Booth's Dynamic Optics and Photonics Group develops adaptive-optics methods (deformable mirrors, spatial light modulators) for aberration correction in confocal, two-photon and super-resolution (STORM/STED/SIM) microscopy, enabling higher-fidelity deep-tissue biomedical imaging, alongside applications in ultrafast laser micro-fabrication of photonic devices.
Bottom builds high-contrast coronagraphic instruments and adaptive-optics systems for direct imaging and characterization of exoplanets, including infrared detector and instrument-concept development for the Habitable Worlds Observatory. The group is actively recruiting postdocs interested in astronomical instrumentation.
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.
Paterson develops adaptive-optics and wavefront-sensing techniques to correct optical aberrations in fluorescence microscopy and imaging through complex/turbid media, improving resolution and depth in biological and biomedical imaging.
Tuthill is the world's leading practitioner of aperture-masking interferometry and its modern photonic successors. His group's instruments — GLINT (a photonic nuller that destructively interferes starlight on a chip), Dragonfly, and the kernel-phase analysis framework — exist to recover structure at and below the formal diffraction limit of the telescope, in the photon-starved, speckle-dominated regime where naive imaging fails. Science targets are the dusty pinwheel nebulae of Wolf-Rayet binaries, protoplanetary discs and direct detection of exoplanets. 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 — this is the astronomy entry in the search that most closely mirrors the intellectual structure of quantum sensing: the instrument's performance is set by a fundamental noise floor (photon and speckle noise, analogous to the shot-noise floor at pT/sqrt(Hz)), and the entire game is designing an estimator and a hardware front end that saturate it. Preferred attribute strongly present.
Upadhyayula (trained with Eric Betzig at Janelia) develops multifunctional adaptive-optical super-resolution microscopy and the large-scale computational pipelines needed to reconstruct terabyte- to petabyte-scale 3D subcellular dynamics datasets. The group is actively recruiting postdocs.