Written into Los Alamos National Laboratory’s agenda of operation is a promise to transfer “new and emerging technologies” to private industry as well as “technologies to stimulate new business startups, attract entrepreneurs, create alternative job opportunities, and attract businesses and capital to the region.”
Laboratory Staff Director Frances Chadwick explains that the concept of being a “force for good” within northern New Mexico and beyond is simply part of the Lab’s mission. “Our employees are our most treasured asset,” she says, “so, selfishly, we want the region we operate in, and especially New Mexico, to be well placed to supply the workforce we need at the Lab. But when we talk about being a force for good, this also means raising the entire economic wellbeing of the state and the region we work in.”
Here are a few of the ways the Laboratory works with private industry:
- The Los Alamos Licensing Program licenses Lab-developed technologies for commercial, research, and U.S. government use so that these institutions can bring Laboratory technologies to the public, often creating jobs in the process.
- The Lab-Embedded Entrepreneur Program grants innovators in clean energy a two-year fellowship at a national laboratory to build a green technology into a business.
- Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) allow Los Alamos scientists and businesses to work alongside each other to develop a technology. Sometimes, the Lab has expertise in a field that companies would like to lean on. Or, perhaps, Los Alamos has the facilities and the federal government licenses needed to work with certain materials.
- The Technology Readiness Gross Receipts (TRGR) Initiative provides New Mexico businesses the opportunity to work directly with scientists and engineers at Los Alamos to advance technologies licensed from or developed through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements with Los Alamos. The goal of this partnership with the state of New Mexico is to move technologies past the invention stage to the market-ready stage.
- The New Mexico Small Business Assistance Program helps for-profit small businesses in New Mexico access cutting-edge technologies, solve technical issues, and gain knowledge from technical experts at Los Alamos. The assistance is provided at no cost.
- The Community Technical Assistance program makes Los Alamos scientists and engineers available to provide short-term, limited assistance to entities facing technical hurdles that overlap with Laboratory capabilities as long as the assistance does not duplicate services or compete with the private sector. This help is provided at no cost to the organization seeking assistance, and the scope of work provided varies based on individual project needs.
Here are five—of many—companies that have blossomed thanks to these tech transfer relationships:
Mercury Bio
Los Alamos is helping Santa Fe, New Mexico–based Mercury Bio through a TRGR that was set up in July 2023. “What we’re doing is trying to enable a technology that does not exist,” says Mercury Bio CEO Bruce McCormick, explaining the company’s goal of developing a novel drug delivery method that could target specific cells within the body. “Roughly 85 percent of diseases are untreatable, and that’s simply because we don’t have a way to access the cells causing the disease.”
One focus of the TRGR has been using Laboratory supercomputers and artificial intelligence to design and model synthetic proteins that do not exist in nature. These novel proteins might be the key to reaching and destroying cancer cells. “A company like Mercury Bio, and most companies for that matter, won’t typically have access to equipment like supercomputers,” says Sandrasegaram Gnanakaran of the Lab’s Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group, who is also the principal investigator on the TRGR partnership. “This is the first case I’m aware of where, at the Lab, we are using artificial intelligence to design completely new proteins.”
Kairos Power
Albuquerque-based Kairos Power is developing a fluoride salt–cooled, high-temperature nuclear reactor that promises to be safer and more cost efficient than conventional reactors. Such a reactor would deliver clean energy that competes with the cost of natural gas. Kairos, however, needs a fuel source for the reactor. Rather than traditional fuel rods, the Kairos reactor will use tri-structural isotropic particle fuel. These so-called “TRISO pebbles” contain uranium, a radioactive element that can only be handled in very specific conditions and amounts, which is why the pebbles will be produced at the Lab’s Low-Enriched Fuel Fabrication Facility, set to begin operation in 2025.
“This is where Los Alamos is critical to our mission—this collaboration allows us to leverage their infrastructure,” says Micah Hacket, Kairos’ senior director of fuels and materials. “The team at Los Alamos has been fantastic to work with; we’ve come to think of them as part of our own team, frankly, because we’re aligned in the same goal.”
Pajarito Powder
Founded in 2012, Pajarito Powder produces catalysts for hydrogen fuel cells—small devices that convert chemical energy into enough electricity to power vehicles. In a hydrogen fuel cell, a catalyst is necessary to split electrons and protons from hydrogen molecules and combine them with oxygen molecules to form water and heat. Traditionally, fuel cell catalysts have consisted of expensive noble metals such as platinum deposited on carbon. Improving these catalysts could bring down fuel cells’ cost and help spur adoption of the technology.
Pajarito Powder’s catalyst is made through a “bottom-up synthesis” process that allows more control over how and where the carbon and platinum bond. Through TRGR and CRADA programs, the company has worked with the Lab to fine-tune its product. “We’ve run accelerated stress tests that have characterized the efficiency and durability of the catalyst,” says Siddharth Komini Babu of the Lab’s Materials Synthesis and Integrated Devices group. “Companies want to know that these fuel cells work well and that they will last a long time. So, we’ve developed ways to reproduce driving a hydrogen car for 8,000, even 30,000 hours without ever leaving the Lab.”
xLight
In 2024, xLight was granted a CRADA to work with Los Alamos on the design of a small accelerator—about the size of two buses. The accelerator’s high-energy beam would be used to imprint patterns on semiconductor chips. “Los Alamos is really a perfect place because they’ve worked with accelerators nearly as long as the Lab has existed,” says Bruce Dunham, vice president of accelerator systems at xLight.
If successful, this partnership could bring about the first automated accelerator program in the world and the first new development in semiconductor technology in decades. Given the wide usage of semiconductor chips and issues in the semiconductor supply chain, “we’re very interested in their technology because of what it would mean for the nation,” says Steve Russell, the Lab’s deputy division leader for the Accelerator Operations and Technology group. He notes that xLight has also been accepted by the Lab’s TRGR program. “We want to do anything we can to help them, and we’re cheering them on.”
UbiQD
Quantum dots are nanocrystals that can convert light into energy and, when given electrical charge, also emit light. In 2014, Los Alamos postdoctoral researcher Hunter McDaniel left the Lab to found UbiQD (pronounced “ubiquity”) with the idea of licensing the Lab’s nanocrystal technology. McDaniel saw promise in the solar energy realm, where the small size of quantum dots meant they could be manufactured into a thin film, turning any window or piece of glass into a source of solar power generation.
“The sun generates an enormous amount of energy,” McDaniel explains, adding that an area the size of Santa Fe County, near Los Alamos, receives sufficient energy from the sun to power the entire planet’s electrical demand. “Quantum dots can be added to solar panels to increase their efficiency or included in windows to harvest the light’s energy without blocking the view.”
Recently, UbiQD has applied its quantum dot technology to greenhouses. “We can manipulate the size of the quantum dots in a way that captures specific wavelengths of light,” McDaniel says, “so we developed a line of greenhouse films that shift the light spectrum and enhance photosynthesis.”
For these applications, among others, UbiQD’s quantum dot technology has received widespread praise, including grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the state of New Mexico Advanced Energy Award. ★