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Quantum sensing

A new generation of quantum sensors is changing how machines perceive the world.

From mobile devices to aircraft, Mesa Quantum builds the chip-scale sensors that let systems know where they are, what time it is, and what is around them — even when GPS is gone.

Explore our capabilities What we’re building

The images in this hero are three environments these sensors are built for: a survey aircraft flying a transect with no satellite fix, a ground convoy navigating at dusk without landmarks, and a data hall that has to hold time through an outage. The sampling lattice over them stays registered while the ground underneath changes — which is what a sensor grid does. All three are generated images of application domains. None of them shows Mesa Quantum hardware, sites or people.

Mesa is not just proving quantum sensors work. Mesa is making them buildable, deployable, and necessary.

Capabilities

What our sensors make possible

Each capability lists example applications — the specific systems it enables. Capabilities lead here; applications live inside them rather than in the navigation. The drawing on each card is of the measurement that capability makes, not an icon standing in for it.

A navigation track holding its course through a GPS-denied band while the satellite-derived estimate drifts away from it.

Alt PNT

Positioning, navigation and timing that holds when the satellite signal is denied, degraded or spoofed.

Read the capability Four distributed clocks whose rising edges all land on one shared reference edge, holding the network in step.

Time synchronization

Chip-scale timing accurate enough to hold networks and grids in step without a satellite overhead.

Read the capability A timing-error trace after the satellite lock is lost: the held clock stays inside tolerance while an unheld oscillator crosses it.

GPS holdover

Timing that stays inside tolerance through an extended outage, long after the lock is gone.

Read the capability A magnetometer traverse across a survey line, with the magnetic contours closing into a bullseye over a buried anomaly.

Mag ISR

Passive magnetic sensing that finds what gives nothing away to a camera or a radar.

Read the capability A magnetic sensor scanning a component wall, with flux leaking out around a subsurface flaw and the trace peaking directly above it.

Mag NDT

Magnetic non-destructive testing that reads through a component wall instead of around it.

Read the capability An inertial sensor riding a length of track, with the deviation trace rising where the rail geometry bows out of alignment.

Rail monitoring

Inertial and gyroscopic sensing applied to track geometry, measured while the vehicle runs.

Read the capability

In the field

Where these sensors have to work

Not a laboratory. The places a quantum sensor earns its keep are the ones where the signal everybody else depends on is missing, jammed, or simply never arrives — open ground with no landmarks, a transmission network that has to stay in step, steel that cannot be opened to be inspected.

Featureless desert terrain seen from a high vantage at dusk, with no roads or landmarks in view.
Generated image, not a photograph of Mesa Quantum. The Alt PNT problem stated as a picture: terrain with nothing in it to navigate by.
High-voltage transmission towers marching across open country at dusk, compressed by a long lens.
Generated image, not a photograph of Mesa Quantum. Time synchronization: a distributed network whose parts have to agree on when, not just on what.
A section of large-diameter steel pipeline crossing open terrain, weld seams visible along its length.
Generated image, not a photograph of Mesa Quantum. Mag NDT: steel that has to be inspected without being opened, from the outside, while it stays in service.

Core technology

One core technology under all six

The vapor cell, the photonic integration and the qualification work are common to every capability above. What changes between them is the quantity being measured.

Mass adoption of quantum sensors was never blocked on the physics. It was blocked on making the part repeatably, characterizing it precisely enough to trust, and qualifying it at volume. Those are manufacturing problems, and they are the ones we solved for ourselves because there was nobody to buy them from.

See the products
Extreme macro of a polished semiconductor wafer surface at a shallow angle, showing a repeating grid of die.
Generated image, not a photograph of Mesa Quantum. An illustration of what a patterned wafer surface looks like close up. Mesa Quantum’s own wafer photographs are on the Products and VCSEL pages, and they are marked as such.

Collaboration

Built alongside the institutions that define the field

National metrology institutes, university groups and manufacturing partners, on both sides of the Atlantic.

  • NPL
  • University of Cambridge
  • Sandia / CINT
  • CHTM · UNM
  • CU Boulder
  • NIST
  • Elevate Quantum
  • Roadrunner Quantum Lab

Turning quantum sensing from frontier science into the infrastructure backbone of modern civilization.

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