Devlin is a Royal Society URF at the Centre for Cold Matter building a new experiment to detect axion and dark matter particles. His prior work at CERN's BASE collaboration (Penning trap antiproton experiment) used the ultra-sensitive superconducting detection circuit of a cryogenic Penning trap to set new constraints on axion-like particle couplings to photons (~2.79 neV/c² range; PRL 2021). At Imperial he is developing a Penning trap single-photon counter concept using a single trapped electron to detect 30–60 GHz photons from axion-photon conversion in a strong magnetic field (arXiv 2601.05472, March 2026), targeting axion masses of 124–248 μeV. This approach could overcome the standard quantum noise limit that hampers conventional haloscope searches at high mass. Active PDRA posting open May 2025.

O'Hare is a dark-matter phenomenologist whose work sits unusually close to instrumentation: he is the principal theorist of the 'neutrino fog' that limits direct-detection experiments, of directional dark matter detection (using the daily modulation of the WIMP wind to distinguish signal from background), and of the axion and ultralight dark-matter searches that increasingly rely on quantum sensors — haloscopes, comagnetometers, NMR-based searches and atomic magnetometers. He writes the sensitivity projections that tell experimentalists which quantum sensor to build. 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 axion/ALP search programme he works on consumes spin-ensemble magnetometry directly: CASPEr-class experiments are, in effect, precision NMR magnetometers operating far below pT/sqrt(Hz), and his phenomenology sets the sensitivity targets they aim at. Theory PI with strong experimental engagement.