Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - UC San Diego Alumni discuss their careers & Quantum Design Inc. with Brian Keating (#033)

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

   Dr. Stefano Spagna, PhD. and Ivy Lum Fipps, MS are both alumni of UC San Diego Physics. Dr. Spagna is Chief Technology Officer and Mrs. Fipps is Final Test Engineer specializing in dilution refrigerators. Since its inception in 1982, Quantum Design International (a privately held corporation) has developed and manufactured automated temperature and magnetic field testing platforms for materials characterization. These systems offer a variety of measurement capabilities and are in widespread use in the fields of physics, chemistry, biotechnology, materials science, nanotechnology, and quantum information research. Building on its expertise in the global marketing and distribution of its own scientific instruments, Quantum Design International (QDI) eventually broadened its scope to distribute quality scientific instruments from other manufacturers through an international network of wholly-owned subsidiaries in every major technological center around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic. Five, four, two. Welcome, everybody out there watching this all over the Internet, and those of you are friends of UCSD. We are pleased to welcome two alums of UC San Diego, Stefano Spagna, who's located at Quantum Design as long as well as Ivy Phipps, who's also an alum of UCSD. In fact, they both have the same advisor.

Stefano for your PhD with Professor Brian Maple, who's now our chair and Ivy for your master's degree. And it's a pleasure to welcome you guys both back. And quantum design has been a huge supporter, friend, and kind of resource for folks far and wide. And quantum design plays a huge role in branches of physics as diverse as material science, quantum information, and even in cosmology, the stuff that we study in our laboratory. And they've been great partners and friends. So thank you guys coming back. Stavano is the chief technology officer, and Ivy is in charge of quantum design's dilution refrigeration technology.

And it's a tool that is used well beyond this campus and well beyond San Diego, certainly. And it has dramatic implications for technology and what we call fundamental physics, revealing the properties of matter and energy at its coldest and most quantum state. And it has vast applications, perhaps, in a multi-trillion dollar business of electronics eventually and perhaps even in quantum computing and things like that. So we hope to talk about that in this little discussion. So Ivy, you're in charge of dilution refrigeration, as I said, a technology that enables ultra-low temperatures.

I always think it's funny because you guys, you know, I remember looking at Quantum Design's website a long time ago, but even before I came here, around the time I came here and thinking about San Diego is a place I think of as really warm, nice balmy temperatures, and then you have technology that gets down. How low, Ivy, can you get down? 50 mili-calvin. So this is 51,000ths of a degree above absolute zero, the temperature below which nothing can be cooled. And so this is really, you've been at the forefront of how we understand

materials and how they behave at low temperatures and in the so-called degeneracy states when they behave purely quantum mechanically, you can't describe them as little billiard balls bouncing off of one another. So it's really wonderful to have you here. And first, I like to always start with personal questions. So nothing too personal. No pin numbers will be revealed. But how does it feel coming back to campus? How often do you get to come back to campus? Actually, quite often. And it's always a great experience to see the campus growing. I get lost every time I come in here because there's a new building. Fewer parking spaces by the day. But it's, as you said, we, We do have a lot of friends here at UCSD, and this relationship is really important to us.

And that's why we built our first quantum design material discovery lab here at UCSD because of this collaboration. Yeah, it's a wonderful resource that we have uniquely, I think, although many universities use your technology in their demonstration labs to have actually one that was dedicated and donated by Quam Design for, use for our undergraduates and even some graduate students sneak in there on occasion to learn about the properties of low temperature materials. And that's, of course, I think a hallmark of what you guys do. You make it really simple. I mean, it's not simple to understand it or how to build it, but you guys make it turnkey and explain why maybe Ivy. Why is that important to your users and the end end user side to have something that's like bulletproof and just works every time? Time. It takes less time. Some labs want the understanding, the fundamental understanding of how

other systems are running. Other labs, that's not their focus. That does need to be their focus. They can immediately access what they would like to research. And time is money. Resources are short in supply right now. That's a big deal. Yeah. It's really wonderful to have that resource. And also to, you know, start as early in the STEM pipeline as possible, training these, you know, undergrads to learn how to operate this technology, which is, you know, turnkey, but they still have that nuts and bolts understanding of the physics that goes into it. So we educators really appreciate. that. So maybe, Stefano, you can describe how is it that these superconducting devices, things like squids and exotic and kind of creepy, crawly things that we use in our technology

and cosmology, how are they used around the world and what's quantum design's role in fabricating them and enabling them, really, for scalability? So quantum design is really the leading provider of nanotechnology tools around the globe, and that includes the squids. You know, our design of all-ting film squid really was a breakthrough when it came. And we used squids as, you know, instruments in the squid magnetometer

to measure really tiny magnetic moments of materials. And people, in fact, use the NPMS. The NPMS 3 is the third generation of 30 years of culmination of putting squids into instruments. really to research new compounds, new superconducting compounds, and discover even higher transition temperatures for superconductors. Squids are widely used as detectors in cosmology as well. And there is for just physical applications, there's squids.

