Conner Galloway, Founder, CEO, and Chief Science Officer, Xcimer

and

Alexander Valys, Co-founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer, Xcimer

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Conner Galloway and Alex Valys have led a tightly-coupled path from their time as roommates at MIT, to working at the same national laboratory, and eventually co-founding Xcimer laser. At each step, they have worked on, researched, and developed conviction about which particular component approaches have the least scientific risk to achieving nuclear fusion.  

Xcimer specializes in laser-driven nuclear fusion. The company is making the world’s most powerful gas lasers. When focused on fuel pellets, the lasers implode these pellets in a manner ignites the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium, releasing energy. Several factors make Xcimer confident of the wisdom of its approach. First, the ultimate extremely powerful two laser beams that strike the pellet are combined from many easier-to-manufacture lasers, and the combined power is magnified by compressing the pulse 1000-fold. Both the combining and compession use well-understood approaches. Furthermore, the amount of power needed to create a commercially viable outcomes have in many aspects been validate by US government tests; this is different from any other approach to fusion. Lastly, the configurations allowed by requiring only two narrow laser beams to ignite the pellet enable liquid containtment of the resulting fusion reactions. This liquid absorbs both the usefuly energy and the damage from these reactions, and its constant recycling enables long-lived facility operation with major overhauls. 

Looking forward, Conner and Alex highlight that Xcimer's immediate focus is on optimizing their laser technology for better energy yield, and validating individual components of the sytem. They target “electrons on the grid” in the early 2030s. In addition, the company’s lasers have applications beyond energy that the company is pursuing in parallel.