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Home » Page 697

Chilled drinks calculator, the mathematics of cooking a steak, physics-related screensavers

Summer will soon be over in the northern hemisphere, but we still have a few weeks left to enjoying a cold drink around the barbeque. Years ago, an engineering-student friend of mine said that his fellow engineers had done some experiments to find the fastest way to chill a tepid bottle of beer using ice. Their solution was immersion in ice water, which made sense to me given the very high heat capacity of liquid water.

Now, two physicists at the University of Warsaw have created a chilled drinks calculator that will tell you how to get your beverage of choice to the perfect temperature using a fridge, freezer, ice bath or even a windowsill.

If you a keen to chill a 500 ml bottle of beer from room temperature to 3 °C you could put it in the freezer for 80 min – the calculator reveals. Chilling a room-temperature bottle of white wine in the fridge to an optimal temperature of 10 °C, on the other hand, would take 2.5 h.

Cool physics

Álvaro Díez and Tibor Pal also provide a wealth of information about the physics of cooling on the calculator website.

Now that your drinks are chilling nicely, it is time to fire-up the barbeque and cook a steak or two. Before you plop that expensive cut onto the grill, you might want to consult “A mathematical model for meat cooking” by Hala Shehadeh of the University of Florida and colleagues.

“We present an accurate two-dimensional mathematical model for steak cooking based on Flory-Rehner theory,” writes the team. “The model treats meat as a poroelastic medium saturated with fluid”. Not very appetising, but will it produce the perfect steak?

Finally, and completed unrelated to food, drink or summer, the folks at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have produced a series of physics-related screensavers that you can download to your device. These include several chalkboard images by the Canadian artist ChalkMaster Dave Johnston (no relation).

 

Tree loss brings more warming as world heats

As global temperatures soar, tree loss will mean the world’s forests may no longer be able to function fully as safe stores for atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Forests play a key role in the effort to contain climate change driven by human combustion of fossil fuels. But as the Arctic burns and fires race through the Amazon forest four new studies cast doubt on whether the planetary canopy can keep up.

The boreal forests of the north-west territories of Canada are home to vast tracts of spruce and other conifers: they cover soils so rich in carbon that a square metre could hold 75 kilograms of life’s most vital element.

But in 2014 wildfires made more probable by rising temperatures spread across more than 2.8 million hectares of Canada, turning at least 340,000 ha of the territories from a carbon sink into a source for more planet-heating greenhouse gas.

Limit to benefits

More carbon dioxide should fertilise more abundant growth in those forests not destroyed by fire and drought. But a new study from California and Spain warns that by 2100, the woodland world may reach breaking point. It isn’t clear that forests can go on benefiting from higher levels of carbon dioxide.

And new measurements from the Amazon, which in theory absorbs around a quarter of all human fossil fuel emissions each year, demonstrate why: the region’s soils are deficient in phosphorus. Without this vital element, the trees cannot take full advantage of the extra carbon fertilizer.

A fourth study presents an overall picture of change driven in some way by climate change. Fires, windstorms, insect outbreaks and other large disturbances account for more than a tenth of all tree death worldwide.

That the world’s forests are part of the campaign to mitigate climate change is not in doubt: one study even presents a picture of all waste land covered by new canopy as possibly the solution. There are an estimated three trillion trees on the planet, being destroyed at the rate of 15 billion a year. Losses are happening worldwide but nowhere with more devastating consequences than in the rainy tropics.

But fire and drought are now more frequent even in the temperate and northern zones. Researchers from the US and Canada visited 200 different stands of scorched and incinerated spruce forest to sample the levels of carbon in the soils. They report in the journal Nature that as fires become more frequent, ever more of the rich legacy of carbon stored over hundreds of thousands of years of green canopy is being returned to the atmosphere.

“In older stands that burn, this carbon is protected by thick organic soils,” said Xanthe Walker, graduate of the University of Saskatchewan and now at Northern Arizona University. “But in younger stands that burn, the soil does not have time to re-accumulate. after the previous fire, making legacy carbon vulnerable to burning. This pattern could shift boreal forests to a new domain of carbon cycling, where they become a carbon source instead of a sink.”

