? An April 5, 2025 article by Sean Silcoff and Ivan Semeniuk for the Globe and Mail raises the question and answers it (more or less), Note: I have the paper version of the article,

Three Canadian quantum computer companies are in the running for up to US$316-million apiece in funding from the US government if they can prove within eight years that their machines will work at scale.

The companies – Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc. of Toronto , Vancouver-based Photonics Inc. and Nord Quantique from Sherbrooke, Que. – are among 18 groups from Canada, the US, Britain, and Australia that have qualified for the first stage (Stage A) of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI).

…

“QBI is not meant to choose a winner and fund your research and development plan, [emphasis mine]” said Dr. Joe Altpeter, the QBI’s program manager. Rather, the program is structured to reward only those that can quickly execute against their roadmaps and deliver something useful.

However, making it through will likely anoint a winner or winners in the global race to develop a working quantum computer. [emphasis mine]

“I can’t think of any other program that has generated this much excitement and interest from startups and big companies – and a lot of investors know about it,” said Christian Weedbrook, Xanadu’s founder and chief executive officer [CEO].

Quantum computer developers have collectively raised and spend billions of dollars so far, and QBI will likely influence financiers in determining who to continue backing.

Conversely, “groups that don’t get in will be challenged to raise venture capital,” said Ray [Raymond] Laflamme, co-chair of the federal Quantum Advisory Council. The council has recommended the Canadian government provide matching funds [emphasis mine] to any domestic company that makes it through QBI.

Council co-chair Stephanie Simmons, who is also the founder and chief quantum officer [CQO] of Photonic, said the US government will gain access to “deep knowledge that other governments won’t have” [emphasis mine] through QBI.

“That will give them geopolitical and other advantages [emphasis mine] that are important in the upcoming economy.” Creating a matching program here would mean “This information would also be owned by the Canadian government.”

…

“I would love to be proved surprised if companies make it through the gauntlet, you’re really will to advocate for them inside the US government in rooms that they can’t go to and say, ‘Look, we did our best to show this doesn’t work, these guys made it, they can really build this thing,'” he [Dr. Joe Altpeter] said adding that the program was designed to a “simple, cheap way” to determine that.

Mr. Laflamme agreed that QBI “is a very smart way for the US to keep at the front. By tis, the US will who has the lead in the world and people are, everywhere.” [p. B11 paper version]

…

Clearly, the US has much to gain from this ‘non-competition’. It’s not clear to me what Canada will gain.

One quick note. D-Wave Systems is mentioned in Silcoff’s and Semeniuk’s April 5, 2025 article and described as a Canadian company. That is questionable. It was headquartered in the Vancouver area, British Columbia, Canada for a number of years but is now, according to its Wikipedia entry, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, US (see the sidebar). The company retains laboratories and offices in British Columbia.

It would seem that Silcoff’s and Semeniuk’s April 5, 2025 article hosted one of M. Laflamme’s last interviews.

RIP Raymond Laflamme, July 19, 1960 – June 19, 2025

I’ve had to interview more than one ‘horse’s behind’ (two members of the forestry faculty at the University of British Columbia spring to mind); M. Laflamme was most assuredly not one of them. It was a privilege to interview him for a May 11, 2015 posting about Research2Reality, a Canadian social media engagement project (scroll down to the subhead with his name),

Who convinces a genius that he’s gotten an important cosmological concept wrong or ignored it? Alongside Don Page, Laflamme accomplished that feat as one of Stephen Hawking’s PhD students at the University of Cambridge. Today (May 11, 2015), Laflamme is (from his Wikipedia entry)

… co-founder and current director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo. He is also a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and an associate faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Laflamme is currently a Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information.

…

The Council of Canadian Academies’ (CCA) July 22, 2025 The Advance newsletter (received via email) held this notice, Note: A link has been removed,

…

And Ray Laflamme, the theoretical physicist and Canada Research Chair in Quantum Information, died on June 19 [2025] following a lengthy battle with cancer. Laflamme, founding director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, served as chair of our Expert Panel on the Responsible Adoption of Quantum Technologies. …

I have a commentary on the CCA report issued by Laflamme and his expert panel. The report was published in November 2023 and my commentary published in two parts about 15 months later,

To wildly paraphrase John Donne (For Whom the Bell Tolls), M. Laflamme’s death diminishes us but more importantly his life enhanced us all in ways both small and large. Thank you.

