Fleming pioneered microstructured polymer optical fibre and continues to work on specialty fibre fabrication: drawing exotic polymer, hybrid polymer-metal and poled-silicate structures that would be impossible in conventional silica, and using them to build metamaterials and biomedical photonic devices including fibre-based sensors and probes. The fabrication route — preform drawing — gives access to geometries and material combinations that lithography cannot reach. 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 relevance to a sensing postdoc is delivery and packaging: fibre-integrated probes are the standard way to get an NV or vapour-cell sensor into a biological or field environment while preserving its pT/sqrt(Hz) sensitivity. Borderline inclusion; senior PI, fabrication-led.
Kuhlmey works on structured electromagnetic materials across an unusually wide frequency range: microstructured optical fibres, metamaterials, non-reciprocal and time-varying media, and — the newest and most sensing-relevant thread — quantum terahertz photonics, in collaboration with ENS Paris and CSIRO. The THz programme is explicitly aimed at single-photon/single-electron coupling in the THz band, which if it works would allow quantum devices to operate at a few kelvin rather than millikelvin. The group runs a THz time-domain spectroscopy lab with cryogenic capability. 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 THz band is the one part of the spectrum where neither superconducting circuits nor NV ensembles currently offer quantum-limited detection, so this is a genuine gap-filling programme rather than a variation on existing pT/sqrt(Hz) approaches.
Leon-Saval co-invented the photonic lantern and is the fibre-device engineer of the SAIL programme. His group designs, draws and characterises multicore fibres, mode-selective lanterns, OH-suppression fibre Bragg gratings and hexabundles, and increasingly applies the same devices outside astronomy — in telecommunications space-division multiplexing and in medical endoscopy and imaging through fibre. The unifying technical problem is coupling a spatially-incoherent, aberrated beam into single-mode circuitry without losing photons. 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 — photonic lanterns are directly applicable to quantum sensing readout: the same device that feeds a seeing-limited telescope beam into a single-mode spectrograph can feed fluorescence from a scattering biological sample into a single-mode quantum-limited detector, preserving the photon budget that a pT/sqrt(Hz) NV measurement depends on.