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M Squared, the photonics and quantum technology developer, today announces a significant new financing of 32.5m as it expands its backers to support its growth and technology developments.

Santander UK will be providing a 20m debt facility, allowing M Squareds founders and management team, led by Dr Graeme Malcolm OBE, to fund the acquisition of the substantial part of BGFs current shareholding along with fuelling the next stage in business and technological growth. The newly formed Scottish National Investment Bank will also support M Squared with 12.5m of growth capital.

Commenting on the transaction,Richard Mathison, Structured Finance Director, Santander UK said:Santander is delighted to have provided M Squared with 20m of debt facilities to support their strategic buyout and future growth ambitions. M Squared is a truly unique, cutting-edge, business driven by a high calibre management team, who we have got to know well over the last 10 months. Santanders debt structure provided was specifically tailored to M Squareds needs and ambitions, alongside funding provided by the Scottish National Investment Bank.

This significant investment from the newly established Scottish National Investment Bank - which is the first investment being made by the Bank - will enable M Squared to further advance its research and development. This is key to upscaling its pioneering work in quantum innovation alongside its technologies to help tackle climate change. The flexibility shown by the Scottish National Investment Bank and its patient capital approach aligned strongly with M Squareds funding requirements.

M Squareds innovations are addressing global scientific and technology challenges in fields as diverse as climate change, healthcare, quantum computing and virtual reality. Therefore, M Squareds activities will make a contribution to all three of the Scottish National Investment Banks proposed core missions to support Scotlands transition to net zero, build communities and promote equality, and harness innovation to enable our people to flourish.

Eilidh Mactaggart, CEO of the Scottish National Investment Bank said:This Glasgow based business is at the cutting edge of innovation and is a recognised world-leader in its field with huge growth potential. It is a great fit with our missions and our investment will create real economic benefit in Scotland. We worked collaboratively to provide an investment solution tailored to M Squareds needs, and our patient capital approach meant we were able to take the longer-term view that was needed. We are hugely excited about the future for M Squared and look forward to working with Graeme and his team supporting the next phase of its growth.

Earlier this year, M Squared announced it is leading the UKs largest industry-led commercial quantum computing project as part of an Innovate UK Challenge fund,DISCOVERY. M Squared has also leveraged investment as part of the projectSquare meaning that total investment has reached 50m in the year to date despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

M Squared is now at the forefront of UK efforts to commercialise revolutionary quantum technology considered a major component of central governments commitment to research and development and its future industrial strategy. This transaction provides the financial strength and independence for the business to play a significant role in the next stage of this technologys commercialisation.

Dr Graeme Malcolm OBE, Founder & CEO of M Squared, said:M Squared makes the world's purest light - technology that has transformative, real-world, applications that can take on the climate emergency, greatly improve biomedical imaging, realise the next evolution of semiconductors, and now truly unlock the coming quantum age.

Scotland is at the heart of the UKs advanced science and technology sectors and sitting alongside world-leading universities and commercial partners it has become a critical hub of excellence from which we can continue expanding globally.

Our commercial and technological potential is enormous and with this transaction we have the ideal financial and structural platform to progress and realise substantial growth and launch major new developments. We are delighted to now be working with both Santander UK and the Scottish National Investment Bank, alongside continued support from BGF, on funding a shared goal to innovate and scale.

BGF will realise the majority of its existing shareholding in M Squared, but will continue to retain a meaningful stake going forward having first invested in the business in 2012 as a long-term partner.

Patrick Graham Head of BGF for Central Scotland and Northern Ireland said:M Squared, one of BGFs first investments, received 6.4m across three rounds of funding over the course of the past eight years. The company has grown ten-fold since, crystalising a strong return for BGF. Our long-term view on investment and supporting growth via follow-on funding can provide a strong platform for businesses like M Squared to realise their full potential. Our flexible model also allows us to collaborate with other institutions and we are pleased to be partnering with both Santander and the Scottish National Investment Bank in its first investment. We are also delighted to continue as an equity shareholder in M Squared and look forward to supporting the management team and the business in the next phase of its growth journey.

