Nomad-Atomics

Eric Wedepohl: Welcome, everyone to the Nomad Atomics networking room. I'm Eric Wedepohl. I'm very excited to be moderating this forum, especially as a physicist, in my past career and supporting the new generation coming through. I have to say, I went and visited the laboratory of these folks, and it was really exciting to see three guys at the forefront of a really exciting emerging technology, where they were taking this and some really exciting commercial opportunities. Just a couple of housekeeping issues before we get going is, if you can please, please conduct your Q&A through the Q&A button so that we've got a record of all your questions. Just as a reminder that your questions are going to be circulated afterwards via video. You're going to get a copy of all the questions. Don't worry if you miss a question, we'll get to everything you ask and you'll get copies afterwards. What I might do is just kick off by asking Paul, Kyle and Christian who are the founders of Nomad Atomics, if they can introduce themselves and the journey which took them to creating this exciting new company.

Kyle Hardman: Absolutely. Thank you for that introduction, Eric. Look, we're really happy to be here. I'm Kyle Hardman. Sitting next to me is Paul Wigley, and then we've got Christian Freier who's currently in Germany right now. I guess the journey that's led us to this point is we're all physicists, and we're all atomic physicists. We spent our careers building sensors using physics, right? Particularly, we build precision sensors. We've all got together through one way or another, I'll call it face, I guess. Meeting here and there and all somehow ended up in Australia in the same lab working on the same projects. Through that time together, we have been developing, pushing this technology closer, and closer, and closer to commercial product. At about a year ago, I think we all were just kind of sitting in the office, we looked at each other and we said, " Oh, we can actually probably do something useful with this." That kind of started the journey. Since then, we've been continuing down that pathway miniaturizing systems, making them more robust and going out and figuring out where this technology can really be implemented, where it'll have big impacts and what are these big markets are for us. That's what brought us to the ON Program. We've made it through ON Prime, validating some of our ideas and then, of course, into this ON Accelerate Program, which brought us to this moment now.

Eric: Fantastic. Kyle, if I may ask, when did you know that you wanted to be a physicist and in particular quantum physicist?

Kyle: That's a great question. I was an engineer to begin with, to start University. After my first semester, and this might sound bad, but after my first semester, I kind of decided that it was slightly too easy. I thought, what's harder than that? I'll do physics. That's what got me into it. Precision measurements. I have always been an atomic physicist, but I saw a talk from a visiting professor from Stanford at my old university, talking about precision measurements of gravity, and I thought it was fascinating that you can use atoms to measure the gravitational pull of a brick sitting next to you. That blew my mind. From that point I thought, hey, I want to get into this world.

Eric: That's awesome. How about yourself Paul, what brought you to be one of the founding members of Nomad?

Paul Wigley: That's a great question. I guess for me, I did Uni at the IMU and did my PhD there with Kyle, and really enjoyed this atomic physic pathway. I've always enjoyed building things and enjoyed science but really wanted to be able to take it into the real world. When I met these guys, we kind of realized that if we were going to do that, it was going to be us and, that really excited me and I'm glad to be on this journey with them.

Eric: Christian, over to you. Let's hear from you about how you became a part this adventure.

Christian Freier: Yes, yes of course. I mean, I can only echo Paul and Kyle with respect to using all this crazy ivory tower style, basic physics research that you will learn during your physics degree, but then kind of wanting to use that for something in the real world. That's really what quantum sensing is about, using cutting edge research that normal people only think of when it comes to these, like science documentaries, and using that to build something that you can actually use in a completely different field, something that's actually in the future will be just in our everyday lives as much as a transistors in our computers today, for example. Then also when it comes to starting this, I think there was a really nice combination of factors like Paul, Kyle and me worked really well together while doing our post docs at ANU, at the Australian National University. There were also really good and external circumstances. The entrepreneurial spirits at the department that we were in, the ON Program as an example, but also other people in Canberra in the entrepreneurial space, pushing this innovation approach, and making it really easy for researchers like us to start thinking about this journey. That's how it really at some point we really decided, okay, let's go for it.

Eric: That's fantastic. Just going back to housekeeping, we've got a bunch of people in the room. There's a bunch of questions coming through as well. Even though you're sitting in the video, if I could just ask you to post your questions on the social Q&A, we're seeing them all. It just means we've got a great record of everything that people are asking. I'd like to jump into one of the questions which is coming through which is really about what is quantum sensing, and where has it -- or what's been happening in the field over the last 10 years, which has brought it to this exciting place. I remember also, you folks said to me that, although you were fairly young, you were actually at the cutting edge of what's a very exciting field. I'm really interested to find out where the field is at right now, and what makes it so commercially exciting.

