Vision.

If you go into a modern physics lab today, you will find that the infrastructure and way of doing science has not changed much in the last decades. Many manual tasks are our daily bread and butter. Setups have to be kept in check, new optical elements have to be placed on the table, samples have to be loaded into experimental apparatus. In the area of Nanofabrication, we see the same; discovery using sample-sized (< 50 mm, 2 inch) pieces is mostly done manually. Steps are repeated many times in a slightly different manner, all by hand.

Assisted Scientific Discovery

We believe that it is time to change this. Automation, control, and robotics have arrived at a place where they are good enough to react to the environment inside a lab, and flexible enough to adapt to explorative requirements.

For the next decade, we believe in assisted scientific discovery; that is what we are currently focusing on.

Afterwards, we expect artificial scientific discovery. That means we get useful machine intelligence beyond programming. In such a future, the computer needs access to physical reality to do experiments and learn about the world. Our research will be a part of this.

Where do we start?

We are intrigued by the possibilities that quantum technology combined with nano-fabrication offers. The observed sample variations and the often stochastic and tedious fabrication offer a fantastic playing field to implement automation beyond basic lab automation.

Why not a startup? Why not in industry?

Good question. A few startups have started, many have pivoted. The billion-dollar use-case is not there yet. Samuel is convinced this is the path science will have to follow, and he wants this future to happen. So a little bit more scientific exploration is needed. It is a little bit like fusion, or quantum computing: the future is fantastic, but ten more years away.

Are we alone?

Already nowadays, assisted scientific discovery is a common sight in life-science or material-science labs, where high-throughput discovery has been well established. Still, physics laboratories have seen very limited adoption, so let’s get inspired by the other fields and see where that leads us.