Cotter leads the Quantum Navigation research stream at Imperial's Centre for Cold Matter. He develops compact, fieldable cold-atom inertial sensors for GPS-denied navigation. Milestones: first demonstration of a cold-atom accelerometer on the London Underground (measuring acceleration/vibration in a real transit environment); successful field trials of quantum inertial sensors aboard the Royal Navy research ship XV Patrick Blackett (2023); Arctic field trials with Royal Navy (2025). His sensors use magnetically launched cold-atom Rb clouds and simultaneous multi-axis interferometry. He also contributes to AION-related atom interferometry work and the Quantum Technology Hub in Sensors and Timing. Department of Materials cross-appointment.

Digonnet's group develops high-sensitivity fiber-optic sensors, especially resonant and interferometric fiber-optic gyroscopes engineered to approach fundamental (shot-noise/quantum) rotation-sensing limits, alongside specialty fiber lasers and amplifiers.

Kasevich is a pioneer of light-pulse atom interferometry, building cold-atom sensors of rotation, acceleration, and gravity that rival or exceed classical inertial instruments, and precision tests of general relativity and searches for dark matter and gravitational waves via large-scale atom interferometers (including MAGIS-100). His 2022 Nature paper demonstrated distributed quantum sensing with mode-entangled, spin-squeezed atomic states, extending entanglement-enhanced metrology to networks of separated sensors.