And the quantum goes on

Members of the Canadian quantum community that M. Laflamme helped build have recently announced a breakthrough. From a July 10, 2025 TRIUMF news release (also on Quantum Wire), Note: A link has been removed,

A cross-Canada team of researchers have brought quantum and generative AI together to prepare for the Large Hadron Collider’s next upgrade.

In the world of collider physics, simulations play a key role in analyzing data from particle accelerators. Now, a cross-Canada effort is combining quantum with generative AI to create novel simulation models for the next big upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the world’s largest particle accelerator [located at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, in Switzerland].

In a paper published in npj Quantum Information, a team that includes researchers from TRIUMF, Perimeter Institute, and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) are the first to use annealing quantum computing and deep generative AI to create simulations that are fast, accurate, and computationally efficient. If the models continue to improve, they could represent a new way to create synthetic data to help with analysis in particle collisions

Why simulations are essential for collider physics

Simulations broadly assist collider physics researchers in two ways. First, researchers use them to statistically match observed data to theoretical models. Second, scientists use simulated data to help optimize the design of the data analysis, for instance by isolating the signal they are studying from irrelevant background events.

“To do the data analysis at the LHC, you need to create copious amounts of simulations of collision events,” explains Wojciech Fedorko, one of the principal investigators on the paper and Deputy Department Head, Scientific Computing at TRIUMF, Canada’s particle accelerator centre in Vancouver. “Basically, you take your hypothesis, and you simulate it under multiple scenarios. One of those scenarios will statistically best match the real data that has been produced in the real experiment.”

Currently, the LHC is preparing for a major shutdown in anticipation of its high luminosity upgrade. When it comes back online, it will require more complex simulations that are reliably accurate, fast to produce, and computationally efficient. Those requirements have the potential to create a bottleneck, as the computational power required to create these simulations will no longer be feasible.

“Simulations are projected to cost millions of CPU years annually when the high luminosity LHC turns on,” says Javier Toledo-Marín, a researcher scientist jointly appointed at Perimeter Institute and TRIUMF. “It’s financially and environmentally unsustainable to keep doing business as usual.”

When quantum and generative AI collide 

Particle physicists use specialized detectors called calorimeters to measure the energy released by the showers of particles that result from collisions. Scientists combine the readings from these and other detectors to piece together what happened at the initial collision. It’s through this process of comparing simulations to experimental data that researchers discovered the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012. Compared to the other sub-detector systems within the LHC experiments, calorimeters and the data they produce are the most computationally intensive to simulate, and as such they represent a major opportunity for efficiency gains.

In 2022, a scientific “challenge” was issued by researchers seeking to spur rapid advances in calorimeter computations, in an attempt to address the coming computational bottleneck at the LHC. Named the “CaloChallenge,” the challenge provided datasets based on LHC experiments for teams to develop and benchmark simulations of calorimeter readings. Fedorko and the team are the only ones so far to take a full-scale quantum approach, thanks to an assist from D-Wave Quantum Inc.’s annealing quantum computing technology.

Annealing quantum computing is a process that is usually used to find the lowest-energy state for a system or a state near to the lowest energy one, which is useful for problems involving optimization.

After discussing with D-Wave, Fedorko, Toledo-Marín, and the rest of the team determined that D-Wave’s annealing quantum computers could be used for simulation generation. You just need to use annealing to manipulate qubits (the smallest bits of quantum information) in an unconventional way.

“In the D-Wave quantum processor, there is a mechanism that ensures the ratio between the ‘bias’ on a given qubit and the ‘weight’ linking it to another qubit is the same throughout the annealing process. With the help of D-Wave, the team realized that they could use this mechanism to instead guarantee outcomes for a subset of the qubits on a device. “We basically hijacked that mechanism to fix in place some of the spins,” says Fedorko. “This mechanism can be used to ‘condition’ the processor – for example, generate showers with specific desired properties – like the energy of a particle impinging on the calorimeter.”

The end result: an unconventional way to use annealing quantum computing to generate high-quality synthetic data for analyzing particle collisions.

The next phase of collider physics simulations

The published result is important because of its performance in three metrics: the speed to generate the simulations, their accuracy, and how much computational resources they require. “For speed, we are in the top bound of results published by other teams and our accuracy is above average,” Toledo-Marín says. “What makes our framework competitive is really the unique combination of several factors – speed, accuracy, and energy consumption.”

Essentially, many types of quantum processing units (QPU) must be kept at an extremely low temperature. But giving it multiple tasks doesn’t significantly impact its energy requirements. A standard graphics processing unit (GPU), by contrast, will increase its energy use for each job it receives. As advanced GPUs become more and more power-hungry, QPUs by contrast can potentially scale up without leading to increasing computational energy requirements.