M Squareds strategic stakeholders including Scottish Enterprise, the University of Strathclyde and the University of St Andrews were highly supportive of this new funding development which represents one of Scotlands most ambitious funding projects this year and will further help Glasgow gain recognition as a global location for quantum and many other advanced technologies.

Stuart Malcolm, M Squareds General Counsel, who led the transaction said:This financing is the culmination of over 18 months determined effort and commitment to ensure that M Squared is now supremely well placed for the next stage in our journey. A challenging and technical transaction such as this, involving a number of stakeholders and inputs, required a proactive and agile advisory team and our thanks go out to all the team members in their efforts and determination to complete this dynamic transaction.

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M Squared Receives Financing to Accelerate Growth and Advance Quantum Technologies - Novus Light Technologies Today

1. Quantum computer race intensifies as alternative technology gains steam  Nature.com
2. Quantum Computing Market is Expected to Reach $2.2 Billion by 2026  GlobeNewswire
3. Quantum Computing Market 2020 Size, Demand, Share, Opportunities And Forecasts To 2026 | Major Giants ID Quantique, Toshiba Research Europe Ltd, Google,Inc., Microsoft Corporation  re:Jerusalem
4. Quantum Computing in Aerospace and Defense Market Statistics Shows Revolutionary growth in Coming decade | Want to Know Biggest Opportunity for Growth?  TechnoWeekly
5. View Full Coverage on Google News

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Quantum computer race intensifies as alternative technology gains steam - Nature.com

DURHAM Construction is currently underway on a 10,000-square foot expansion of Dukes existing quantum computing center in the Chesterfield Building, a former cigarette factory in downtown Durham.

The new space will house what is envisioned to be a world-beating team of quantum computing scientists. The DQC, Duke Quantum Center, is expected to be online in March 2021 and is one of five new quantum research centers to be supported by a recently announced$115 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Error-corrected Universal Reconfigurable Ion-trap Quantum Archetype, or EURIQA, is the first generation of an evolving line of quantum computers that will be available to users in Dukes Scalable Quantum Computing Laboratory, or SQLab. The machine was built with funding from IARPA, the U.S. governments Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The SQLab intends to offer programmable, reconfigurable quantum computing capability to engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians or anyone who comes forward with a complex optimization problem theyd like to try on a 20-qubit system.

Unlike the quantum systems that are now accessible in the cloud, the renamed Duke Quantum Archetype, DQA, will be customized for each research problem and users will have open access to its gutsa more academic approach to solving quantum riddles.

(C) Duke University

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Construction begins for Duke University's new quantum computing center - WRAL Tech Wire

COVID-19 has been a gut punch. Our response? Largely frantic, like deer caught in the headlights. Researchers are racing to find a vaccine, as we pause in lockdown mode. But the process of drug discovery is lengthy and expensive, just like the process of discovering and designing any material crucial to fighting existential problems.

But these problems are piling up: pandemics, climate change, antibiotic resistance, food security, cyber-challenges, shared-economic prosperity and so on. We urgently need to change our traditional approach to science.

We have a rare and narrowing window of change to build a better world after the pandemic.

The World Economic Forum's inaugural Pioneers of Change meeting will bring together leaders of emerging businesses, social entrepreneurs and other innovators to discuss how to spark and scale up meaningful change.

To follow the Summit as an individual, you can become a digital subscriber here. As a company, you can participate in the summit by becoming a member of our New Champions Community.

For centuries, weve done science in a linear way: an issue prompts a hypothesis, followed by a model and a test. If the result is a failure, the process starts again, and iterations may take years. And its got us far; its how weve developed better plastics, more efficient solar panels and lighter-but-stronger composites for modern aircraft.

