Barry works on the detection of the 21-cm signal from the Epoch of Reionisation with the Murchison Widefield Array and, prospectively, SKA-Low. Her specialty is calibration systematics: she has shown how small errors in the sky and beam model propagate into spectral structure that mimics or swamps the cosmological signal, and has developed the diagnostic and mitigation framework that current MWA upper limits rest on. This is a measurement whose entire difficulty is instrumental. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — the intellectual structure is identical to a hard magnetometry measurement: raw sensitivity is adequate, and everything depends on understanding correlated, instrument-induced systematics well enough to subtract them below the signal. Early-career PI (DECRA). Borderline astronomy inclusion, kept on the systematics/instrument criterion.
NON-PREFERRED (astronomy pivot, kept for review). Hewitt builds and operates low-frequency radio interferometers (HERA, MWA) to detect the redshifted 21-cm signal from the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization; the sensors are large radio antenna arrays rather than quantum sensors, so this is a borderline astro-instrumentation inclusion.
Parsons directs Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Laboratory and leads instrumentation development for the HERA 21-cm interferometric array, engineering the low-noise, precisely calibrated radio receiver systems needed to detect the faint cosmological 21-cm signal from the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization.
Webster works on the Epoch of Reionisation with the Murchison Widefield Array, where the science goal — detecting the redshifted 21-cm signal from the first stars — is a five-orders-of-magnitude foreground-subtraction and instrumental-calibration problem rather than an astrophysics problem. Her group's contributions are in foreground modelling, ionospheric and beam calibration, and the statistical detection of a signal buried far below the systematics floor; she also works on quasar accretion physics. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — the methodological parallel is exact: like a pT/sqrt(Hz) NV ensemble measurement, a 21-cm detection lives or dies on the control of correlated systematics rather than on raw sensitivity. Borderline inclusion under the astronomy criterion, kept because the array and its calibration are the central object of study.