Looking forward, the team is excited to test their models on new incoming data so they can finetune their models, increasing both speed and accuracy. If all goes well, annealing quantum computing could become an essential aspect of generating simulations.

“It’s a good example of being able to scale something in the field of quantum machine learning to something practical that can potentially be deployed,” says Toledo-Marín.

The authors are grateful for the support of their many funders and contributors, which include the University of British Columbia, the University of Virginia, the NRC, D-Wave, and MITACS [originally funded as: Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems; now a nonprofit research organization].

A joint July 10, 2025 Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and TRIUMF news release on Newswise (also on the Quantum Insider but published July 11, 2025) is markedly shorter more ‘boosterish’ than what appears to be the TRIUMF news release,

In a landmark achievement for Canadian science, a team of scientists led by TRIUMF and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have unveiled transformative research that – for the first time – merges quantum computing techniques with advanced AI to model complex simulations in a fast, accurate and energy-efficient way.

“This is a uniquely Canadian success story,” said Wojciech Fedorko, Deputy Department Head, Scientific Computing at TRIUMF. “Uniting the expertise from our country’s research institutions and industry leaders has not only advanced our ability to carry out fundamental research, but also demonstrated Canada’s ability to lead the world in quantum and AI innovation.”

…

In any event, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Conditioned quantum-assisted deep generative surrogate for particle-calorimeter interactions by J. Quetzalcóatl Toledo-Marín, Sebastian Gonzalez, Hao Jia, Ian Lu, Deniz Sogutlu, Abhishek Abhishek, Colin Gay, Eric Paquet, Roger G. Melko, Geoffrey C. Fox, Maximilian Swiatlowski & Wojciech Fedorko. npj Quantum Information volume 11, Article number: 114 (2025) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41534-025-01040-x Published: 07 July 2025

This paper is open access.

Raymond Julien Joseph Laflamme (July 19, 1960 – June 19, 2025))

[image downloaded from https://uwaterloo.ca/news/global-impact/opinion-canadas-stake-quantum-race]

Brain surgery with no scalpel or incisions

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A December 3, 2021 news item on ScienceDaily announces some very exciting work from the University of Virginia UVA) and Stanford University,

University of Virginia School of Medicine researchers have developed a noninvasive way to remove faulty brain circuits that could allow doctors to treat debilitating neurological diseases without the need for conventional brain surgery.

The UVA team, together with colleagues at Stanford University, indicate that the approach, if successfully translated to the operating room, could revolutionize the treatment of some of the most challenging and complex neurological diseases, including epilepsy, movement disorders and more. The approach uses low-intensity focused ultrasound waves combined with microbubbles to briefly penetrate the brain’s natural defenses and allow the targeted delivery of a neurotoxin. This neurotoxin kills the culprit brain cells while sparing other healthy cells and preserving the surrounding brain architecture.

…

A November 22, 2021 University of Virginia news release (also on EurekAlert but published on December 3, 2021), which originated the news item, offers technical details (Note: Links have been removed),

“This novel surgical strategy has the potential to supplant existing neurosurgical procedures used for the treatment of neurological disorders that don’t respond to medication,” said researcher Kevin S. Lee of UVA’s Departments of Neuroscience and Neurosurgery and the Center for Brain Immunology and Glia, or BIG. “This unique approach eliminates the diseased brain cells, spares adjacent healthy cells and achieves these outcomes without even having to cut into the scalp.”

The Power of PING

The new approach, called “PING,” has already demonstrated exciting potential in laboratory studies. For instance, one of the promising applications for PING could be for the surgical treatment of epilepsies that do not respond to medication. Approximately a third of patients with epilepsy do not respond to anti-seizure drugs, and surgery can reduce or eliminate seizures for some of them. Lee and his team, along with their collaborators at Stanford, have shown that PING can reduce or eliminate seizures in two research models of epilepsy. The findings raise the possibility of treating epilepsy in a carefully targeted and noninvasive manner without the need for traditional brain surgery. 

Another important potential advantage of PING is that it could encourage the surgical treatment of appropriate patients with epilepsy who are reluctant to undergo conventional invasive or ablative surgery.

In a scientific paper newly published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, Lee and his collaborators detail the ability of PING to focally eliminate neurons in a brain region, while sparing non-target cells in the same area. In contrast, currently available surgical approaches damage all cells in a treated brain region. 

