Venture capital firm funds quantum technologies

While living in the Soviet Union, Serguei Kouzmine made a lot of science-minded friends. Some he got to know in college. Others he met at the country’s Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, where he earned his doctorate.

Today Kouzmine depends on that network—not as a scientist, but as a founder of Quantum Wave Fund. Launched in December, QWave is a venture capital firm guided by a community of Russian advisers scattered across the world. It backs the development of new materials and new devices related to quantum physics. ‘As scientists, we feel pretty much at home with quantum physics,’ says Kouzmine. ‘We discuss what people know about quantum effects and see what can be utilized to change everyday human life.’

The Boston-based company has raised $40 million of the $100 million it aims to eventually attract. Investors tend to fit a certain profile, says Kouzmine. Most made their money in software or other high-tech industries. That background makes them receptive to his message that today’s hardware is approaching its limits, and that tomorrow’s will require new approaches exploring the tiny scales at which quantum phenomena come into play.

Last month the firm announced its first round of investments: $7 million split among three small companies with projects thought to be commercializable on short time scales. There were no quantum computers in the bunch. Each company already had in hand a prototype of a technology that promises to do something better than existing technologies. Over the next 18 months, those devices must be brought to market and, by 2016, begin to win customers. Significant market recognition within five years is expected.

Raman spectrometers and semiconductor diodes

Based in Morrisville, North Carolina, Centice has put a new twist on Raman spectroscopy, an established technique for identifying molecules with lasers. The technology qualifies as quantum because it relies on a quantum effect, the scattering of laser light off the vibrations of chemical bonds. Squeezing the equipment down into a device the size of a briefcase, Centice has miniaturized the tabletop-sized machines traditionally used for Raman spectrography.

The first clients Centice is chasing for its portable instrument may come from the government sector. Police working in the field could use it to identify illicit drugs. As an explosives detector, the tool could also be useful for military personnel. And with some retooling, it could identify compounds relevant to the pharmaceutical industry.

Clifton , an Estonian company also supported by QWave, already owns a manufacturing plant for its product: semiconductor diodes that allow electricity to flow in only one direction. Made of a gallium arsenide mixture, the diodes can handle higher temperatures than traditional silicon diodes can, and dissipate less current. They are well suited, the company says, for high-voltage electronics in automobiles, planes, and spacecraft. The secret to the diodes’ endurance is an epitaxial technique for growing thin layers of gallium arsenide, which ensures that all of the atoms are lined up in a crystal structure.

Such advances in precise engineering are one of the big reasons that Kouzmine decided the time was right to get into the quantum materials business. A decade ago, he says, someone who suggested tinkering with the quantum states of nitrogen impurities inside diamonds, for instance, would have been met with a blank stare. ‘People would have looked at you like you were from Mars.’ The ability to perfectly position nitrogen atoms in diamonds just wasn’t there.

Now nitrogen-vacancy centers have proven to be a promising system for new quantum technologies, thanks to improvements in chemical vapor deposition, a technique for synthesizing artificial diamonds. A third endeavor backed by QWave has big plans for such diamonds. Founded by Vladimir Shalaev, a professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, Nano-Meta Technologies straddles academia and the business world.

‘That’s one of the interesting things about the materials space versus any other investment space,’ says QWave partner Frank Creer. ‘The vast majority of our deals have their genesis in universities and academic environments.’

Diamond-metamaterial lasers

Nano-Meta Technologies is working on a quantum laser made of diamonds paired with metamaterials, manmade materials with repeating structures that manipulate light in unusual ways. The laser rapidly fires single particles of light. Those photons can encode information in their quantum states and carry that information over long distances in quantum networks or for quantum cryptography.

Governments in Switzerland and other nations have already begun to invest in quantum networks, which has opened up potential markets for the photon cannon. ‘It might be too soon today,’ says Shalaev. ‘But then again it might be too late tomorrow.’ He also hopes to target big players such as Google and IBM that have been investing in quantum information.

The Russian physicist is also working on another technology that IBM has been chasing in recent years: nanophotonic devices that work with light at the nanometer scale. Last year IBM unveiled its first nanophotonic chip, which included both traditional electronic transistors and optical components capable of moving tremendous amounts of information around on beams of light.

University laboratories have given birth to a slew of other nanoscale photonic devices, including tiny antennas for detecting light. But none of those inventions has found its way onto commercial computer chips. The reason, says Shalaev, is that researchers tend to build their devices out of silver and gold, precious metals that have great optical characteristics but aren’t compatible with current chip-manufacturing techniques. ‘The manufacturers look at us as if we are kids playing with toys,’ he says. His company is working with industry-friendly materials such as titanium nitride in an effort to improve their properties.

While Centice, Clifton, and Nano-Meta Technologies push forward, QWave is looking at another 38 companies in its investment pipeline. Kouzmine doesn’t expect to find the next Bill Gates or Larry Ellison. Unlike information technology, he says, materials don’t tend to be a winner-take-all game: ‘You don’t win as much, but you also don’t tend to lose your shirt.’

QWave isn’t the only new fund focused on physics and new materials. Mike Lazaridis, founder of Blackberry, recently launched the venture capital firm Quantum Valley Investments , based in Waterloo, Canada. But Kouzmine says he isn’t worried because the market is underserved and has room for new players. ‘Out of the thousands of venture capital companies out, only a few are capable of handling materials science,’ he says. ‘We have the expertise. We have the scientific network.’

Devin Powell is a freelance science writer based in Washington, DC. His stories have appeared in Science News, Wired, US News & World Report, and other outlets.