Researchers wonder in the journal Nature Climate Change about the capacity of forests to go on indefinitely absorbing ever more carbon dioxide, given that to do so they will also need ever more nitrogen and phosphorus.

Losses already happening

Scientists from Stanford University in California and the Autonomous University of Barcelona took data from 138 experiments with heightened atmospheric carbon dioxide over cropland, grasslands, shrubs and forests and used computer models to peer into the future.

By the end of the century, this extra greenhouse gas could boost the biomass of foliage by 12% − the equivalent of about six years of fossil fuel emissions. But the forests of the Amazon, the Congo and Indonesia will be crucial.

“We have already witnessed indiscriminate logging in pristine tropical forests, which are the largest reservoirs of biomass on the planet,” said César Terrer of Stanford University. “We stand to lose a tremendously important tool to limit global warming.”

Now a study from an international team suggests that some forest capacity is already being lost. They report in Nature Geoscience that they used computer models to check the increasing uptake of carbon in the Amazon, given the finite levels of soil phosphorus, a condition current estimates have not properly taken into account. The news is not encouraging.

Multiple stresses

“In reality the ecosystem is millions of years old, highly weathered and therefore depleted on phosphorus in many parts of the Amazon,” said Jennifer Holm of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the authors.

And even if there was a healthy supply of nutrients, the stresses linked to rising temperatures – greater extremes of flood, heat, drought and wind – will take their toll. Scientists from Europe and the US studied the satellite data to build up a picture of profit and loss in the wooded world and found that, along with harvesting, such upsets account for 12% of forest loss. And with the loss, the surrender of carbon continues, they suggest in the journal Nature Geoscience.

“This year’s large fires across the Arctic may be just an anomaly, they may be a sign that disturbances in the region are becoming more frequent relative to the historical norm,” said Thomas Pugh of the University of Birmingham in the UK, who led the research.

“If that’s the case, we can expect large amounts of carbon to be released from these forests over the coming century and perhaps wholesale changes in the mix of vegetation that make up the forests.”

Freight-train earthquake detectors, ion-trap quantum computers and the ‘dude wall’ problem

If you’ve ever been wakened by the roar of a freight train – or waited at a level crossing for one to trundle by – you’ll be glad to know that these noisy vehicles have a new and potentially life-saving purpose: predicting earthquakes. As Hamish Johnston explains on this week’s podcast, freight trains generate surprisingly strong seismic waves, and changes in the velocity of these waves is an early sign of hazardous earthquake activity. Researchers in France, Belgium and the US studied the rumblings of freight trains running through California’s Coachella Valley and found that they could, in principle, be used to monitor the nearby San Jacinto fault.

Next on the podcast is Chris Monroe,  an atomic physicist and quantum technologist whose start-up firm, Ion Q, is developing a quantum computer that uses trapped ions as qubits. In an interview with Physics World’s industry editor Margaret Harris, Monroe explains how Ion Q’s technology differs from classical computers, and describes how trapped ions execute quantum gates.

The third segment of the podcast focuses on the persistent lack of diversity in physics. In an interview, Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London, discusses the scientific impact of this poor diversity and suggests ways to make the field more welcoming to members of underrepresented groups. Afterwards, our features editor Sarah Tesh, who commissioned Wade and Maryam Zaringhalam to write about this topic in the August issue of Physics World, talks about the portraits of white male scientists that adorn walls in many physics departments. These so-called “dude walls” honour important historical figures, but they also send out subtle signals about what a “great” physicist looks like.

Finally, Hamish returns to talk about the amazing scientific infographics that employees at Alan’s Factory Outlet – a Virginia-based manufacturer of sheds, carports and garages – have made as a team-building exercise.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope assembled for the first time

Engineers have successfully connected the two halves of NASA’s $8.8bn James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for the first time.

On 28 August engineers at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in California used a crane to lift the mirror and science instruments onto the sunshield and spacecraft.

Now that the observatory has been mechanically connected, the next steps will involve electrically connecting the two halves together followed by testing those connections.

