Quasar Leads Development of Advanced Sensing Technologies for Government

In the 11 years since Andrew Hibbs started QUASAR, the privately held company has flourished by developing a smorgasbord of sophisticated sensing technologies under various government research and development contracts.

I met Hibbs more than a decade ago, during the formative years of San Diego’s Quantum Magnetics, where he led development of advanced electromagnetic sensors so sensitive they could detect the unique molecular resonance of explosives. His work resulted in the first commercially available explosives detector using Nuclear Quadrapole Resonance, a technology akin to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans that are commonly used in medical diagnostics.

Hibbs founded QUASAR in 1998, after InVision Technologies acquired Quantum Magnetics (and General Electric acquired InVision in 2004). Hibbs acquired a penchant for studying the quantum phenomena at the core of such technologies while earning his PhD in physics at England’s Cambridge University. In fact, he named the company for Quantum Applied Science & Research.

Since QUASAR was founded, Hibbs has formed a group of several related companies focused on biomedical, geophysical, and various military applications of electromagnetic sensing. The company bills itself as a world leader in low-frequency electromagnetic sensing systems that operate at room temperatures (at frequencies from 0.01 Hz to 5 MHz).

When I dropped in for a briefing earlier this week, Hibbs was out of town, so I met with Lowell Burnett, chief technology officer for QUASAR Federal Systems and at least four other PhDs who oversee different development efforts within the group. Burnett told me the QUASAR group has grown to about 70 employees (at least a third are former Quantum Magnetics employees), funded solely by revenues from government contracts.

Burnett says QUASAR’s scientists have made steady advances in electromagnetic sensors, particularly in electric field sensors, with each group applying

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.