A key advantage of the approach is its incredible precision. PING harnesses the power of magnetic-resonance imaging to let scientists peer inside the skull so that they can precisely guide sound waves to open the body’s natural blood-brain barrier exactly where needed. This barrier is designed to keep harmful cells and molecules out of the brain, but it also prevents the delivery of potentially beneficial treatments.

The UVA group’s new paper concludes that PING allows the delivery of a highly targeted neurotoxin, cleanly wiping out problematic neurons, a type of brain cell, without causing collateral damage. 

Another key advantage of the precision of this approach is that it can be used on irregularly shaped targets in areas that would be extremely difficult or impossible to reach through regular brain surgery. “If this strategy translates to the clinic,” the researchers write in their new paper, “the noninvasive nature and specificity of the procedure could positively influence both physician referrals for, and patient confidence in, surgery for medically intractable neurological disorders.”

“Our hope is that the PING strategy will become a key element in the next generation of very precise, noninvasive, neurosurgical approaches to treat major neurological disorders,” said Lee, who is part of the UVA Brain Institute.

About the Research

Lee’s groundbreaking research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Chester Fund and the Charlottesville-based Focused Ultrasound Foundation. The work is part of an expansive effort at UVA Health to explore the potential of scalpel-free focused ultrasound to treat complex diseases throughout the body.

UVA’s pioneering research has already paved the way for the federal Food and Drug Administration to approve focused ultrasound for the treatment of essential tremor, a common movement disorder, and Parkinson’s disease symptoms. Research is underway on its potential applications for many more conditions, including breast cancer and glioblastoma, a deadly form of brain tumor. Learn more about UVA’s focused ultrasound research.

The research team included Yi Wang, Matthew J. Anzivino, Yanrong Zhang, Edward H. Bertram, James Woznak, Alexander L. Klibanov, Erik Dumont and Max Wintermark. 

An application to patent the PING procedure has been submitted by members of the research group. 

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, grants R01 NS102194 and R01 CA217953-01; the Chester Fund; and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation.

To keep up with the latest medical research news from UVA, subscribe to the Making of Medicine blog at http://makingofmedicine.virginia.edu.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Noninvasive disconnection of targeted neuronal circuitry sparing axons of passage and nonneuronal cells by Yi Wang, Matthew J. Anzivino, Yanrong Zhang, Edward H. Bertram, James Woznak, Alexander L. Klibanov, Erik Dumont, Max Wintermark, and Kevin S. Lee. Journal of Neurosurgery DOI: https://doi.org/10.3171/2021.7.JNS21123 Online Publication Date: 19 Nov 2021

This paper is behind a paywall.

Thin-film electronic stickers for the Internet of Things (IoT)

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This research is from Purdue University (Indiana, US) and the University of Virginia (US) increases and improves the interactivity between objects in what’s called the Internet of Things (IoT).

Caption: Electronic stickers can turn ordinary toy blocks into high-tech sensors within the ‘internet of things.’ Credit: Purdue University image/Chi Hwan Lee

From a July 16, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily,

Billions of objects ranging from smartphones and watches to buildings, machine parts and medical devices have become wireless sensors of their environments, expanding a network called the “internet of things.”

As society moves toward connecting all objects to the internet — even furniture and office supplies — the technology that enables these objects to communicate and sense each other will need to scale up.

Researchers at Purdue University and the University of Virginia have developed a new fabrication method that makes tiny, thin-film electronic circuits peelable from a surface. The technique not only eliminates several manufacturing steps and the associated costs, but also allows any object to sense its environment or be controlled through the application of a high-tech sticker.

Eventually, these stickers could also facilitate wireless communication. …

A July 16, 2018 University of Purdue news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, explains more,

“We could customize a sensor, stick it onto a drone, and send the drone to dangerous areas to detect gas leaks, for example,” said Chi Hwan Lee, Purdue assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanical engineering.

Most of today’s electronic circuits are individually built on their own silicon “wafer,” a flat and rigid substrate. The silicon wafer can then withstand the high temperatures and chemical etching that are used to remove the circuits from the wafer.

But high temperatures and etching damage the silicon wafer, forcing the manufacturing process to accommodate an entirely new wafer each time.

Lee’s new fabrication technique, called “transfer printing,” cuts down manufacturing costs by using a single wafer to build a nearly infinite number of thin films holding electronic circuits. Instead of high temperatures and chemicals, the film can peel off at room temperature with the energy-saving help of simply water.