Kyle: Yeah, sure. I guess the big question, we'll break it down in two things, what is actually quantum sensing and what makes a sensor quantum I guess. This depends on who you ask, really, but I'm going to say a definition for you that I think is right. I would say that quantum sensing is any sensor that senses anything from electric fields, to magnetic fields, to accelerations, time. That relies on some quantum mechanics effect to make their measurement and that can be an energy splitting of an atom, or superposition, anything like this. I would define anything that uses these things as quantum sensor. We specifically use a number of these different kinds of things to build our sensors themselves.This is what we're good at, quantum sensing. We know how to manipulate atoms extremely well. Eric?

Eric: What's been happening in the last year, because it sounds like it's something which has come to fruition because on that super cool technology. But from a more commercial viewpoint, a bunch of you looked at this and said, this is actually going to turn into a massive business. I know that you're very interested in gravity sensing as a first product, but what brought you to this point where suddenly it's become commercially really interesting?

Kyle: Yes, so quantum sensing of all different kinds has been around for ages, right? The ideas are not new, right? The principles of sensing things with atoms, it's been around, 30, 20 years. What has really happened though, is that 20 years ago to make this work, you have infrastructure that takes up rooms, so developing electronics, developing laser systems, developing small vacuum systems in order to be able to take these out into the real world. None of that supporting technology really existed. Over the last 10, 15 years up to I would say really five like years ago, all of these subsystems have started maturing, and this is in collaboration with quantum sensing. This has been really pushed in places like the UK, and in the United States where initially military really, where they've realized that they are critical parts of quantum sensing that give them strategic advantages, and they really, really need to invest in these and the subsystems. All of these little pieces of technology have caught up with the quantum sensors themselves, and have allowed us to actually start building really small compact systems that can go out and be put on real platforms that normal sensors, classical sensors just can't be. That's really what's making it exciting right now is that we have finally the skills and the supporting technology to actually integrate these systems, where you can't integrate normal classical systems and get the same performance at all.

Paul: I think to add to that too, there's a recognition now from industries that this technology is really becoming mature enough to be commercialized. There's now a great interest with this technology in a number of different sectors.

Eric: One of the applications or domains that you're talking about is oil and gas. Now, I think you mentioned that there's an application for using quantum gravity sensing in a way which is commercially very exciting. Can you maybe just talk through that? It will be really good to understand a real use case which is really important industrially, and just how this very cutting edge technology is going to support that application.

Kyle: Sure. I guess to understand why it works, you need to understand how an oil field works, but it's really simple. All oil is where all oil fields are. There's a bunch of oil sitting in the ground in some porous rock kilometers under the ground, and you have to get that out somehow. One of the problems is that once you're pumping that oil out of the ground, you're not entirely sure what's happening to the fluid under the ground. In certain circumstances, the fluid can get cut off because you might have fault lines that you don't know about, or the porosity of the rock is not what you thought it was, and you can get trapped oil pockets that now you can't recover at all. This type of thing leads to really reduce efficiencies in oil production. Typical fields now only extract anywhere from 30% to 50% of the oil that's actually under the ground, and then they abandon it. What they really want to be able to do is be able to measure from the surface what the oil is actually doing under the ground so they know where it's going. Then they can drill new wells and understand the dynamics of that system and increase that efficiency. They've been investing a lot of money to try and do this using something called 4D seismic. They use seismic, essentially little explosions on the surface and geophones to try and measure where the oil is going under the ground, but it's not very effective, and it's extremely, extremely expensive. It has been shown that if they get this data then they can increase their extraction efficiencies quite substantially. What the gravity sensors that we build allow you to do is essentially, at a much, much reduced cost, and a much higher resolution from the surface of the earth, directly monitor where all of those fluids are going, much, much better than 4D seismic.

Eric: Passively too.

Kyle: Passively, so you don't have to set up explosions. The infrastructure associated with these is much, much less than 4D seismic. You can get to areas on earth with oil sensors that you can't with the seismic systems. You can operate them in areas that seismic just doesn't work like in sands like in the Middle East and areas like this.

