T0.technology is a new company taking their founders’ experience building cutting-edge terrestrial astronomy equipment and applying it to new fields. It’s not a spin-off, but their skillset is unique, and may have significant applications both on Earth and in space.
Expertise in managing detector arrays
Founders Joshua Montgomery, Graeme Smecher and Professor Matt Dobbs are all tied to the McGill cosmology instrumentation lab, which “deploys and builds new instrumentation for observational cosmology.” Montgomery is an experimental astrophysicist and software engineer with experience working for CERN, Smecher is an electrical engineer with a background in space avionics that worked for the group as a subcontractor, and Dobbs is the respected McGill professor and Canada Research Chair that runs the lab.
Their group specialized in a very specific kind of instrumentation: massively parallel microwave antennas using large numbers of cryogenically cooled, superconducting detectors. One of their most notable achievements was installing the SPT-3G camera in the South Pole Telescope, with Dobbs, Smecher and Montgomery personally travelling to the South Pole in 2016 in order to install the camera. (Dobbs’ blog on the experience is actually still available.)
The camera actually consists of thousands upon thousands of tiny cameras in a huge array, each channeling electromagnetic waves to superconducting metal components held at near absolute zero. The waves near-infinitesimally change the temperature of the metals, and these changes are analyzed to detect the background radiation of the universe and, prospectively, detect gravitational waves and neutrinos.
(Note that this is a heavy simplification of enormously complex devices employing cutting-edge quantum mechanics.)
Dobbs and his team didn’t build the camera and its arrays themselves. They worked with the American Argonne National Laboratory and others for that. But they were responsible for the electronics that controlled them, collected their data, and combined it and analyzed it. And while the components aren’t exotic — Dobb’s blog shows off a crate of recognizable circuit boards stamped with the “McGill” logo — they’re still dealing with the tremendous challenge of gathering data from thousands of hyper-cooled superconducting bits of metal accurately and making it usable.
They’ve done so well that they were invited to contribute their expertise to JAXA’s LiteBIRD probe. LiteBIRD will be travelling to Earth’s L2 Lagrange point in order to study cosmic background radiation and the expansion of the universe. Canada was asked to provide the “warm” electronics for the arrayed superconductor antennas that will be a key part of the probe’s instrumentation, which are (according to the LiteBIRD Joint Study Group presentation) “based on the system deployed for the South Pole Telescope” by the Dobbs’ team.
It’s a daunting job, and they’re one of the only teams in the world who are able to do it. So, as Montgomery explained in an interview with SpaceQ, they decided to take advantage of that to start their own company.
Taking unique FDM expertise to the market
Montgomery strongly emphasized that T0 is not a “spinoff,” and would not be using the technology or IP developed at McGill. Instead, it is an “independent company” that will allow them to use their existing skill and knowledge to “continue doing our R&D work, but this time for the much broader scientific, industrial, and quantum computing communities.”
He said that one of the biggest challenges they face with creating these large arrays is that they can’t be simply wired up like traditional electronics. Adding wires to all of the thousands of detectors individually would transmit too much heat to the ultra-sensitive, near-zero-degree Kelvin detectors. It might affect the results, or even affect the equipment.
He explained that their solution to the problem is frequency-domain multiplexing (FDM). FDM lets the detectors encode their results as modifications of a carrier tone transmitted through a pair of wires, with specialized hardware and software analyzing the combined waveform at the end to get the information. This single pair of wires carrying the waveform can transmit the information from a large number of detectors (up to 68 according to Montgomery’s most recent publication in arXiv).
It’s extremely difficult — Montgomery says the detectors can be “horribly pernicious devices” — but it reduces the amount of wiring enough to make the arrays feasible.
Their unique expertise is in creating the hardware and software that creates and analyzes these waveforms. Almost nobody else is able to do it — part of why JAXA may be using their expertise for LiteBIRD — and so they’re taking this expertise to the market. T0 is working on all-new products that will allow astronomers, researchers, and others to employ FDM to collect the data from these large arrays using an accessible, even off-the-shelf solution.
Potential markets
In the short term, the principal market for their products and services will be astronomers just like them. While their work was with microwave detectors, the technology could be used for x-ray detectors and even other more exotic antennas searching for dark matter, dark energy, or other cosmological phenomena. If they succeed, any antenna that uses superconducting elements could be scaled up tremendously using their tech.
In the medium term, however, Montgomery sees two potential other markets: space-based detectors and quantum computing. While terrestrial arrays are getting larger and more powerful, he said that “one detector in space is worth a hundred on the ground.” This is why probes like LiteBIRD are important, and why he’s encouraged by the Canadian Astronomy Long Range Plan and the American Decadal Survey. Their team knows that a lot of sensor arrays will be going into space, but that the technology is still well behind their terrestrial counterparts. Scaling up from the dozens of detectors on current probes and satellites to the thousands on future satellites will likely require frequency domain multiplexing, and their technology will be necessary to make it happen.
Quantum computing, meanwhile, is in a similar place. Montgomery talked about how companies are attempting to scale up the number of qubits they can work with, but encounter a similar problem as astronomers, where they simply can’t keep things cool enough as they scale up. T0 believes that they will be able to apply their techniques to quantum computing, using frequency domain multiplexing to gather data without affecting its accuracy and quality. Montgomery acknowledges that Qubits have their own “peculiarities,” but that they “come from the same family,” and could benefit from the T0 team’s expertise.
This is in an earlier stage, but Montgomery is confident that “some of the techniques that help TES detectors are unknown in the qubit world, and would be a big help” in scaling up to from dozens of qubits to thousands of qubits without exotic and impractical cooling requirements. These larger arrays could let researchers to start seriously tackling hard problems: Montgomery pointed to drug discovery as a current focus, but other “massively parameterized constraint problems” like supply chain issues, secure finance, and quantum cryptography could benefit from these kinds of large-array quantum computers.
T0: A business still in early days
These goals are down the road. Right now, they’re focused on the basics of starting a business. They incorporated in October, and are working on prototyping with an eye to sending out development hardware next year and launching their technology late next year. Montgomery couldn’t share details about their fundraising situation, but said that they’ve been through several accelerator programs including The McGill Dobson X1 Accelerator, and were finalists for the MNP x BCF NextSteps Pitch Competition. They’re working on a seed raise, and are pursuing governmental non-diluted funding opportunities. He said they would have more to share early next year.
Their goal in 2022 is to finalize the terrestrial board development and get to production, while beginning to enable the pre-flight and flight programs of planned space-based detector arrays like the US Decadal missions and the LiteBIRD observatory. Montgomery said that they will be “a way in for Canada to play a pivotal role in the next decade of great space observatories.” After finding their feet, they’ll be well placed for when both space-based large-array detectors and quantum computers begin being developed in earnest. The public may never even realize that they exist, but their technology could have a profound impact nonetheless.
Updated Dec. 30, 2021.