“It’s like the red paint on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge – paint peels because the environment is very wet,” Lee said. “So in our case, submerging the wafer and completed circuit in water significantly reduces the mechanical peeling stress and is environmentally-friendly.”

A ductile metal layer, such as nickel, inserted between the electronic film and the silicon wafer, makes the peeling possible in water. These thin-film electronics can then be trimmed and pasted onto any surface, granting that object electronic features.

Putting one of the stickers on a flower pot, for example, made that flower pot capable of sensing temperature changes that could affect the plant’s growth.

Lee’s lab also demonstrated that the components of electronic integrated circuits work just as well before and after they were made into a thin film peeled from a silicon wafer. The researchers used one film to turn on and off an LED light display.

“We’ve optimized this process so that we can delaminate electronic films from wafers in a defect-free manner,” Lee said.

This technology holds a non-provisional U.S. patent. The work was supported by the Purdue Research Foundation, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL-S-114-054-002), the National Science Foundation (NSF-CMMI-1728149) and the University of Virginia.

The researchers have provided a video,

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Wafer-recyclable, environment-friendly transfer printing for large-scale thin-film nanoelectronics by Dae Seung Wie, Yue Zhang, Min Ku Kim, Bongjoong Kim, Sangwook Park, Young-Joon Kim, Pedro P. Irazoqui, Xiaolin Zheng, Baoxing Xu, and Chi Hwan Lee.
PNAS July 16, 2018 201806640 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1806640115
published ahead of print July 16, 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

Dexter Johnson provides some context in his July 25, 2018 posting on the Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers] website), Note: A link has been removed,

The Internet of Things (IoT), the interconnection of billions of objects and devices that will be communicating with each other, has been the topic of many futurists’ projections. However, getting the engineering sorted out with the aim of fully realizing the myriad visions for IoT is another story. One key issue to address: How do you get the electronics onto these devices efficiently and economically?

A team of researchers from Purdue University and the University of Virginia has developed a new manufacturing process that could make equipping a device with all the sensors and other electronics that will make it Internet capable as easily as putting a piece of tape on it.

…

… this new approach makes use of a water environment at room temperature to control the interfacial debonding process. This allows clean, intact delamination of prefabricated thin film devices when they’re pulled away from the original wafer.

The use of mechanical peeling in water rather than etching solution provides a number of benefits in the manufacturing scheme. Among them are simplicity, controllability, and cost effectiveness, says Chi Hwan Lee, assistant professor at Purdue University and coauthor of the paper chronicling the research.

If you have the time, do read Dexter’s piece. He always adds something that seems obvious in retrospect but wasn’t until he wrote it.

US White House establishes new initiatives to commercialize nanotechnology

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As I’ve noted several times, there’s a strong push in the US to commercialize nanotechnology and May 20, 2015 was a banner day for the efforts. The US White House announced a series of new initiatives to speed commercialization efforts in a May 20, 2015 posting by Lloyd Whitman, Tom Kalil, and JJ Raynor,

Today, May 20 [2015], the National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy held a forum at the White House to discuss opportunities to accelerate the commercialization of nanotechnology.

…

In recognition of the importance of nanotechnology R&D, representatives from companies, government agencies, colleges and universities, and non-profits are announcing a series of new and expanded public and private initiatives that complement the Administration’s efforts to accelerate the commercialization of nanotechnology and expand the nanotechnology workforce:

  • The Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in Albany, NY and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health are launching the Nano Health & Safety Consortium to advance research and guidance for occupational safety and health in the nanoelectronics and other nanomanufacturing industry settings.
  • Raytheon has brought together a group of representatives from the defense industry and the Department of Defense to identify collaborative opportunities to advance nanotechnology product development, manufacturing, and supply-chain support with a goal of helping the U.S. optimize development, foster innovation, and take more rapid advantage of new commercial nanotechnologies.
  • BASF Corporation is taking a new approach to finding solutions to nanomanufacturing challenges. In March, BASF launched a prize-based “NanoChallenge” designed to drive new levels of collaborative innovation in nanotechnology while connecting with potential partners to co-create solutions that address industry challenges.
  • OCSiAl is expanding the eligibility of its “iNanoComm” matching grant program that provides low-cost, single-walled carbon nanotubes to include more exploratory research proposals, especially proposals for projects that could result in the creation of startups and technology transfers.
  • The NanoBusiness Commercialization Association (NanoBCA) is partnering with Venture for America and working with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to promote entrepreneurship in nanotechnology.  Three companies (PEN, NanoMech, and SouthWest NanoTechnologies), are offering to support NSF’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program with mentorship for entrepreneurs-in-training and, along with three other companies (NanoViricides, mPhase Technologies, and Eikos), will partner with Venture for America to hire recent graduates into nanotechnology jobs, thereby strengthening new nanotech businesses while providing needed experience for future entrepreneurs.
  • TechConnect is establishing a Nano and Emerging Technologies Student Leaders Conference to bring together the leaders of nanotechnology student groups from across the country. The conference will highlight undergraduate research and connect students with venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders.  Five universities have already committed to participating, led by the University of Virginia Nano and Emerging Technologies Club.
  • Brewer Science, through its Global Intern Program, is providing more than 30 students from high schools, colleges, and graduate schools across the country with hands-on experience in a wide range of functions within the company.  Brewer Science plans to increase the number of its science and engineering interns by 50% next year and has committed to sharing best practices with other nanotechnology businesses interested in how internship programs can contribute to a small company’s success.
  • The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology is expanding its partnership with the National Science Foundation to provide hands-on experience for students in NSF’s Advanced Technology Education program. The partnership will now run year-round and will include opportunities for students at Hudson Valley Community College and the University of the District of Columbia Community College.
  • Federal agencies participating in the NNI [US National Nanotechnology Initiative], supported by the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office [NNCO], are launching multiple new activities aimed at educating students and the public about nanotechnology, including image and video contests highlighting student research, a new webinar series focused on providing nanotechnology information for K-12 teachers, and a searchable web portal on nano.gov of nanoscale science and engineering resources for teachers and professors.

Interestingly, May 20, 2015 is also the day the NNCO held its second webinar for small- and medium-size businesses in the nanotechnology community. You can find out more about that webinar and future ones by following the links in my May 13, 2015 posting.

Since the US White House announcement, OCSiAl has issued a May 26, 2015 news release which provides a brief history and more details about its newly expanded NanoComm program,

OCSiAl launched the iNanoComm, which stands for the Integrated Nanotube Commercialization Award, program in February 2015 to help researchers lower the cost of their most promising R&D projects dedicated to SWCNT [single-walled carbon nanotube] applications. The first round received 33 applications from 28 university groups, including The Smalley-Curl Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at Rice University and the Concordia Center for Composites at Concordia University [Canada] among others. [emphasis mine] The aim of iNanoComm is to stimulate universities and research organizations to develop innovative market products based on nano-augmented materials, also known as clean materials.

Now the program’s criteria are being broadened to enable greater private sector engagement in potential projects and the creation of partnerships in commercializing nanotechnology. The program will now support early stage commercialization efforts connected to university research in the form of start-ups, technology transfers, new businesses and university spinoffs to support the mass commercialization of SWCNT products and technologies.

The announcement of the program’s expansion took place at the 2015 Roundtable of the US NanoBusiness Commercialization Association (NanoBCA), the world’s first non-profit association focused on the commercialization of nanotechnologies. NanoBCA is dedicated to creating an environment that nurtures research and innovation in nanotechnology, promotes tech-transfer of nanotechnology from academia to industry, encourages private capital investments in nanotechnology companies, and helps its corporate members bring innovative nanotechnology products to market.

“Enhancing iNanoComm as a ‘start-up incubator’ is a concrete step in promoting single-wall carbon nanotube applications in the commercial world,” said Max Atanassov, CEO of OCSiAl USA. “It was the logical thing for us to do, now that high quality carbon nanotubes have become broadly available and are affordably priced to be used on a mass industrial scale.”

Vince Caprio, Executive Director of NanoBCA, added that “iNanoComm will make an important contribution to translating fundamental nanotechnology research into commercial products. By facilitating the formation of more start-ups, it will encourage more scientists to pursue their dreams and develop their ideas into commercially successful businesses.”

For more information on the program expansion and how it can reduce the cost of early stage research connected to university projects, visit the iNanoComm website at www.inanocomm.org or contact info@inanocomm.org.

h/t Azonano May 27, 2015 news item

Clay disks and flowerpots that purify water

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Ben Schiller writes in a Mar. 1, 2013 article for Fast Company about a not-for-profit organization, PureMadi, a joint venture between the University of Virginia (US) and the University of Venda (South Africa) and its water purification technology,

PuriMadi has already built a factory in the Limpopo province of South Africa and hopes to expand further. “Eventually that factory will be capable of producing about 500 to 1,000 filters per month, and our 10-year plan is to build 10 to 12 factories in South Africa and other countries,” Smith says. “We plan to eventually serve at least 500,000 people per year with new filters.”

