It was in a swimming pool that Massimo Caccia, an Italian physicist, first got the idea that would lead to what is now one of Europe’s promising new quantum electronics start-ups.
At the time, he was struggling with some pesky quantum “noise” that kept disrupting the output of photon detectors he had been working with at the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva.
“While you’re swimming, you have time to think,” he recalls. “And while I was going back and forth in the swimming pool, I was thinking: is there nothing I can do with this problem? Yes, he thought: maybe the quantum noise, far from a problem, has a value of its own. That notion sparked a nine-year journey to invent, prototype, fund and get partners in a company he co-founded, Random Power srl.
A big help, he says, was a novel EU-funded R&D project, ATTRACT, that provided €2.1 million in grants and a network of collaborators to move his idea into the global tech marketplace. With the funding, Random Power has developed a suite of chips and circuit boards that can be plugged into data centres, government facilities or other institutions needing super-strong cryptography. Today, the company has patents from China to the US, has won start-up awards, and expects to pocket another €2 million or so in private funding to propel it to market.
‘Deep-tech’ incubator
Caccia’s work is one of 170 “deep tech” ideas that the €55 million ATTRACT project has helped advance since its 2018 start. The project, under the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, brought together two universities, a business organisation, and seven research infrastructure – “big science” labs like CERN and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility – to help move tech ideas from the lab towards the market. After granting €100,000 in seed money for each project, ATTRACT picked 18 of its most promising ventures, like Random Power, for a further grant of up to €2 million each. And it connected them to a huge ecosystem of physicists, engineers, companies and others across Europe.
Besides Random Power, there are ATTRACT projects developing inexpensive “terahertz” detectors to monitor crops in a field; “smart” biomarker systems to monitor people’s health more effectively; and new sensors to help drivers see better at night or in fog. Some of the results of ATTRACT will be on display July 2-3 at a conference in Brussels, assisted by Science|Business.
Bad odours
An example is SNIFFIRDRONE, a project developing drones to monitor wastewater plants for dangerous or obnoxious gas leaks. The idea, says project leader Agustin Gutierrez Galvez of the University of Barcelona, started at a conference where he and colleagues met engineers from DAM, a big water-purification company in Spain. Their problem: getting sued by plant neighbours for bad odours. Around the world, there are regulations to control wastewater plants, but the evaluation methods for emissions and smells are slow and expensive. Could there be a faster, cheaper way of monitoring the plants?
The university’s solution: Mount a collection of sensors on a drone, and fly it systematically over a plant so it can identify and map emissions. Of course, sensors for chemical emissions aren’t new. But measuring bad odours is difficult; they’re in the nose of the smeller, dependent on the specific mix and concentration of pollutants in any one place.
So Gutierrez and his team developed an electronic nose: a drone that can fly at one metre per second over a wastewater plant and, in 15 or 20 minutes of tracing out a 3D grid over the plant, map exactly what it’s smelling and where. Its sensors include a novel chemical detector for methane and ammonia developed by a Scottish partner, and a system for measuring more general odours. They have patented the odour-sniffing method, and with five colleagues are now working to attract industrial partners. His aim: to offer wastewater plants a sniffing service, rather than sell the drones and sensors themselves. The market is big: there are more than 58,000 wastewater plants around the world.
In applying for ATTRACT funding, Gutierrez says, the aim is “to bring these systems to technological maturity – something new.”
You can read the full article on the Science | Business website.
Discover all the R&D&I projects here.
It was in a swimming pool that Massimo Caccia, an Italian physicist, first got the idea that would lead to what is now one of Europe’s promising new quantum electronics start-ups. At the time, he was struggling with some pesky quantum “noise” that kept disrupting the output of photon detectors he had been working with […]