Engineers will then fully deploy and test the intricate five-layer sunshield, which is designed to keep the JWST’s mirrors and scientific instruments cold by blocking infrared light from the Earth, Moon and Sun.

The JWST is scheduled to launch in 2021. Once it reaches space, it will explore the cosmos using infrared light, from planets and moons within our solar system to the most ancient and distant galaxies.

The JWST programme is led by NASA and involves the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Smartphone-based device detects norovirus

Norovirus is the most common cause of gastrointestinal illness, with infection causing vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pain. It is also extremely contagious. Made infamous by outbreaks on cruise ships, norovirus can also affect public water systems, schools and restaurants.

“It only takes a very small number of norovirus particles to cause an infection in humans, so we need a really sensitive detection method,” says Jeong-Yeol Yoon from the University of Arizona. “Also, scientists aren’t able to culture norovirus in the lab, and available antibodies to the pathogen aren’t very strong.”

As a result, detecting minute amounts of norovirus in water or food samples typically involves complicated concentration of viruses and/or amplification of genetic materials, which must be conducted in a lab by trained personnel. At the ACS National Meeting, held this week in San Diego, CA, Yoon described an inexpensive portable device that can detect just a few norovirus particles in water.

Yoon and colleagues have created a smartphone-based device that employs fluorescence imaging. Their technique uses a paper microfluidic chip, to which a water sample potentially containing norovirus is added. Next, the researchers add a suspension of fluorescent beads covalently linked to antibodies against norovirus, and the two liquids mix. If norovirus is present, the virus particles will bind to multiple antibodies, each of which is attached to a fluorescent bead. This binding causes the beads to aggregate and produce an intense fluorescent image.

To visualize this fluorescence, the researchers converted a standard smartphone into a fluorescence microscope by attaching a commercial light microscope accessory, a separate light source and two band-pass filters. They also wrote software to analyse images of the microfluidic chip and calculate norovirus concentrations from the pixel count of the images.

“The lowest detection limit corresponded to about five or six norovirus particles per sample, so it’s very close to the single-virus level,” Yoon says. Because as few as 10 virus particles can cause illness in people, the new method is sensitive enough for practical applications.

Yoon and colleagues recently made the system more compact and handheld by enclosing the fluorescent microscope, light source and optical filters in a 3D-printed case. They also developed a cloud-computing app to analyse the large images and send the results back to the smartphone. In addition, they have found a way to concentrate samples within the paper chip so that they can analyse much larger sample volumes.

The device could detect miniscule amounts of norovirus in both purified water (as low as 1 genome copy/μl)  and reclaimed wastewater (10 genome copies/μl). Yoon notes that tap water, however, was prone to error, likely due to chlorine affecting the assay. “We don’t think it will be a problem to treat the water to remove chlorine before performing our method,” he says.

Yoon envisions that staff at public water systems staff could use the smartphone-based device and app to check for norovirus in the water supply. It could also be deployed on cruise ships or used to rapidly test hundreds of wells on site without having to take samples back to the lab.

Protein building blocks make sustainable organic batteries

Batteries are everywhere and their use is likely to increase in the future as they are employed in emerging applications such as flexible electronics and biometrics. Lithium-ion batteries will not be suitable here because of their safety and toxicity issues. Researchers at Texas A&M University in the US are working on battery electrodes made from polypeptides – which make up proteins – and say that these materials show promise for sustainable energy storage that is safer for the environment and for users. They presented their work at a press conference at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2019 National Meeting & Exposition taking place this week.

Protein batteries could be safe, recyclable and responsibly sourced circular economy devices, unlike Li-ion batteries (only 5% of these are recycled at present), say the researchers, who are led by Karen Wooley. All-protein batteries could also be recycled or degraded back into their constituent amino acids. This is not the case for Li-ion devices since the cost of recycling these is higher than manufacturing them from scratch. What is more, there is currently no way of disposing of Li-ion devices safely.

