Grant: Idea to Innovation

Building on a decade of nanoscale heat transfer and nanomechanical resonator (NMR) research, our lab can now detect mid to far infrared (IR) radiation with performances significantly exceeding all commercial room-temperature sensing technologies. Our approach harnesses the extreme temperature sensitivity of specially tailored silicon nitride nano membrane resonators, which are immune to the electrical noise (i.e., Johnson-Nyquist) that limits current technologies (i.e., pyroelectric, thermistor and bolometric detectors). Armed with this NMR-based IR sensing technology, our medium-term objective is to enter and disrupt the single-point, mid- to far-IR sensing market by launching a spin-off company led by Prof. St-Gelais and two soon-to-graduate PhD candidates. This spinoff will manufacture, entirely in Ottawa, high-end single point detectors that will outperform current commercial offerings. Industry-leading companies in the fields of spectroscopy and infrared sensing are interested in strategic partnerships with our future start-up. Before entering such partnership, non-diluting funding form the NSERC I2I program will be critical for derisking our technology, thus strengthening our startup position before entering more concrete negotiations with seed investors. As such, our general objective and the associated tasks for this project is to refine our technology to move from our proven research lab system (currently at TRL 4-5) to a packaged alpha prototype ready for field validation (TRL 6-7).