Paul: Maybe to add on that just a little bit, the question why quantum sensing for this application in oil and gas? Why don't you use existing gravity sensors that are already out there? The answer is simply that the existing sensors because they are based on these older measurement principles essentially they have shortcomings. That means you cannot measure these slow small gravity signals that are created by the oil in the ground with them. Unless you use essentially sensors that are extremely large, extremely expensive, and cause an out of proportion amount of work and resources that makes it un-commercial and not viable. Really, the point here is that quantum sensing enables this new application for gravity sensing.

Eric: I see there's a question which just comes through which also raised the point of that accelerometers are highly commoditized, what is the benefit of using a quantum sensor? It might be worth answering that, but also I know there are other gravity sensors out there as well just been used in exploration. It might be worth just talking through the distinction between what you're doing in accelerometers, and also why quantum sensing is allowing you to monitor an oil field in a way that, say, gravity sensing technology in the past hasn't been able to do.

Kyle: I would say you have to understand the difference between an accelerometer and a gravimeter, and then beyond that an absolute gravimeter. Accelerometers are everywhere, they're in your phone, they're in your cars, they're everywhere. When you call something an accelerometer, usually what that means is that it can only effectively measure accelerations in a certain bandwidth, anywhere from say 1 Hertz, accelerations that happen over one second up into 100 kilohertz. Anything outside of that world, it's not useful anymore. When you're talking about gravity systems or gravimeters, you're looking at things that change over weeks or days, or I'll just say days, or weeks, or years. Gravimeters exist in this lower frequency band where normal accelerometers just don't really work. What quantum gives you in this space is it gives you the ability to measure over the years what we call then a drift-free. Normal gravimeters as Eric's saying, they're usually based off of springs. You have a really tiny spring that sits in a really nice box. What happens over a long period of time is as gravity changes, that spring length expands or contracts. From that expansion and contraction the pull of gravity, you can determine gravity. Unfortunately, because it's based off of this spring, and this mechanical component. As temperatures change or the spring just ages over days or weeks, what you think the gravity signal is drifts. It moves around because that spring's properties are changing. With quantum sensors, quantum gravimeters, in particular, don't have this problem. They're based specifically off of some property of an atom that never ever changes. It's the same here as it is in the US, or as it is on Mars, and it doesn't matter what the temperature is that is always the same. This is a really distinct advantage that these quantum sensors give you.

Eric: That's given me a new insight from what you're saying. Really, what you're saying is they are ideally suited for measuring process and changes in process because, if you can vary with other sensors can make measurements what you're measuring it changes, and because these devices are so accurate and so stable, you can measure very small changes over time, which makes them really well-suited for monitoring what's happening as you said in an oil reservoir or something like that.

Kyle: Yes .

Christian: Maybe one addition to that, you can measure these really small changes over infinite amounts of time in a small box that is just sitting there and that doesn't cost millions of dollars and that has never existed before.

Kyle: Exactly.

Eric: Give us an idea of the commercial scale. If you got this working as it sounds like you're going to be able to do in an oil reservoir, what cost-benefit are you talking about for an oilfield or the oil industry?

Kyle: Just a general, your average medium-sized oil reservoir if we want to talk about this, if you can increase the production efficiency by 1%, 1% it's a billion dollars extra revenue . This is the kind of money that we're talking about here. Realistically, like I said, they try and use 4D seismic to do this now. Every time they do this, they spend $30 million to do a survey, every time, and they do it multiple times a year. They're willing to invest lots of money in this because they know, that if they can just change that extraction efficiency slightly, the revenue that they're going to get out of this vastly outweighs the cost that they're putting into the technology. It gives us a good price point for what these kind of companies are willing to invest in technology that gives them that strategic advantage.

Eric: That's quite staggering when you talk about those sort of numbers. So one of the related question, which is coming through regarding applications is whether you collaborated with any businesses during the development of your product or capability.

Kyle: In the development of the technology itself, no. Like we said, we were researchers at the Australian National University. We build, we design, build, integrate all of the sub systems, everything from the ground up really. This is something that we've been trained to do as atomic physicists, you build your own lasers, you build your own electronics, you build your own backing systems and you make it work. The technology side of things, I would say, no, we really haven't collaborated with people. On the commercial side of things, absolutely. This is exactly what we're trying to do and exactly what we're doing and we have ongoing little projects with people across a number of resource sectors and the different companies throughout this to essentially get out, prove feasibility of the technology on real fields out in the real world.

Eric: While we're on that, I might just segue into other applications because one of the things which really interested me when you started speaking about the technology is you've got one application in oil and gas, which is huge. It's an obvious first cab-off-the-rank for you, but there's a whole bunch of other things which the technology can do. There's mining and, from what you've told me, you've also not only think there's applications in the military, but you've been involved in some major contracts around military applications. Now, some of that's going to be confidential, but as much as you can, can you just talk us through some of those other use cases?