But the world is changing rapidly; in order to tackle todays global challenges with the speed and effectiveness they demand, we need a new way to do science.

Science is an inherently creative process; scientists are constantly expanding their imagination to explore new designs of drugs and chemicals. But the human brain has its limits. After all, there are more possible designs of a molecule than there are atoms in the universe. No human can sift through all of them to come up with the best option.

The good news is we do have the ingredients to give science or our brains limits a boost: cutting-edge computing technology and talent. The real challenge is to apply them strategically, in both public and private sectors.

Image: IBM Research

Helping science determine a new path

The world is witnessing a revolution in computing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is enhancing traditional computing and could soon boost the emerging quantum ones: the very machines that could allow us to solve some of the worlds greatest problems. They can be accessed from anywhere on the planet through a hybrid cloud.

More and more companies and labs are now using AI, whose deep neural networks are able to extract scientific knowledge at scale from all the literature published on a specific topic.

Say a scientist needs to create a new catalyst for better artificial fertilizers. Instead of blindly trying to determine the catalysts chemical structure, AI would first sift through a multitude of patents, academic papers and other publications to see what had already been done on this topic.

Next, AI would automatically generate hypotheses based on the data it found, to expand the search for new molecular designs. Based on the most promising hypothesis, high-performance computers and quantum computers would simulate a new molecule.

Digital work done, the simulation would be confirmed or refuted during increasingly autonomous lab tests. Finally, AI would assess the result, identify anomalies and extract new knowledge. New questions would surface and the loop would continue.

To shift the paradigm of scientific discovery, we need to enable AI, hybrid cloud, and eventually quantum computing to converge. We also need a second ingredient new types of scientific collaborations or communities of discovery to be added to the mix.

What would we gain? An accelerated scientific method, fit for catalysing major transformations in science, and with unprecedented speed and automation. We could design new materials faster than ever before, impacting all aspects of our lives from healthcare to manufacturing, to agriculture and beyond.

For the first time, closing the loop in scientific discovery seems a very real and imminent possibility. When it does happen, we will have achieved the dream of scientific advancement being a self-propelled and never-ending process.

The need for new communities of discovery

But its not just technology that that will drive this new level of discovery; people will too. The world is teeming with the talent and creativity of millions of scientists spread across academia and industry, who shouldnt be tackling the numerous global crises they face independently. Indeed, no single company or university lab can overcome a pandemic on its own.

National and international private-public collaborations share knowledge, data and the latest technology, speeding up the process of discovery. Our need for more of them has never been greater.

They also need to be diverse. In science, problems can be big and complex, or small and more focused. For instance, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) requires a deeply coordinated community with scientists from 42 countries to run some two-million experiments every day across about 170 labs and thats just for the science coming from Large Hadron Collider.

And yet, science is becoming more open, with researchers from private and public sectors increasingly sharing papers, experiments, data, results and resources.

One successful example of such a smaller, new community of discovery is the COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium. A collaboration of 87 partners from academia, industry and national labs, it has been granting researchers from around the world who are fighting the current pandemic access to supercomputers.

Industry partners are often rivals, but not in the current coronavirus vaccine endeavour. Every member of the Consortium is united by a common goal: to accelerate our search for a new treatment or vaccine against COVID-19. The benefits of collaboration are greater speed and accuracy; a freer exchange of ideas and data; and full access to cutting-edge technology. In sum, it supercharges innovation and hopefully means the pandemic will be halted faster than otherwise.

But material design isnt the limit.

With continuing evolution as an AI-accelerated approach that builds on data, advanced compute in hybrid cloud, progress in quantum computing and growing communities of discovery, the upgraded, self-propelled continuous scientific method should greatly impact multiple aspects of our lives. And with all the global crises of today and tomorrow, the need for it has never been greater.

