Commercializing your Research

Sometimes I stay awake in the night thinking – how soon will the results of my work become useful for humanity? Well, better get up and do something about it! And so a few months ago we have started a new scientific equipment company, based on research breakthroughs in the field of topological quantum matter.

The new company is called ‘Pittsburgh Instruments’ to honor the long-standing tradition of naming something after a city. We currently have three employees, and a distinguished board of advisers though some of the founders of our technology are sadly, no longer with us. The website for the company, along with the Kickstarter page are going online as I write this.

We actually already have a prototype of our first instrument. Please welcome:

Chernnumberometer 1.0 from Pittsburgh Instruments, going on sale December 31 2016

It is a sleekly designed high tech gadget which can measure a Chern number of anything that fits inside! Just open the door, put your item of choice in.Select Integration Time. Press start. The machine will rotate the object to examine it. Then the digital display will show you the answer. For example, if you put a doughnut inside it will read 0, if you put an orange it will read 1. You can read pretty high numbers if you put in something like this. Give it a try! You can also easily switch a topological invariant that you want to measure from Chern number to a Z2 or a determinant of a scattering matrix for 1D systems. Nevermind that labels say ‘Chicken’ or ‘Popcorn’ – this is an inside joke from the company, we like to be cool like Android developers. For example ‘Defrost’ refers to a very advanced renormalization group-based algorithm.

Our target population are theoretical physicists who have an incessant desire to know things about physical systems that cannot be measured. This compact and elegant Chernnumberometer fits on an office desk, in the coffee area or even at your house! Priced at just $3,999 it also fits on almost any grant. Make sure to mention it in your next proposal!

(Some of the issues we are still working out are dynamic cooling, as certain samples we reported to get very hot. The final release might actually feature a helium compressor bumping the price to $53,999. Also, don’t try to measure Chern numbers of your pets or eggs)