So the general terms for these squids is really a magnetic flux to voltage converter, that really that's what the actual device does and be able to use it is difficult because its sensitivity, not only it's the greatest strength, but it's also its greatest weaknesses because you have to shield everything else that be moving that you don't want to measure by the squid. So you have to do it correctly. Now, are these using any medical applications? Of course. So does the patient have to be cooled down to 50 millicableness?

Does Ivy actually do that to the patient? Not all the time. Okay. Now, they are used for study ellipsis, how do you say ellipsis? Apollectic. Yeah. Epileptic seizures. So they're used for that.

So brainwave sensing. Brainwave sensing, that's right. So these devices, these superconducting quantum interference devices, I believe I have that right. They can sense, you know, things that are basically a one quantum of, magnetism. So the smallest possible magnetic fields that could be many, many times, billions of times, you know, smaller than the Earth's magnetic field, maybe even a trillion's of times. And magnetic fields are very hard to block and shield out. So to get something that's reliable in the lab, in the field, in diagnostic or clinic office is really impressive. But you do more

than kind of that sort of applied technology, which is used for, you know, diagnostics or medical things I said or even in our field where we're using them as amplifiers for detecting these ultra faint signals from the cosmic microwave background radiation. A lot of what other people do using these around the world, I remember going to your facility to the factory and seeing all the places that you're sending these machines out to around the world. And do you guys get to go to these places and visit with potential customers? Or is that not the chief technology officer?

is it role in the that's certainly not my role although they do keep trying to ship me out with the DRs not going to lie yes yeah no that's certainly one of the satisfaction I think one of the questions later on is what

what is mostly you appreciate about your work and it's really seeing our technology used by researchers the end users and how the technology that we design into these instruments that often is so hard to create from scratch, you know, from fundamental principle, how that gives an edge

to our instruments compared to other products there might be out there, and how that really has a huge impact on the ultimate research of scientists. And there's been many times during the company history where our instruments have really fueled some major breakthroughs, even the first squid magnetometer, the NPMS, became highly sought instrument right after the Discovery ITC superconductors that accumulated in 1987 with the Woodstock of physics. After that, we were inundated by orders for the magnetic property measurement system. That's the NPS.

And even today, that really remains the instrument of choice for researchers who are looking for new compounds, superconducting compounds, that have even higher transition temperatures. and in terms of breakdown, that's probably your dominant, you know, kind of customer or, you know, product that you guys are producing. But lately, you've also been getting more and more into dilution refrigeration. I thought maybe Ivy, you could explain. First of all, what is dilution refrigeration for those that may not be familiar out there? Or what does it do? As I said, you have the coldest part of San Diego on a typical day and down in the valley where you guys work.

And these are kind of, I usually describe. it when someone asks me for a technical description of how they were, I say it's magic, and a miracle happens here. And functioning, what do they do? And you flip a switch and what happens? Well, ours is a button, because that's what we specialize in. We provide the easy user interfaces. But essentially, with your normal physical properties measurement system, a PPMS system,

you can access down to 2 Kelvin, thereabouts. And then the 50-mil Kelvin comes from the more or less cryostat within your cryostat. a la your dilution refrigerator. So it has two modes of operation. One is just pure, like normal, evaporative pumping, evaporative cooling process where you're just purely removing energy from it that'll access certain temperature range. Thereabouts 1 Kelvin.

But it'll allow you have a continuous measurement down to it rather than having the disjoint of which thermometers can control and a seamless integration of temper control. And then we have the delusion cooling phase, which is where the interplay between the healing 3 and healing 4 isotopes actually become a bit more important. That is where we get our 50 milichalph and cooling power. But it is the energetic exchange between those isotopes that is really the niche of dilution refrigeration. And these devices, do they consume helium? Like as you were, you and I were graduate

students, we had to dump in vast quantities of liquid helium, which at the time cost about the same amount as, you know, fine Italian wine, but now it's gotten much more expensive. So you presumably don't need any of these consumable liquid helium supplies, correct? It is a closed system. So once the mixture is set, after a while, of course helium is a very small atom. So after a while, it will deplete, but that's decade. So for like a decade, you have the same source of healing. That's a big deal because you're only paying that expenditure one. maybe a second time depending on maintenance or other things that can potentially go wrong. But that's the same.