Kyle: Sure. Chris, do you want to talk mining really quick?

Christian: Yes, I can. I was actually thinking about the slides that we have prepared and I'm wondering whether that may be a good point to show them because it just has the different deputations on them. Let's see. [silence] Here we go. Now, we see you again.

Kyle: Here we go.

Christian: This is really just a little visualization really of the four obvious commercial opportunities we see in the near future for this. We've already talked a bit about oil and gas and the monitoring of fluid saturation under the ground. Now, in mining as well as in oil and gas, there's actually the second application, which is based on which is around exploration and more specifically gravity exploration. As a routine surveying strategy before both the oil and gas and the mining sector decides on a new area for final stage exploration, which usually means drilling holes and doing simple seismic studies, they conduct airborne and often also land-based gravity exploration, which means running around with a gravimeter, measuring local gravity and the changes in local gravity actually tells you a lot of what's going on underneath the ground. That is routinely conducted along with other types of data like electromagnetics and some other types of data. Now, gravity sensors because of their increased precision, because they can be packaged into smaller platforms, which means, for example, it's easy to put them on drones in the future, you can conduct these surveys at a higher density with a airborne vehicle that flies slower, and those facts mean that essentially the gravity map that you gather for a specific area will have a higher resolution and allow you to generate more insight from that map. Now, the other application in mining is actually around safety monitoring and making sure that operating companies in that space can really know what's going on on their site. In this space, you actually often-- Let's for example, think about an underground mine with where there you have underground what's called stokes, which is essentially tunnels underground, and you extract rock and ore from this mine site to operate your mine. Now, during this process, there may be fractures and voids being created around your mine site that can be really detrimental to your operations because they are risks for your personnel and they create risks for your operations because they can actually-- If accidents happen because you have uncontrolled cadence and fractures around these stokes, your mines may stop operating, which actually causes tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue each day. Now, these quantum gravity sensors, because you can monitor the local gravitational field around your stilts and around your underground mine, that actually gives you more insight around what's happening around your mine, creating insight again around, "What do I have to do next and how can I avoid these problems to ensure that my mine is operating at optimal efficiency and as safely as possible?"

Eric: You've also got the GPS navigation/military application. What's the relevance and importance of that?

Kyle: We actually do quite a bit of work in this space, and this is actually where a lot of our technology development has come from, is working on enhanced navigation systems. I guess the easiest way to talk about this is there are a number of, I guess, situations in which the military platforms may not have access to GPS, so we can't really navigate using GPS or they're in a situation where the GPS has been denied. This is a strategic problem for the defense force. How they navigate in these systems now is something called Inertial Navigation. All that means is that they have a series of accelerometers on three axis and gyroscopes on the platform, say on the ship, because we have a nice picture of a ship. If they know where they started and they can measure all their accelerations and rotations, but in principle, three days later, you know where you are and you never made to look outwards for GPS or anything like this. The problem is that, like I said earlier, current accelerometers drift, they actually can't tell you what something-- the acceleration of anything over a day or something like this or two days. What that means is, if I were to take in a normal accelerometer and put it on a table that doesn't move and I were to ask that accelerometer where it thinks it is three days later, it won't tell me that it's sitting on the table. It will tell me that it's six kilometers away somewhere. If you can imagine, if you're in a boat or an aircraft or something like this, this is a really big problem. If you can make accelerometers like we do, that don't drift, so if you put it on a table, it's not moving, a week later, a day later, a year later, it will tell you it's still in that exact same spot. What this has allowed you to do is now navigate effectively over long periods of time without GPS systems.

Eric: Got you.

Kyle: This is where this is at, yes.

Eric: It sounds like you've got a couple of really good applications, but overall, this is almost like a platform technology. There's a whole bunch of different applications. We've got a question coming through saying, "What is your first target market? Is it oil and gas, navigation, et cetera?" Maybe it's a good chance to segue into more of the business thinking. You've got all these things you can do with the technology. What are you going to tackle first and where is Nomad Atomics going next as a business?