The University of Virginia Feb. 5, 2013 news release by Fariss Samarrai describes both a disc and a flowerpot version of the water purification technology (Note: Some links have been removed),

PureMadi, a nonprofit University of Virginia organization, will introduce a new invention – a simple ceramic water purification tablet – during its one-year celebration event Friday [Feb. 8, 2013] from 7 to 11 p.m. at Alumni Hall.

Called MadiDrop, the tablet – developed and extensively tested at U.Va. – is a small ceramic disk impregnated with silver or copper nanoparticles. It can repeatedly disinfect water for up to six months simply by resting in a vessel where water is poured. It is being developed for use in communities in South Africa that have little or no access to clean water.

“Madi” is the Tshivenda South African word for water. PureMadi brings together U.Va. professors and students to improve water quality, human health, local enterprise and quality of life in the developing world. The organization includes students and faculty members from engineering, architecture, medicine, nursing, business, commerce, economics, anthropology and foreign affairs.

During the past year, PureMadi has established a water filter factory in Limpopo province, South Africa, employing local workers. The factory produced several hundred flowerpot-like water filters, according to James Smith, a U.Va. civil and environmental engineer who co-leads the project with Dr. Rebecca Dillingham, director of U.Va.’s Center for Global Health.

Here’s the flowerpot filter,

A worker molds a filter from local clay, sawdust and water. (Photo: Rachel Schmidt)


A worker molds a filter from local clay, sawdust and water. (Photo: Rachel Schmidt)

Here are the discs or, as they are known, the MadiDrops,

The new MadiDrops can be produced in the same factories as the filters. (Photo: Rachel Schmidt)


The new MadiDrops can be produced in the same factories as the filters. (Photo: Rachel Schmidt)

The factory is more than just a producer of water purification technologies, from the University of Virgina news release,

“Eventually that factory will be capable of producing about 500 to 1,000 filters per month, and our 10-year plan is to build 10 to 12 factories in South Africa and other countries,” Smith said. “Each filter can serve a family of five or six for two to five years, so we plan to eventually serve at least 500,000 people per year with new filters.”

The idea is to create sustainable businesses that serve their communities and employ local workers. A small percentage of the profits go back to PureMadi and will be used to help establish more factories.

The PureMadi website’s About page offers more information about the partners, the technology, and the economic impact,

PureMadi has been created by an interdisciplinary collaboration of students and faculty at the University of Virginia.  In partnership with the University of Venda in Thohoyandou, South Africa, and developing-world communities in Limpopo Province, South Africa, PureMadi is working to provide sustainable solutions to global water problems.

Our first project is the development of a sustainable, ceramic water filter factory in South Africa.  Ceramic filters are a point-of-use (e.g. household-level) water treatment technology.  Ceramic filters can be produced with local materials (clay, sawdust, and water) and local labor. The materials are mixed in appropriate proportions, pressed into the shape of a filter pot, and fired in a kiln at 900 ˚C.  Upon firing, the clay forms a ceramic and the sawdust combusts, leaving a porous ceramic matrix for filtration.  In addition, the filters are treated with a dilute solution of silver nanoparticles.  The nanoparticles lodge in the pore space of the ceramic matrix and act as a highly effective disinfectant for waterborne pathogens like Vibrio cholerae and pathogenic strains of Escherichia coli.   Untreated water can then be passed through the filter and collected in a lower reservoir with a spigot to obtain purified water.

In the field and in the laboratory, we have demonstrated that this technology is highly effective at purifying water and the filters are socially acceptable to developing-world communities.  In some of our most recent work, we have shown that the filters significantly improve the health outcomes of human populations using the filters relative to groups who only drink untreated water.

A filter factory can become a sustainable business venture that provides economic stimulus to the local community.  Our goal is to create a blueprint for a successful factory, including its architecture, efficiency of water and energy use, technological performance of the filter itself, and an effective and sustainable business model.

While the flowerpot filter has been well received the MadiDrop fills another need, from the University of Virginia news release,

MadiDrop is an alternative to the flowerpot filter, but ideally would be used in conjunction with it. The plan is to mass-produce the product at the same factories where the PureMadi filters are produced.

“MadiDrop is cheaper, easier to use, and is easier to transport than the PureMadi filter, but because it is placed into the water, rather than having the water filter through it, the MadiDrop is not effective for removing sediment in water that causes discoloration or flavor impairment,” Smith said. “But its ease of use, cost-effectiveness and simple manufacturing process should allow us to make it readily available to a substantial population of users, more so than the more expensive PureMadi filter.”