That's way less than any of the big cryostats and having to potentially like leak check that and all of the ways that things can be improved for our dilutionary future. It's going to be pretty minimal compared to the big cryostats. Yeah. So, yeah, is there, are there, challenges and listeners out on our audience may have heard about the global helium shortage that's ongoing obviously you use some ordinary isotopic helium four which has two protons two neutrons helium three has one fewer neutrons so it has two protons two protons one neutron is there a shortage

of helium three as well as a shortage of helium four there is never enough feeling three But, you know, right now, I think the prices are coming down a little bit, so it would indicate that there is normal supply, but there is never enough. And, you know, helium in general is the fuel of our business. You know, we are dependent on liquid infreifying helium for testing our instruments. And, you know, if you do a short flashback, 2012, seven years ago, quantum design was consuming about 10,000 liters of lithium. liquid helium per month. That's 120,000 liters of liquid helium per year. Millions a dollar.

We put it to work because it was calibrating our instruments, validating, you know, calibration of customer units, but the same time was also waste because all the helium was basically released to the atmosphere and lost forever. So after a while, this became unsustainable because of e-lium shortages around the world, and then the fact that the price kept increasing. So we really set ourselves to create a line of products for our customers where they can not only recycle the helium, but liquefy it. And we ourselves have installed a pretty major helium plant at quantum design so that the helium can be recovered, purified, and liquefied again. And as a comparison, seven years later now, we are using 18,000 liters of helium, which is an 85%

reduction of helium consumption over 70 years ago. So, and it gets better. You know, we are really committed trying to keep this helium molecule as much as we can on Earth. And as an analogy, our chief operating officers always says that every day we basically fill up about 3,000, balloons and but instead of letting it go we actually use them at three wadings before we actually release them into the sky so you know this is really where helium conservation comes in play trying to keep the helium working for this industry as much as possible and that's why on july 10th of this year we quantum design have launched helium conservation day and there was a very pretty major event,

a quantum design that was also a webinar on it and many people from all around the world contributed clips from their labs to say how they were recycling helium. And the event is really one to commemorate the, of course, the great

Dutch physicist, Carmelian Omnes, who liquefied helium in 1908 and for the first time. But at the same time, really increase awareness about helium. Helium is a non-renewable source, then once

it's lost into the atmosphere, it's gone forever. And we want to do our part in not only enabling our customers to recover it, but do it here at the factory. Yeah. I mean, oftentimes people talk in my field of cosmology that humans are made of star stuff. But, you know,

actually, we're also made of a lot of stuff that was produced in the Big Bang, which is hydrogen and isotopes of hydrogen, but also a little bit of helium and some of that helium, if not all of that helium, that we find our local part of the universe, shall we say, or a great deal of it was produced in the big bang. And there's only one big bang that we know about for sure. And so it's hard to think about renewables in that sense. So we've got to be careful with what we do have.

I want to move on to some of the applications of delusion or refrigeration. and people have heard a lot of interesting of advances in quantum computing and many different maybe competitors or maybe other colleagues or so forth in the field of quantum materials are using dilution refrigeration to get down to low temperatures to operate

these new devices which have so much promise potentially for solving very previously intractable problems in computer science and physics and simulations and math, biology, etc. Can you say something Ivy about potential applications or how people are using dilution refrigeration to enable research or development in quantum computing? I think the application would be more for assessing the quality of the quantum materials that would eventually be utilized with quantum computing. The whole bread and butter of our QD dilution refrigerator is that we can do these experiments quickly. Some of the bigger cryostats take at least like a week to prepare.

And they can measure many samples at a time. But that's a week, if not a month of preparation for hopefully a successful measurement. We can do it in eight hours. So you would test the materials that would go into the quantum. So we can fully characterize the material before it's designed incorporation into something called a quantum computer. Oh, okay. That's where I would consider our bread and butter to be. really in the contribution to quantum computing.

So is that another MPM mass or is it a low temperature? Because the one you described earlier is a 1 Kelvin-ish or not perhaps a 50-millimeter. It's a dilution refrigerator. Yeah, it's a dilution refrigerator. For instance, just this June, in June 2019, some measurements on a new material, quantum material, a pi-cloride single crystal, discovered, we helped make some measurements, I see susceptibility measurements on this material

and by a scientist, a quantum design, Manan Ivan Nailan that performed the measurements, and he helped a collaboration of international collaboration of scientists that was led by Pencheng Bay at Rice University in discovering a new quantum material. And they believe that this is the first, experimental verification of discovering a quantum spin liquid. As you know, the quantum speed liquids were first postulated by Philip Anderson,

a Nobel laureate in 1973, and it took 46 years to basically discover this material. This material is attracted a lot of attention because of its properties, where the spin, basically the atomic lattice of the material doesn't let the spin order in any form. And therefore, it can be really used for creating qubits. And so since in 1980, there's been a lot of interest both in superconductivity, trying to explain superconductivity, using this quantum spin liquids,

