In my previous article, I highlighted some of the quantum and green-energy companies that won Business Innovation Awards from the Institute of Physics in 2024. But imaging and medical-physics firms did well too. Having sat on the judging panel for the awards, I saw some fantastic entries – and picking winners wasn’t easy. Let me start, though, with Geoptic, which is one of an elite group of firms to win a second IOP business award, adding a Business Innovation Award to its start-up prize in 2020.

Geoptic is a spin-out from three collaborating groups of physicists at the universities of Durham, Sheffield and St Mary’s Twickenham. The company uses cosmic-ray muon radiography and tomography to study large engineering structures. In particular, it was honoured by the IOP for using the technique to ensure the safety of tunnels on the UK’s railway network.

Many of the railway tunnels in the UK date back to the mid-19th century. To speed up construction, temporary shafts were bored vertically down below the ground, allowing workers to dig at multiple points along the route of the tunnel. When the tunnel was complete, the shafts would be sealed, but their precise number and location is often unclear.

The shafts are a major hazard to the tunnel’s integrity, which is not great for Network Rail – the state-owned body that’s responsible for the UK’s rail infrastructure. Geoptic has, however, been working with Network Rail to provide its engineers with a clear structural view of the dangers that lurk along its route. In my view, it’s a really innovating imaging company, solving challenging real-world problems.

Another winner is Silveray, which was spun off from the University of Surrey. It’s picked up an IOP Business Start-up Award for creating flexible, “colour” X-ray detectors based on proprietary semiconductor materials. Traditional X-ray images are black and white, but what Silveray has done is to develop a nano-particle semiconductor ink that can be coated on to any surface and work at multiple wavelengths.

The X-ray detectors, which are flexible, can simply be wrapped around pipes and other structures that need to be imaged. Traditionally, this has been done using analogue X-ray film that has to be developed in an off-site dark room. That’s costly and time-consuming – especially if images failed to be recorded. Silveray’s detectors instead provide digital X-ray images in real time, making it an exciting and innovative technology that could transform the $5bn X-ray detector market.

Phlux Technology, meanwhile, has won an IOP Business Start-up Award for developing patented semiconductor technology for infrared light sensors that are 12 times more sensitive than the best existing devices, making them ideal for fast, accurate 3D imaging. Set up by researchers at the University of Sheffield, Phlux’s devices have many potential applications especially in light detection and ranging (LIDAR), laser range finders, optical-fibre test instruments and optical and quantum communications networks.

In LIDAR, Phlux’s can have 12 times greater image resolution for a given transmitter power. Its sensors could also make vehicles much safer by enabling higher-resolution images to be created over longer distances, making safety systems more effective. The first volume market for the company is likely to be in communications and where a >10 dB increase in detector sensitivity is going to be well received by the market.

Given the number of markets that will benefit from an “over an order of magnitude” improvement, Phlux is one to watch for a future Business Innovation Award too.

Medical marvel

Let me finish by mentioning Crainio, a medical technology spin-off company from City, University of London, which has won the 2024 Lee Lucas award. This award honours promising start-up firms in the medical and healthcare sector thanks to a generous donation by Mike and Ann Lee (née Lucas). These companies need all the support, time and money they can get given the many challenging regulatory requirements in the medical sector.

Crainio’s technology allows healthcare workers to measure intracranial pressure (ICP), a vital indicator of brain health after a head injury. Currently, the only way to measure ICP directly is for a neurosurgeon to drill a hole in a patient’s skull and place an expensive probe in the brain. It’s a highly invasive procedure that can’t easily be carried out in the “golden hours” immediately after an accident, requiring access to scarce and expensive neurosurgery resources. The procedure is also medically risky, leading to potential infection, bleeding and other complications.

Crainio’s technology eliminates these risks, enabling direct measurement of ICP through a simple non-invasive probe applied to the forehead. The technology – using infrared photoplethysmography (PPG) combined with machine learning – is based on years of research and development work conducted by Panicos Kyriacou and his team of biomedical engineers at City.

Good levels of accuracy have been demonstrated in clinical studies conducted at the Royal London Hospital. It certainly seems a much better plan than drilling a hole in your head as I am sure you can agree – making Crainio a worthy winner, with its non-invasive technology it should have a positive impact on patients globally. I hope the regulatory hurdles can be quickly cleared so the company can start helping patients as soon as possible.

As I have mentioned before, all physics-based firms require time and energy to develop products and become globally significant. There’s also the perennial difficulty of explaining a product idea, which is often quite specialized, to potential investors who have little or no science background. An IOP start-up award can therefore show that your technology has won approval from judges with solid physics and business experience.

I hope, therefore, that your company, if you have one, will be inspired to apply. Also remember that the IOP offers three other awards (Katharine Burr Blodgett, Denis Gabor and Clifford Paterson) for individuals or teams who have been involved in innovative physics with a commercial angle. Good luck – and remember, you have to be in it to win it. Award entries for 2025 will be open in February 2025.

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I have mentioned many times in this column the value of the business awards given by the Institute of Physics (IOP), which can be a real “stamp of approval” for firms developing new technology. Having helped to select the 2024 winners, it was great to see eight companies winning a main IOP Business Innovation Award this time round, bringing the total number of firms honoured over the last 13 years to 86. Some have won awards on more than one occasion, with Fetu being one of the latest to join this elite group.