A typical battery consists of a cathode, an anode, an electrolyte through which charged ions can easily flow, and a barrier to keep the two separate. An electric current is produced as positively charged ions move from the anode to the cathode during cell discharge. When a battery is recharged, an external current makes the ions flow in the opposite direction. This results in the ions being stored at the anode.

Redox-active molecules

Wooley and colleagues made battery electrodes using composites of carbon black and polypeptides that contain either viologen or 2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidine 1-oxyl (TEMPO). They attached viologens to the matrix used for the battery anode and used a TEMPO-containing polypeptide for the cathode. Both viologens and TEMPO are redox-active molecules, which means they contain a component that acts as the charge-storage centre surrounded by insulators or barriers formed by linkage and surface groups. Electrons tunnel through the barrier during oxidation and reduction processes.

Redox active polymers can also charge much faster than Li-ion materials, so batteries made of these polymers have the potential to charge within minutes rather than hours, says Wooley.

The researchers have measured the potential window between the anode and cathode in their devices to be about 1.5 volts. Although this is low, it is enough for applications such as biosensors, that require little energy.

Different conformations

The team says that it has synthesized several polymers that adopt different conformations, such as a random coil, an alpha helix and a beta sheet, to study how these structures function when organized on a substrate. These kinds of conformations are found in natural proteins that already transport electrons efficiently, explains Wooley.

“The spatial arrangement of the molecules is important for how the energy transfer mechanism works in the device, so changing this arrangement will help us find out which conformations work best,” adds team member Tan Nguyen. “We can also control the degree of polymerization of the molecules and are mixing and matching various types of molecules to build up a library of potential protein-battery compounds.

“The trend in the battery field right now is to look at how the electrons are transported within a polymer network,” he says. “The beauty of polypeptides is that we can control the chemistry on their side chains in 3D without changing the geometry of the backbone, or the main part of the structure. Then we can systematically examine the effect of changing different aspects of the side chains.”

The work is simply a proof-of-concept at this stage, he stresses. This was our first attempt to make such devices, so we chose molecules that we could easily work with.

California sunsets bring solar woes

Put solar photovoltaics (PV) on the roof of your house and it’s win-win: plenty of power while the sun shines and a rebate on your electricity bill for the excess power you feed into the grid. But what happens when everyone has solar photovoltaics on their roofs? If not managed carefully, a plethora of rooftop solar panels can put pressure on the electricity grid, potentially increasing electricity prices and reducing the reliability of the electricity supply, finds a study in California.

In order to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, global carbon emissions must be net zero by 2050, according to the most recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Decentralised energy generation – home solar panels, for example – is a promising path for reducing emissions.

In sunny California rooftop solar PV has already proved a tempting option. Today nearly 10% of California’s electricity mix comes from individual rooftop solar panels. By 2030 this share is likely to more than double, particularly once the new building energy code comes into place and mandates rooftop solar PV for new buildings from 2020 onwards. But this switch to decentralised renewable power is not without its problems.

In California, grid operators are struggling with the sudden surge in evening demand (from 5 to 8 pm) once the sun goes down. Batteries to store surplus solar electricity help buffer the problem, but ultimately make grid electricity more expensive.

That’s because more people can support themselves from their home-generated electricity, resulting in a fall in demand for grid electricity. As a result, the fixed costs of electric utilities – such as infrastructure – are shared amongst a smaller pool of people. This pushes up bills, particularly for those that rely on grid electricity alone.

“Low income households rarely have the financial means to install solar PV systems, meaning that they are often hit hardest by the price rises,” explains Marius Schwarz from ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Together with colleagues, Schwarz simulated California’s electricity market between 2005 and 2030 under four policy scenarios. The first takes the current path, where solar tax credits are phased out until 2022 and “time of use rates” are introduced for all electricity customers in 2019. The second considers support for solar at the 2016 level and a three-tiered costing for grid electricity. The third scenario shuts down solar credits from 2018 and switches to flat charges for grid electricity at the same time. Finally, the fourth scenario is the same as the first but with the addition of a fixed $35 per month charge for solar PV owners that is phased in between 2022 and 2030.