and also the fact that maybe I'm able to create qubits for a quantum computer. computer. So it's the deletion refrigerators are really used, our deletion refrigerators are really used by material scientists that want to focus on discovering the next generation of quantum materials that would eventually fuel going to devices that would fuel the quantum computing revolution of the future. So while our instruments are deletionary materials are rather small and they cannot be built into a quantum computer, I really use for another purpose. and more fundamental purpose, which is discovering new materials that enables this quantum technology. The basic properties, fundamental physics that go into it. Good. So I want to finish up with a couple of questions about your relationship to UCSD. As I said, UCSD has benefited a lot from quantum design and vice versa.

So how did your education here and experiences that you had here shape where you ended up today? I'll start with Ivy, maybe. I have a simple answer to that. I was in Brian Maple's Lab. I started there as an undergraduate, worked there as a lab tech, was able to be in the right place at the right time for when a chief technical officer from Quantum Design came over to Brian's Lab and asked if there was anybody that would be interested in an internship. Okay, yes, yes, please. Thank you very much. So I ended up doing my master's at within Brian's lab, but with the material sciences and engineering program. So my degrees do cover physics, material sciences, and engineering.

And had a great time doing it. Brian's lab afforded me a lot of opportunities, the least of which is being able to transition to a career with quantum design. Yeah, wonderful. And what about you? So, you know, Anki, a little bit further back. I was very fortunate to work in Brian's lab. I earned my PhD under his guidance. And, you know, Brian really taught me, I was a great mentor,

really taught me to really great attributes to become not only a good researcher, but eventually a leader of a technology company. And that is that you really have to work through challenges and problems that will occur. in whatever you're pursuing and be tenacious and really looking to a successful completion of a research project. And also be very flexible because as you discover things, you may find out new solutions that take you to a different path that, again, may be even more rewarding of what you are seeking to begin with.

So be flexible and tenacious. And that's something that really, I think, I got from Brian. Yeah. Yeah. I also benefit from from my co-name sake, Brian. He's an invaluable resource. He's such a wonderful figure in this university's history and certainly in the company that you guys are a part of.

I want to finish up with, you know, for kind of an opportunity for you guys to speak to a future person who may be like Ivy is now or wanting to be where Ivy is now and wanting to know what's the best part of your job. What do you like most about the, you know, opportunities, resources and so forth that you have at quantum design. It's almost odd that the culture at quantum design is not that much different than the culture at the lab that I came from. It inspires open-mindedness.

It inspires conversation about difficult problems, regardless of whether the people you're talking about are within that same field or within that same product. But the open-mindedness for conversation, for problem-solving. and just different perspectives. That's something that I know that Stefano is carried through. And because I came after, I definitely saw that transition. And it's wonderful to be able to work with a group of people that have that generosity of spirit, generosity of their time, because everybody is busy.

But they will stop and just figure it out. And, you know, sometimes, like Stefanos saying, different perspectives lead to different pathways of thinking, which lead to different solutions that one normally wouldn't have come to on their own. And that's a very, very vital part of at least our industry. I'm assuming any company would benefit from those dynamics, but specifically for a technologically based company that has to stay on the forefront of innovation, that's an important dynamic to have within a group. Yeah. Whenever I go down there, I've been permitted on the campus there a couple times and the thing I always strikes me is the curiosity and the passion of the people that

work there for you know the from the line you know worker to all the way up to the managers there's this relentless curiosity and passion for what they're the mission of the company and and what about you what are your well I think I talked to before about you know being really my you know satisfaction of this this job is really seeing our instruments used by end users and also collaborating with them and listening to them to what they need You know, at the end of the day, we are instrument makers and we're trying to solve a problem. Really, not something esoteric, but we enjoy and engage with researchers and we find out what is that you're trying to do.

And for instance, that's how the heat capacity measurements that we have engineered and now it's an automated system is probably one of our most best-selling measurement options was something that. a lot of people came to us and said, you know, it would be really great to do the heat capacity measurements, but you can't do it. It's really hard to do. And, you know, for us to go to the, you know, the tenacity of like doing it and then really finding it a way, a way that wasn't done before and making something that is now used worldwide everywhere. I mean, literally there are tens, if not hundreds of papers per month that come out in scientific journals from our instruments, that's a tremendous amount of pride that we have there. I can imagine.

Well, Ivy Phipps and Stefano Spagna, thank you so much for coming back to your alma mater and sharing some of your experiences at quantum design with us. The future looks incredibly bright and promising, and they're with all your capabilities. Thank you so much again. Thank you. Thank you for having us. The only thing we can be sure of about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.