Testing shows that the filters are safe to use and release only trace amounts of silver or copper particles, well within the safe water standards of the developed world. The filters also would be useful in rural areas of developed countries such as the United States where people rely on untreated well water.

Smith noted that U.Va. Architecture School professor Anselmo Canfora and his students have worked closely with PureMadi to design sustainable filter factories for developing countries that would optimize use of local labor and materials.

The National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, U.Va.’s Jefferson Public Citizen Program and the Vice Provost for Global Affairs provide support to PureMadi. Partners include the University of Venda in South Africa; Potters for Peace, a nonprofit organization committed to providing safe drinking water in the developing world; and local communities in Limpopo province in South Africa.

Taken in conjunction with my Feb. 28, 2013 posting titled, Silver nanoparticles, water, the environment, and toxicity, where I juxtaposed two articles about toxicity and silver nanoparticles (they’re ok/they’re not ok) to illustrate the complexity surrounding the question of risk, this article which features silver (and copper) nanoparticles in use for water purification adds another dimension to the question. What are the risks?, to add, are they worth taking?

Canadian attosecond researcher wins medal

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The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)  awarded Dr. Paul Corkum at the University of Ottawa with $1M in funding and the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. Corkum’s work is in the field of attosecond science.

I looked up attosecond to find out that it is one quintillionth of a second or one thousandth of a femtosecond. I found the description of the work a little more helpful (from Attosecond science researcher wins Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal),

Dr. Paul Corkum and his team at NRC used the world’s fastest laser light pulses to capture the first image of an electron, one of the smallest bits of matter in the universe.

And this helped too,

Dr. Paul Corkum and his team … used the world’s fastest laser light pulses to capture the first image of an electron, one of the smallest bits of matter in the universe. This manipulation of electrons could lead to breakthroughs in fields as diverse as computing, engineering and medicine.

I’m still trying to find ways to describe nanotechnology and now there’s attosecond science. Not to mention synthetic biology (I’m still not sure I can define the difference between that and biotechnology). Btw, there’s a Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies event, Synthetic Biology: The Next Biotech Revolution Is Brewing on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 from 9:30 am to 10:30 am PST. It will be webcast live and posted on their website a few days later. If you’re in the Washington, DC area and want to attend please RSVP by clicking on the event title link. The event features Michael Rodemeyer from the University of Virginia. He’s the author of a report titled New Life, Old Bottles: Regulating First-Generation Products of Synthetic Biology and will be discussing the US regulatory framework for biotechnology and whether synthetic biology can be contained within that framework.

Quantum dots possibly toxic? And a followup to the Canadian 2009 budget and Genome Canada

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After last week’s (and continuing into this week) excitement over Canadian scientists creating the smallest quantum dot ever, there’s an article about possible toxicity in Science Daily here. The gist of the article is that quantum dots which are used in solar cells, medical imaging devices, and elsewhere could decompose during use or after they’re disposed. In any event, the decomposed dots could release metals that are toxic when they are exposed to acidic and/or alkaline environments. According to the article, there’s no need to sound an alarm yet but it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the situation.

I made a comment abut mapping genomes when discussing the science funding cuts in the Canadian budget which featured Genome Canada’s complete disappearance [from the budget].  I referred to a comment by Denise Caruso (she was featured in a Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies webcast discussing synthetic biology here). I’ve reviewed the webcast and found that she wasn’t referring to genome mapping per se but was discussing something called the Encode Study which was four years long and funded by the Human Genome Project. It featured an international consortium of 80 organizations that were working together to create an encyclopedia of DNA elements. Here’s a rough transcription of her comments,

We have no idea what we’re talking about here. The genes don’t operate the way we thought they did. The genome is not a tidy collection of independent genes where the sequence of DNA does this [action] and always does this so we can put it on a shelf [and have it on a] parts inventory list. [The genes] operate within networks. What they [study participants] said was almost 180 degrees opposite to what we have believed for quite some time.

Rick Weiss who was interviewing her went on to describe how a genes that are seemingly unrelated signal each other in ways that we had not expected. Who knows how it all works in the environment i.e. when you get out of the lab?

So getting back to my original point, mapping is fine but it’s not the most primary goal. As per the webcast, it’s the relationships or networks that are important.

A quick note: the University of Virginia has a virtual lab that features information and podcasts about nano. You can go here to see it.