Kyle: Let's say, what are we going to tackle first? Well, we're going to tackle the market that is the easiest for us to get into, it's the shortest pathway for the technology development and it has the biggest payoff, really. A combination of these things are kind of what drive us. Realistically, that is in oil and gas. The monitoring of these underground fluids in oil and gas world is going to be the very first market that we actively are engaged with. That being said, we have to build traction as many things as we can. That same technology, the same box is useful in mine safety and some mining explorations. We're also involved on the side and trying to build traction with those as well but oil and gas is the main market that we're going after first. How we're going to do that is essentially, we build a piece of technology. We have pieces of technology that no one else in the world has. It would be really nice if you can just sell these things off, but what that means is we have to build thousands of them and sell them to lots and lots of people and, realistically, players in this space, your BPs, your BHPs, your Shells, they don't really buy a whole lot of technology. What they do buy is data. They spend a lot of money on data and surveying systems. What we're trying to do is essentially, we enter in the market with some commercial partners, like Slumber J or people that have pretty good experience in the surveying system and, using our technology, we then go out and provide essentially a data platform where we go out and we make measurements. We do surveying. We do data our analysis and we provide these insights to the oil and gas companies showing them that their reservoir is not doing what they expected, that there is a fault line here, this and that. That's kind of what our vision is moving forward into this space.

Eric: Just to jump back and tell everyone in the room or remind them, if you've got questions, please post them on the Q&A App. Also, that this session is being recorded. You will see the full list of questions answered in the Q&A with the recording coming back. You also mentioned that during a pitch that you were looking at raising, I think, it was $2 million. Can you talk step through the next steps in terms of your commercial execution plan and what your use of bonds would be with that raise? That links to another question which came up, which is the product roadmap around miniaturization of the technology.

Kyle: Yes, absolutely. Essentially, where we're at now, the team is made up of the three of us. We have extremely good technical skills, obviously, or else we wouldn't be in this position to begin with. That means that, essentially, we're kind of more bandwidth limited. The $2 million we're asking for, that's a two-year runway to hit our first-- actually, I would say really the first major inflection point, which puts us out into the field with a commercial partner, making measurements-- making commercial measurements. What that looks like is they're in our first year. I guess from the initial funding plus 12 months, that is the timescale it takes to put out our first ruggedized field platform. At the end of that first year, actually during that first year, we're already doing the modeling feasibility studies that we'll never have industry partners to try and sort out what is the best way to do real field studies when we actually have the piece of kit to go out and make measurements. That will then lead into the second year. Whereas that second year is with those partners going out into the field and providing, making the measurements on the real world systems, doing the data analysis and providing these-- demonstrating the value proposition during that second year. Once that's been done, essentially, that's the end of those $2 million, those first two year run line and then, hopefully after that, we should be generating revenue through small contracts essentially for fluid monitoring with our partners. Along this way, we are trying to go after a number of different things. We're also doing, like I said, we're doing these feasibility studies with some industry partners to try and bring in some external money that way on the modeling side of things as well as building some traction in that space. We're also involved in some defense projects and we're trying to continue that going because the technology that we need for oil and gas is very similar to technology that we need for defense. We have really good contacts in defense. Defense just announced their star shots. One of those star shots is quantum-based precision navigation and timing of which we are the experts in Australia and we continue to exploit that, to develop that technology through contracts with defense to give us essentially runway and revenue from day one. Hopefully, that allows us-- If all the things went well, that would allow us to bootstrap essentially entire product development until we are out into the real world.

Eric: That probably leads me to the next question. You made a comment about where you sit in Australia. If you look on the planet earth excluding other planets for the moment, how many people understand quantum sensing of the kind that you're doing to the point that they'd be able to exploit this opportunity to turn it into a platform business?

Kyle: Not a lot. I think one of the problems that people are going to see very soon as they push-- and this has already been realized as you push into these commercial quantum sensing space is that you have skills shortages and that's because there are only maybe six experimental groups around the world that do this, and then commercial groups, they are even less. Then the people that are coming out of these groups haven't necessarily built or designed the systems, they just run experiments on them. They don't really have the skillset to actually build them and take them out into the world, and so there's a real shortage of people like us. That's what we got really, really lucky with is that we have three people that have a specific set of skills that not very many people have in the world. That being said, you've got currently, there are three other companies that are operating, that are trying to develop quantum sensing technology. You have one in the United States called AOSense. They've been around for awhile. They made a strategically poor decision and that they started in the United States and got embedded to US military very early, and this kind of had two problems. One was that they can't export the technology out of the United States now because it's controlled. They are kind of really-- No one really knows what they're doing because they're so ingrained in the US military, and so that's kind of their focus is space military applications in the US. They haven't really branched out and have no desire to branch out into these other commercial sectors. It's just not on their plan. Beyond this, you have the other probably most prominent company is a company in France called New Quants and they develop or have been developing large kind of scientific type devices. Again, I'm not really sure why people aren't going after smaller portable devices that I can go after mineral and resource sector. This is just something that they're not doing. They're focusing more on the science side, trying to make higher and higher precision devices, which is not necessarily the right commercial pathway at the time.

