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A light survey aircraft flying a straight transect over empty high desert terrain at golden hour

Quantum sensing

Boulder · New Mexico · United Kingdom

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

Behind the headline A survey aircraft flying a transect with nothing on the ground to fix a position against; a night convoy on a road that is not on any map; a data hall whose racks have to agree with each other about the time. Three environments these sensors are built for. Generated with gpt-image-2 on 2026-08-27, not photographed. It shows the kind of place this work happens; it is not Mesa Quantum hardware, a Mesa Quantum site or Mesa Quantum staff. Mesa Quantum’s own two photographs are further down this page, captioned as plates.

Capabilities

What our sensors make possible

Each capability lists example applications — the specific systems it enables.

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 GPS is denied, degraded or spoofed.

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.

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

Mag ISR & NDT

Magnetic sensing that reads what cameras cannot — underground, inside metal, through structure.

Mag NDT →

All six capabilities

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

Evidence

What we make, under test

Mass adoption of quantum sensors required tackling manufacturing and characterization challenges nobody had solved. We solved them for ourselves, because there was no supplier to buy them from.

The two photographs below are Mesa Quantum’s own, of Mesa Quantum hardware. They are the only photographs on this site that are.

Probe needles contacting a laser die under a microscope, with the emitted spot visible on the wafer surface
Plate 01 · Die under probeWafer-level probing on our automated test setup. The bright spot is the laser output, measured on the die before it is packaged.
A laser wafer viewed through a microscope, showing hundreds of individual dies in a regular array
Plate 02 · WaferHundreds of dies on one wafer. Volume is what turns a laboratory result into a component somebody else can build with.

How we characterize and qualify them

Institutions

Built alongside the institutions that define the field

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

Direction

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

Get in touch