The researchers show that the current path has encouraged installation of battery storage systems, which has helped flatten out the spikes but will ultimately lead to increased electricity prices. Meanwhile, the third scenario – immediate shut down of solar credits – slows the price increase of grid electricity but causes a crash in the solar PV market.

“This results in a slowdown of carbon dioxide emission reductions and might jeopardize energy transition milestones and goals,” write the scientists in their paper in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).

The alternative path of scenario four, where solar credits are phased out and fixed charges for solar PV owners are introduced gradually, manages to counter the electricity price increase and enables steady adaptation of the grid to cope with demand.

“Fixed charges are likely to be opposed by solar PV customers because they lower the financial viability of solar PV, but our findings show that they are one promising way to ensure grid supply reliability and keeping electricity prices stable,” says Schwarz.

As other countries and regions seek to go carbon-neutral, they too must consider how to phase in changes to their power systems. As the California study shows, the path to carbon neutrality is not necessarily smooth.

Technicians sue Brookhaven National Laboratory over carcinogenic cleanser use

Two technicians are suing Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and two manufacturers of cleaning products after saying that the substances damaged their health. The technicians used fluids containing trichloroethylene (TCE) to clean and maintain BNL’s supercomputers. They claim, however, that they received no warnings about the dangers of TCE and that they were not supplied with safety gloves and other forms of protection despite the lab and the manufacturers allegedly knowing about its potential for harm.

Last month, 61-year-old Joseph Marino, who worked at BNL in 1999 and 2000, filed a $25m suit against Associated Universities, Inc (AUI) — the organization that previously managed Brookhaven — and TCE manufacturers Dow Chemical and Zep Inc. Marino lost his right kidney to cancer and has a damaged left kidney, both of which he attributes to his exposure to TCE at BNL. Another former technician, Ron Yuhas, 77, who spent 42 years at the lab and has cystic kidney disease and gastrointestinal problems, filed a similar suit last week.

It’s clear that the technicians really didn’t think twice about this product they were using throughout the laboratory; it worked well

Jaehyun Oh

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lists TCE as “carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure”. Conditions that can result from exposure to TCE include cancers of the bladder, liver and pancreas, heart abnormalities and damage to the immune system. The court filings by the technicians’ lawyers say they were exposed to the compound via the inhalation of vapours, absorption through ungloved hands and ingestion by mouth of tiny droplets in TCE sprays.

“Toxic exposure”

Joseph Lanni, an attorney with New York City’s Jacob Fuchsberg Law Firm, who represents about a dozen former employees, asserts that BNL managers “clearly knew” that TCE was a health threat. “The problem was that the workers had no knowledge that TCE was determined to be toxic to humans years ago and long suspected as a carcinogen,” says Lanni. “The Department of Energy banned TCE close to 30 years ago, yet AUI continued to stock it because it was an effective cleaner.” The lawsuits claim that the technicians are now suffering “the latent effects of the toxic exposure”.

Jaehyun Oh, a lawyer who works with Lanni, says it is “striking” how many former workers have kidney-related issues. “It’s clear that the technicians really didn’t think twice about this product they were using throughout the laboratory; it worked well,” she says. New York State authorities have taken notice of the technicians’ complaints with some of them obtaining limited workers’ compensation payments related to their health conditions. Marino, for example, has received $47 500 and a small annual payment from the state’s workers’ compensation board. But he complains that it scarcely covers his medical expenses. Lanni adds that state boards has denied compensation to many other technicians. “We’re trying to give ex-workers some measure of justice – and adequate compensation,” he says.

The lab has suffered several spills of TCE, and groundwater outside its boundaries contains a plume of the chemical. When Physics World contacted BNL, lab spokesperson Pete Genzer declined to comment. TCE has recently emerged as an issue beyond Brookhaven. During President Barack Obama’s administration, the EPA proposed banning its use in degreasing and spot-dry cleaning. But the Trump administration has indefinitely delayed any restrictions on the compound. That, say critics, discourages organisations from substituting safer cleaning and degreasing alternatives and exposes perhaps 178 000 workers to the chemical’s effects on human health.