Eric: Okay. That's really interesting. I work a lot with technology companies and software companies, and there's a massive problem with skill shortages now, with really good technology developments, software technology developers, but it sounds like this is an order of magnitude different. When they're complaining about people with the right skills, they're talking about they're still having access to thousands of people. It sounds like in the quantum world, you're talking about tens or hundreds maximum on the planet.

Kyle: Yes, probably 100. [crosstalk] They all probably don't have the skills to actually design and build the systems.

Paul: Or more interested in the fundamental side of these things rather than applied .

Eric: It sounds like, thinking through what you're saying, you've got a platform technology with some pretty compelling applications. You've got three guys who are at the cutting-edge of this technology and also the thinking aptitude to make it commercial. How are you going to build out your team to exploit this as a commercial opportunity?

Kyle: I guess moving forward, we need a number of things. We've said a number of times, we're very technical people, and this has been how we've gotten to this point in time. Building a commercial company is not necessarily based off of how good you are at turning bolts, although we'd like it to be. Moving forward, we have realized and I think we all want to be really involved in the development of this company moving forward. That means then, because of the skill shortage that we are talking about, during the early parts of this venture, it's going to be critical for us to be working and developing the technology and training people up. Moving forward, we have to build up a nice suite of commercial advisors on the BB side as well as having lots of commercial experience in the sectors that we're going after, and help us push forward those things when we don't have the ability to do so, or the time to build those connections. Having those people on board that have that domain experience, that really understand how decisions are made in these sectors and in this oil and gas world or the defense world is going to be-- and have the insights and how the networks is going to be critical for us to move fast, talk to the right people, get the technology to the right places and make the right decision moving forward.

Eric: I'm going to turn you on to around and try and ask everyone who's listening to this video is anyone in a domain who sees applications for this technology, please get in touch with Nomad Atomics, or anyone who's got commercial experience, especially in those sectors and wants to be involved with a super cool company and thinks they can help, please, get in touch. Now, there's been a few other application-style questions, folks who've asked those questions, I'm going to get to them. Before I do, I'd like to come back to one, which is around the business side, which is please discuss IP protection. You said the tech had been around a long time so others produced those sensors, and that sounds like a great question. What is the way, apart from the scarcity of your expertise, that you can protect the technology that you're developing and using? [crosstalk]

Christian: It’s really quite simple. As we said earlier, really the basic science of the sensors and the principles have been around for a long time. The trick is to actually integrate these sensors, these atom defrometers is what they're called in the topical field of science, into small little packages sensors that you can use for the applications we've been discussing. That is around, A, using tricks in working with the atoms. This is really highly-specific stuff that enables you to generate this sensing performance and sensitivity in a smaller box. Traditionally, these sensors in that were built in the labs, you literally had large vacuum tanks with a meter in size, and you needed to actually drop the atoms, that whole meter, to generate that sensitivity. One trick is around shrinking that down to something smaller. The other trick is around building electronics, building laser systems that also fit into a small box and always just work reliably, so you can use the overall sensor without thinking about them. We actually generated two patents during our time at ANU, that's to tackle these two problems individually. One patent is right now in the PCT stage, and the other, I think it's still in Australian Provisional and Philosophies, that stage still. I guess that's around the IP. Of course, there's a lot of industry-know-how and trade secrets that are involved in this as well, but yes, the obvious thing is really a couple of patents that we developed at ANU.

Eric: Okay, got you. I'll give you a very simple, easy question. Which uni are you from?

Kyle: ANU.

Christian: Australian National University.

Eric: Big shout out for ANU. I've got two application questions which might be related. From a smaller scale, can we use it to measure liquids underground, and would you consider a partnership with a petrol station that has underground tanks? The reason I linked those two is I'm thinking that the underground tanks is looking at leakage. Again, this comes back to the stability question. You're measuring very subtle changes in density with the leakages, could the technology potentially pick up those leaks over time, and is that something you'd consider commercially?

Kyle: We thought about that surprise. One of the things that we actually are currently doing, or us as researchers at the University, we currently have a project with Sydney Water, and what that project is is how do you use or can you use gravity sensors to measure or detect water plumes from leaky water mains? This is one of the things as far as the civil engineering side of things, that gravity sensors can be very useful for. That initial technology, that initial data, I guess, is quite promising right now. It's looking like gravity might be very useful to do these sorts of things and we're looking forward to seeing how far we can take it, so absolutely.