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Scientific discovery must be redefined. Quantum and AI can help - World Economic Forum

In recent research sponsored by Ambature, Inc., a clean energy intellectual property licensing company, researchers from Cornell University, Peter Grnberg Institute, JARA-Fundamentals of Future Information Technology, Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science, and Leibniz-Institut fr Kristallzchtung achieved world-class interface smoothness with a-axis YBa2Cu3O7-x/PrBa2Cu3O7-x/YBa2Cu3O7-x trilayers grown on (100) LaAlO3 substrates.

This development work was commissioned to validate the a-axis growth of superconductive materials using a deposition method called Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE). Ambature has more than 3600 individual patent claims that have issued in the 10 largest economies in the world. Many of these claims are based on the a-axis (as opposed to the c-axis) growth of superconductive materials. This research has demonstrated how to use MBE to control the growth of high-quality a-axis crystal wafers. The a-axis architecture takes advantage of two properties in quantum mechanics: a longer coherence length and improved electrical current flow that moves in both the vertical and horizontal directions (in contrast to c-axis flow, which is only horizontal and problematic for fabrication processes).

Silicon wafers are commonly used as substrates for semiconductors. Ambature uses similar substrates to grow a-axis thin films, which are the base epitaxy for a-axis devices. This work describes the process for the commercialization of Ambatures a-axis thin films and the superconductive electronic devices described in its patent portfolio. It proves that MBE, with its atomic-level accuracy, is a superior method of epitaxy deposition.

In addition to its importance tomaterials science, the proposed technology can also boost the development of artificial intelligence (AI). It can be used to fabricate superconductive devices called Josephson junctions (JJs). JJs are the workhorses of high-performance superconductive electronics that can function as detectors, sensors, switches, and processors. They are also the most common method used to generate Qubits for quantum computing (QC). These superconductive devices can gather the data inputs needed for AI algorithms and process the data extremely quickly for faster AI decision-making. For example, a signal detector/sensor can provide extremely fast reaction times for an autonomous vehicle or an edge sensor in smart city communications. Because JJs are the basis for QC, Ambatures technology enables quantum AI sensing and communications with encryption of sensitive data (such as patient and military data) in AI applications.

According toAmbature, the proposed technology can be applied to many interesting fields of artificial intelligence as listed below:

Many of todays superconductive electronic applications are impractical to implement due to cooling requirements. Therefore, many new HPC and QC applications for AI will become feasible with higher-temperature superconductive electronics. Every incremental increase in temperature or drop in electrical resistance gives rise to new AI possibilities in sensing, detecting and computing, as superconductors are the best sensors/detectors in the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The proposed a-axis technology will play an important role in enhancing automotive sensors, data centers, networking and telecommunications that are crucial to IoT networks.

The paper a-axis YBa2Cu3O7-x/PrBa2Cu3O7-x/YBa2Cu3O7-x trilayers with subnanometer rms roughness is on arXiv.

About Ambature

Ambature, Inc. is a clean energy intellectual property (IP) licensing company with over 200 patents with more than 3600 unique claims in the area of a-axis superconducting technology. This company has developed a synthetic material that reduces electrical resistance in products like integrated circuits, sensors, cell phone base stations, and quantum computers. The NASA Jet Propulsion Lab independently tested Ambatures materials and stated in their Annual Report that Ambature has fabricated and tested a material that arguably holds promises for room temperature superconductivity. Ambatures patents have already been cited as prior art in 190 third-party patent applications filed by companies such as IBM, Qualcomm, MIT, GE, Samsung, Global Foundries, Taiwan Semiconductor, the US Navy, Broadcom, Shell Oil, Hitachi, Chinese electrical grid companies and BOE in China.

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This report offers a look at how China has leveraged artificial intelligence technologies in the battle against COVID-19. It is also available onAmazon Kindle.Along with this report, we also introduced adatabasecovering additional 1428 artificial intelligence solutions from 12 pandemic scenarios.

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A-axis Superconductive Wafers for Enhanced Sensors and High-Performance Computing - Synced