CT-based radiomics reveals prostate cancer risk

Features extracted from routinely acquired CT images can be used to classify risk among prostate-cancer patients. Using a machine-learning method, researchers in the UK and Netherlands trained prediction models to identify textural and intensity-based features imperceptible to human observers, and to associate them with commonly used measures of disease progression. The technique could complement conventionally used methods and in the long-run could lead to a non-invasive alternative to tissue biopsies for guiding treatment decisions (Int. J. Radiat. Oncol. Biol. Phys. 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2019.06.2504).

Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer, but the post-diagnosis development of the disease is extremely variable. While some tumours metastasize rapidly, others can remain inert for years. To predict the risk represented by a given tumour, oncologists typically assign a Gleason score (GS) based on how a sample of the tumour appears compared with normal prostate tissue.

The problem, says Sarah Osman of Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and Northern Ireland Cancer Centre (NICC), is that “prostate cancer is highly heterogeneous in nature and a limited number of biopsies may not give the full picture.” As a complementary method to current biopsy methodologies, Osman – with collaborators at QUB, NICC and D-lab at Maastricht University Medical Centre – has turned to the growing discipline of “radiomics”.

“Radiomics is the high-throughput extraction of quantitative imaging features with the intent of creating mineable databases from routine medical scans,” explains Osman. “The central hypothesis is that mining of such imaging features will reveal predictive or prognostic associations between images and medical outcomes – i.e., radiomics features can act as surrogates of biological characteristics.”

Although the principle is rooted in image-classification techniques that are decades old, advances in computer hardware and software have prompted an explosion in the field over the last few years. Approaches based on MR images have already shown promise, but as imaging protocols vary between clinics, and MRI scans only recently became part of routine practice for cancer management, it has been difficult to obtain the large data sets needed to test the technique thoroughly.

Instead, Osman and colleagues used X-ray CT scans acquired for 342 prostate-cancer patients prior to radiotherapy. Because such images are already a routine part of radiotherapy treatment planning, they are widely available and highly standardized. At the time of treatment, each patient had been assigned a GS according to the results of between six and 21 biopsies, and had been classified as low, medium or high risk depending upon the size of the tumour and whether the cancer had spread.

Focusing only on the prostate itself, the researchers extracted 1618 candidate radiomic features from each image. These were based on the statistics and distribution of voxel intensity, and measured different aspects of texture heterogeneity. Of this total, 522 features passed reliability tests and were taken forward for analysis. These features, along with the GS and risk classification for each patient, were used as training data for a machine-learning algorithm.

After training, the classification models proved able to discriminate between patients in low- and high-risk groups, and between those with low and high GS. The system was especially competent at distinguishing between separate patients with the same high GS, but whose biopsies showed subtle morphological differences. This distinction, which is based on the prevalence within the prostate of the most abnormal-looking tissue, has been shown previously to indicate likely disease outcome.

Although the present study will not revolutionize prostate cancer treatment by itself, Osman says, as the first CT-based radiomics investigation for this treatment site, it shows what could be possible in the future. “The idea is that the information gained by radiomics analysis will complement what we get from biopsies, helping us determine risk groups more accurately, and subsequently leading to more personalized treatment decisions.”

Big stuff with little qubits

What was your career like before you started Zurich Instruments?

I had always wanted to start a company. Even as a child, I wanted to do stuff bigger than what I could do by myself, stuff that is done by teams. I also liked the idea of running a business and being responsible for the financial side. When I was an undergraduate I financed my studies by running a one-person business providing computer expertise to companies, and that gave me some exposure to different business styles. I saw some companies where the atmosphere was horrible, and others where I thought, wow, it would be cool to build an environment like this.

I came to Switzerland to do my PhD at ETH Zurich, and I worked very closely with Flavio Heer, who is now our chief technology officer. For our PhD research, we developed CMOS-based chips that interfaced with biological neurons. To complement our research, we used lock-in amplifiers to perform impedance spectroscopy on single cells, and we saw things about the instruments that could have been done better. The amplifiers were using digital technology, but they were closely mimicking their analog predecessors: with one instrument, you could work at only one frequency at a time. We wanted eight frequencies simultaneously, so we had to stack up eight instruments. It was awkward, and we knew how with digital signal processing you could put all of that in one box. We defined a task for a student to do as a summer project, which led to a proof-of-principle device, and then another student worked on it for his diploma thesis and brought it to the next level. At that point, I thought, “We can do this.”