Eric: Okay. There's almost a big scale thing, which is the large water thing. The leaking tanks is an interesting one. What I would say, is the person who asked that question, it's sounding to me like that is definitely a possibility. Please, do get in touch with the team and maybe have an offline conversation with them if there's a specific application that is interesting.

Paul: Unfortunately, we don't actually know who asked the questions on the Q & A. If whoever asked that is here and willing to get in contact, please do, find us on LinkedIn, whoever are you.

Eric: Yes. I think the info packs which went out to all the attendees do have contact details, so iterating once again, the whole purpose of this networking is to allow Nomad to engage with people interested in the technology and can support it, so absolutely urge you to get in touch if you've got something that you'd like to run by them. Now, the technical question, must it have line of sight?

Christian: That's another easy one to answer. No, absolutely not. That's actually one of the great advantages of using gravity, because it cannot be shielded. The gravitational force cannot be shielded by anything. That's the difference to, for example, electromagnetic forces. That means that you can detect things underground without having direct line of sight. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to monitor underground fluids with it, for example.

Kyle: I guess the interesting point here is that gravity always has a line of sight to everything. It's just the way it works. It's the only force in the universe that can extend from one end to the other without having been shielded. That's what makes it a very powerful method.

Christian: It depends on your definition of the site.

Eric: That's a really interesting point you made, Kyle. It's very fundamental. If you can measure it with the precision you've got, there's going to be a bunch of things you can do with it, which people just haven't thought of, because as you said, people use acoustics for sensing the electromagnetics but all of them get interfered with whatever's between where you are and the thing you're trying to look at. Gravity is the one thing that you just do not have that complication-

Kyle: Absolutely.

Eric: - with the caveat that you can measure it accurately, which of course you can. Then, I've got a question that the Australian Government is out to tender for a GPS enhancement scheme with geo sub-decimeter accuracy, so sub 10 centimeter accuracy. Why do we need more than that? I guess in a sense, that's a bit of a different issue from what you've been tackling, but you might just want to clarify that question and how what you doing relate to that?

Kyle: GPS is obviously how people normally navigate. This is what they do. We're not really there to help out when you have GPS. The question is what happens when you don't have GPS. So when you don't have the ability to ping the satellites, to tell you where you are anymore. This happens in all sorts of different circumstances. Let's talk about a simple one that is, we can all maybe relate to, and that's what urban canyoning. When you're in a city that has really big tall buildings, and you don't have your phone, doesn't have line of sight to GPS, it actually can't figure out where you are because it's trying to ping GPS, it can't locate you and your accelerometers are wandering around everywhere. This is going to become a really big problem when you're trying to have autonomous vehicles navigating in cities for a long period of time.

Eric: I remember a few years or so back, I had a conversation with Steve Baxter up in Queensland. Steve, if you're here, this one's for you. One of his passions was the use of drones and possibly the use of drones for transport around cities. He made the comment that one of the big issue is obviously, is air control with this sort of thing. One of the biggest dilemmas in built-up areas was that GPS tends to break down in suburban areas. I guess it's sounding like this is one of the applications, which is maybe not that well understood but it's pretty clear that, when you need precision mapping around cities, GPS isn't going to hack it whereas if you can get precision, inertial sensors, based on gravity, you could. Watch the space for new applications.

Kyle: Just need to make it small enough to fit in a glove box, then we're all good, which isn't too far for that.

Paul: That's a huge market if you can address that.

Eric: Getting a few follow-up questions coming on. First of all, Sherman, aka Mental Pimp, has dubbed himself in as the person asking about petrol stations. So he'll get back to you on that. In a question on how robust is the sensor, no need to recalibrate it, temperature, pressure, sensitivity, et cetera. I think that's also-- that's a great question, also coming back to what you raised about that. Do you want to go through that?

Kyle: This is a great thing about quantum sensors that are based off of atoms is that they don't need to be calibrated. Their measurements are based off of properties of atoms and those never change. It doesn't matter what temperature it is or what pressure it is. There are techniques to measure things that are intrinsically stable, like we said, the electron excitation of an atom. If you can relate all of your measurements back to these really simple things, then you have systems that never need to be calibrated, that never drift under any circumstances. It doesn't matter what the temperature is, it doesn't matter what the pressure is. They are just absolutely stable.

