ACTORS OF VACUUM

Actors

Who runs ultra-high vacuum, and why it is hard.

  1. Industrial Applied Materials The Bay Area vacuum-process elephant: every chamber is a vacuum + plasma problem, and the "integrated materials" approach chains deposition and etch under one vacuum. The opposite of the qubit startups — deep, mature vacuum culture at scale, and the most literal reading of a "vacuum/process company" pivot. View →
  2. Public / Research Atom Computing The vacuum chamber IS the core of the system; scaling toward ~100k atoms per chamber demands growing vacuum and cleanliness mastery. Many PhDs, few dedicated vacuum engineers, and Berkeley is next door. View →
  3. Industrial CPI / Eimac (heritage) The historical lineage of Bay Area industrial vacuum. Same technology family as the Thales tubes. Useful as context anchor. View →
  4. Industrial eBeam, Inc. Core tube/source territory. A small shop where sharp external expertise carries high unit value. View →
  5. Industrial HeatWave Labs Closest fit to an industrial electron-tube background: X-ray sources, electron tubes, UHV, cathode thermomechanics and beam optics. A narrow field with few competitors worldwide. View →
  6. Industrial Lam Research Plasma + vacuum at industrial scale, in the East Bay next to Pacific Fusion. Etch and deposition are vacuum-native; nearly every advanced chip passes through a Lam process — same Fremont commute, very different culture from a national lab. View →
  7. Accelerators Lawrence Berkeley Lab / ALS Synchrotron terrain, the heart of beamline vacuum, and a direct neighbor. View →
  8. Accelerators Lawrence Livermore Lab / NIF Big-science vacuum next door; laser-matter-plasma interaction. Pairs naturally with the private-fusion entry up the East Bay (Pacific Fusion). View →
  9. Public / Research Pacific Fusion Private fusion 30 minutes up the East Bay, built on pulsed power + vacuum + HV — the exact industrial-meets-frontier seam. The CTO is the former LLNL/NNSA Director of Inertial Confinement Fusion. ~140 people, no entrenched vacuum tradition. View →
  10. Public / Research PsiQuantum Assembles its systems in a former semiconductor fab in Milpitas (now "PsiFactory"), next to SLAC. Young, with no lab vacuum tradition. The Linde partnership will build the largest cryogenic plant ever planned for a quantum computer — central challenges are materials, cryogenics, vacuum integration. Ideal ground for UHV + materials + cryo expertise. View →
  11. Public / Research Rigetti Computing Cryo + vacuum + in-house fabrication coupling. Vacuum and cryo integration at very low temperature is classic synchrotron territory. View →
  12. Accelerators SLAC / LCLS-II A reference point for the depth of the terrain: pulsed HV, UHV/XHV, cryo, copper outgassing. The benchmark, not a prospect. View →