How did the company get started?

Initially, Flavio wasn’t sure about the idea of starting a company to make lock-in amplifiers, because although you have to do it right, it’s not “rocket science” like interfacing to neurons. It doesn’t require secret knowhow or patented technology. But our PhDs were coming to an end, and I kept hammering at him, and he was looking for jobs and not finding anything appealing, so at some point he said, “Let’s give it two years.”

We also have a third co-founder, Beat Hofstetter, who comes from a very different background. He went to art school and is a designer by training. He’s also a very good programmer and when he did a diploma thesis at ETH I was one of his supervisors. When he learned that we were starting a company, he immediately wanted to join. Today he is responsible for our entire corporate design.

Who else did you bring in to help you?

None of us had much business experience, and our management experience was limited to leading sub-groups in a university research environment. But the first person we hired, Stephan Koch, was very complimentary in that respect. Stephan has an MBA, and his knowledge of marketing and sales has been indispensable. Hiring him was the best decision ever, and I have to say we were fortunate. We started the company in 2008, the year of the financial crisis, when lots of companies in Zurich were shutting down. Without that, Stephan probably wouldn’t have been looking for a job, and he definitely wouldn’t have been looking for a job at a new company run by three guys just out of school. But he came in and wrote our user manual, fixed our price list, devised an advertising strategy, and worked out which trade shows we should attend. Having that emphasis on marketing really helped us grow, and we would not have achieved that without him.

How did you get funding?

Initially, we thought we needed investors, so we talked to business angels and to a bank, but because we started selling our product so early we decided to do without. I’m happy about that today. We probably could have developed faster if we’d had investors, but we’re growing at 25–30% a year now and I feel this is adequate. I have American friends who tell me I’m wasting my time, that I need to mount a bigger “engine” to grow the company, but I’m happy with it how it is, and so are the people around me.

We were also quite successful in winning business competitions, which gave us about 300,000 Swiss francs (£239,000) in cash, and we had a project with ETH Zurich that was worth another quarter of a million in salaries for people at the university. In addition, we only paid out half of the salaries to the founders. The other half remained in the company as a subordinate loan – meaning that if the company went bankrupt, we would have lost our money.

Finally, it helped that we initially focused on the high end of the market, where the margins are higher and the volume of production is lower. At about the five-year mark we expanded to include the lower end of the market as well, and we also got into neighbouring markets, such as making instruments for quantum computing.

How has the business changed in response to the demands of this new market?

We were already supplying instruments to people who study nuclear magnetic resonance – measuring the spin of hydrogen atoms in water molecules in your body. This is essentially the same as what people in quantum computing do, only they want to measure the spins of single particles, rather than a whole bucket of them. So we developed an instrument specifically for that application, which was new for us.

Before, we were making the equivalent of Swiss army knives, where one instrument is used for many different applications, but for each individual application, it might not be the best conceivable tool. When we started working with the quantum community it was different. We went to visit their labs and worked with them for weeks to fine-tune our tools to suit their very tough requirements. For example, a superconducting qubit in a quantum computer has a lifetime of maybe 100 microseconds, so whatever you want to do to it, you have to do it within 100 microseconds. That means your instruments need to be extremely fast and extremely accurate. If you want to execute quantum gates in, say, 20 nanoseconds, you might have to synchronize 100 channels with 200-picosecond timing. These are tough and very specific requirements that cannot be satisfied with a universal instrument.

Another difference is that requirements in the quantum market change – I don’t want to say on a daily basis, but maybe on a yearly basis. When we entered the field, everyone was telling me, “Hey, Sadik, we need high-electron-mobility transistors in our low-noise amplifiers.” Today, they are asking for travelling-wave parametric amplifiers (TWPAs) – an entirely different technology. We have to compete in an environment where requirements change rapidly, even though developing a new instrument is typically a multi-year project. So we’ve had to become much more agile, and that change has gone through our entire company, from product management to R&D.