Christian: Furthermore, and maybe to add to that, they also don't have any internal moving parts. That's actually a big difference to some of the other gravity sensors that are around so far. That enables them to operate for months, years without any interruptions basically, which is really new. There's also no internal parts that are intrinsically pressured or temperature-sensitive as well. Now, it's really about the engineering issue, okay, how do you design your specific box if it has to go, for example, into a borehole where you have temperatures of around 100 degrees in the bottom or higher, then it's all just an engineering question to design the different subsystems so they can handle that, but there's no fundamental limit to it.

Eric: In a way, like a good analogy, is you get a old-fashioned analog watch, which looks really beautiful but it drifts. You have to reset it all the time. It's never accurate. Whereas, if you compare that to a digital watch, you're just getting the time off of something like your iPhone, which is automatically reset. It's always exact. It doesn't matter where you are or what you do, it's always exact.

Christian: That's right. You get a step change in data quality. That's exactly what you get from the quantum sensors.

Kyle: Oddly enough, why your phone never address is because it's picked up by GPS, whose timing is set by an atomic quantum clock.

Eric: In a way, the reason that GPS works so well is because it's a non-drift system, exactly like what you're doing. What you're trying to do is exploit the same strength as something like GPS has got, turn it to other applications. Ironically, you've got one application where GPS doesn't work, as you said, which is built-up cities and what have you. We're starting to run short of time. I've just got the heads up that we're going to try to close off at 6:30, which is three minutes. I'll ask anyone who is in the forum if you've got one last question to ask to put it in the Q&A. Otherwise, I'm going to ask for some final thoughts from you folks to wrap up what we've learned. Just seeing if there's any last--

Christian: There's actually one more question in the Zoom channel from Matt Longmeyer. If it is sensitive to gravity alone, how can you distinguish between a lot of water and the same mass of a little bit of metal? It's this question, I just saw it in the chat window here. Maybe we can just briefly touch on that. Of course, in the end, what you do is you integrate over a density distribution that you have in the underground. It is right that depending on the different density distributions, for example, a big chunk of water or a smaller chunk of metal can give you similar gravity signatures at the surface. That's why you, A, you make a fine grid of gravity at the surface because that helps you reject those tricky issues, and also it's why you combine gravity with other signals. like for example, magnetics. For example, the chunk of metal is probably going to have a magnetic signature as well and you combine all this knowledge into your exploration effort to get best insight possible.

Eric: I guess that also comes back to the drift question and the measuring process over time, whereas, the metal is going to stay fixed and always the same, whereas if you're measuring the water it changes. What you're actually measuring is actual change mapping? The fairly large signature from the metal is actually going to cancel it out, which is what makes this so powerful as a process mapping tool.

Kyle: They're also very, very different shapes.

Eric: Yes. Absolutely, final question is how does your gravity sensor cope with vibration?

Kyle: Vibrations are accelerations and that's what we measure, right? Except, we measure at really hard-- The quantum sensors measure at very low frequencies where accelerometers measure very high frequencies. Most of the background vibrations are at very high frequencies. You can deal with this in two different ways. You can say I don't care about any of the high frequency information and I can put a gravimeter on a vibration isolation platform that essentially just filters out all of the high-frequency noise and you only measure low frequency things. That works really, really well in the lab, but it works horribly when you put something on an airplane or a truck because of the movement . The proper way to go about this is something called sensor fusion which is where you use high precision, high bandwidth accelerometers that measure everything from a Hertz to a kilohertz. Those are monitoring the high frequency vibrations of your platform and you use your accelerometer that's strapped to it, in some type configuration to measure the DC changes and gravity. By combining these two things, what you get is a high precision, high accuracy measurement of all of the accelerations from DC up to a kilohertz.

Eric: Great. I've got you. Sadly, we're out of time. I'd like to wrap up by, first of all, thanking the Nomad Atomics team and congratulating you on the journey. I'm so excited to see what the next steps going forward are. It's been a privilege to be the person who has been mediating this session. I'd also like to thank everyone who has attended and shown their interest and ask questions reminding you that the videos will be circulated and please, please do get in touch if you're excited and enthused about where Nomad Atomics is going. The contact details are in the information pack. Thank you again. Good night. It's been a great occasion and look forward to where Nomad Atomics is it going next.

Kyle: Thank you, Eric.

Paul: Thank you very much.

Christian: Thanks to the whole ON team and thanks everyone else. Bye. [01:02:22] [END OF AUDIO]