Set up by Jonathan Fenton in 2016, FeTu originally won an IOP Business Start-up Award in 2020 for its innovative Fenton Turbine. According to Fenton, who is chief executive, it is the closest we have ever got to the ideal, closed-cycle reversible heat engine first imagined by thermodynamics pioneer Nicolas Carnot in 1824. The turbine, the firm claims, could replace compressors, air conditioners, fridges, vacuum pumps and heat pumps with efficiency savings across the board.

Back in 2020, it might have sounded like a “too-good-to-be-true” technology, but Fenton has sensibly set out to prove that’s not the case, with some remarkable results. The turbine is complex to describe but the first version promised to cut the energy cost of compressing gases like air by 25%. They claim has already been proven in independent tests carried out by researchers at the University of Bath.

One challenge of any technology with many different applications is picking which to focus on first

One challenge of any technology with many different applications is picking which to focus on first. Having decided to focus on a couple of unique selling factors in large markets, FeTu has now won a 2024 Business Innovation Award for developing a revolutionary heat engine that can generate electrical power from waste heat and geothermal sources as low as 40 °C. It has a huge market potential as it is currently not possible to do this economically.

Innovative ideas

Another winner of an IOP Business Innovation Award is Oxford Ionics,  a quantum-computing firm set up in 2019 by Chris Balance and Tom Harty after doing PhDs at the University of Oxford. Their firm’s qubits are based on trapped ions, which traditionally have been controlled with lasers. It’s an approach that works well for small processors, but becomes untenable and error-prone as the size of the processor scales, and the number of qubits increases.

Instead of lasers, Oxford Ionics’ trapped-ion processors use a proprietary, patented electronic system to control the qubits. It was for this system that the company was recognized by the IOP, along with its ability to scale the architecture so that the chips can be made in large quantities on standard semiconductor production lines. That’s essential if we are to build practical quantum computers.

While it’s still early days in the commercialisation of quantum computing, Oxford Ionics is an exciting company to watch. It has already won contracts to supply the UK’s National Quantum Computing Centre at Harwell and has bagged a large contract with its partner Infineon Technologies AG in Munich to build a state-of-the-art portable quantum computer for Germany’s cybersecurity innovation agency. The two firms are one of three independent contractors selected by the agency, which is investing a total of €35m in the project.

I should also mention Dublin-based Equal1, which won the IOP’s £10,000 quantum Business Innovation and Growth (qBIG) Prize in 2024. Equal1 is developing rack-mountable quantum computers powered by a system that integrates quantum and classical components onto a single silicon chip using commercial fabrication processes. The company, which aims to develop compact quantum computers, also won 10 months of mentoring from the award’s sponsors Quantum Exponential.

Meanwhile, Covesion – a photonics and quantum components supplier founded in 2009 – has won an IOP Business Innovation Award for its magnesium-doped, periodically poled, lithium niobate (MgO:PPLN) crystals and waveguides. They allow light to be easily converted from one frequency to another, providing access to wavelengths that are not available from commercial laser sources.

With a manufacturing base in Southampton, Covesion works with customers and industry partners to help them design and make high quality MgO:PPLN products used in a wide range of applications. They include quantum computing, communication, sensing and timing; frequency doubling of femtosecond lasers; mid-infrared generation; atom cooling; terahertz generation and biomedical imaging. The shear breadth and global nature of the customer base is impressive.

Sounds promising

Among the companies to win an IOP Business Start-up Award is Metasonixx, based in Brighton. Spun off from the universities of Bristol and Sussex in 2019, the firm makes mass-produced acoustic metamaterial panels, which can dramatically attenuate sound (10 dB in its Sonoblind) and yet still allow air to flow freely (3 dB or 50% attenuation). That might seem counter-intuitive, but that’s where the innovation comes in and the panels can help with noise management and ventilation, allowing industrial ventilators and heat pumps to be more widely used.

The company really got going in 2020, when it got a grant from UK Research and Innovation to see if its metamaterials could cut noise in hospitals to help patients recovering from COVID-19 and improve the well-being of staff. After Metasonixx won the Armourers and Brasiers Venture Prize in 2021 for their successes on COVID wards, the firm decided to mass-produce panels that could perform as well as traditional noise-reduction solutions but are modular and greener, with one-third of the mass and occupying one-twelfth of the space.

From a physics point of view, panels that can let air and light through in this way are interferential filters, but working over four doublings of frequency (or octaves). With manufacturing and first sales in 2023, their desk separators are now being tested in noisy offices worldwide. Metasonixx believes its products, which allow air to flow through them, could help to boost the use of industrial ventilators and heat pumps, thereby helping in the quest to meet net-zero targets.

Winning awards for Metasonixx is not a new experience, having also picked up a “Seal of Excellence Award” from the European Commission in 2023 and honoured at Bristol’s Tech-Xpo in 2024. Its new IOP award will sit very nicely in this innovative company’s trophy cabinet.

• In his next article, James McKenzie will look at the rest of the 2024 IOP Business Award winners in imaging and medical technology.

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