The final point I’d like to make, though, is that it’s not enough to just do what customers ask. Researchers typically do not have a broad outlook, because they have a very hard problem that they need to solve now, and they will ask for very pragmatic solutions. But often those are not the best solutions, so you need creative people to come up with the right ones.

How do you find those people?

It’s hard, because there’s a quantum boom going on that absorbs a lot of people. We recently set up a subsidiary in Boston, US, and we have job openings there, but there are no quantum physicists on the market; I read recently that [the US-based electronics and aerospace conglomerate] Honeywell has a hundred people working on ion-trap quantum computing, which is just amazing. However, we are fortunate in the sense that our customers are at university, and at some point, they will be looking for a job. We have hired many happy customers.

What’s been your most difficult challenge?

It’s definitely been on the organization side rather than the technical side. We’ve made mistakes there, usually in relation to company growth and organization development. For example, our first fully fledged subsidiary was in China, and although it’s now a big success story, setting it up was a learning experience for both sides. For example, we got into a situation where people there were talking about “headquarters”, as in, “We have to ask headquarters before we make that decision.” They didn’t feel empowered to take responsibility themselves. And then people in Zurich started talking about “the subsidiary” and I realized, aha, they think that our people in China are working for them.

I’m usually not someone who tells other people how to do their job, but this was a situation where I went in and said, “Nobody says ‘headquarters’ anymore. From now on, we have houses. We have a house in Switzerland, and we have a house in Shanghai, and another house in Boston and more houses in France, Italy and South Korea. We are all Zinians” – that’s what we call employees at Zurich Instruments – “and we are working in different houses, and there is no such thing as ‘headquarters’.” And that’s worked very well. But sometimes you detect these things a bit late.

Any advice for someone thinking of starting a scientific instrumentation company?

Switzerland is the land of the perfectionists, and I’m a naturalized Swiss now, but my advice is that you don’t have to be perfect. I see so many folks grinding and polishing their product, but it doesn’t have to be perfect; it just needs to be better than the competition, and often the competition is not very good. My other advice is that you do need to be your own salesperson. Don’t think that if you make a product, somebody else is going to sell it for you. That was a mistake we made. We thought we would make a product and get distributors to sell it. Very quickly, we understood that distributors are not interested in bringing new brands or instruments to market. We had to do it ourselves.

If you could go back and do anything differently, what would it be?

As the company grew, so did we. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been prepared to take on a $10m investment. Today, I think I could. So if I would do it all again, I would take investors on board and build the company faster. But that’s me talking today, and back then I think we made the right choice.

The other thing I’d do differently is to build an even more agile organization. From the outside, we may look like a hardware company, but we have more than 70 employees, and our production team is only four people. We’re actually a software company – that’s where we generate our value, and almost all of our instruments’ functionality is software-defined. So while we do quality control and we manage a production supply chain, the big effort and cost is in software. We go through two software release cycles per year, and I wish it were more. The market for lock-in amplifiers is like icebergs floating past, but in quantum computing it’s a race, and you have to be quick at responding to new requirements. We are now changing the organization towards that, but we could have done it earlier.

When we started in 2008, we wanted to make the best lock-in amplifiers in the world. That was our original vision. But we got there a while ago, and today the vision has changed. Today the vision is, we want to help build a quantum computer. Lock-in amplifiers are important; they’re a pillar of our business, our cash cow, and we are still investing in them. But our new vision is to enable researchers to focus on the physics of the quantum computer and not on the instrumentation.

What is it about quantum computing that attracts you? It sounds like you view it as more than just a business opportunity.

Part of it is that it’s a race. There are many start-ups, and I find that a very stimulating environment. But it’s also the people and the spirit in the community. I find it contagious. People have the attitude of “let’s try it, let’s do it”. Also, the timing is right for us as a business. In three years, the window of opportunity may be gone, and someone else will have become the standard supplier for quantum computing instrumentation. But now we have the opportunity to set global standards, and that’s very appealing.

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