Micolich works on semiconductor nanowire and organic/polymer nanoelectronic devices, with two strands relevant here: the physics of low-dimensional transport and noise in nanowire transistors, and the use of those devices as transducers at the interface with biological systems, where a nanowire field-effect transistor acts as an extremely local potentiometer sensitive to charge and potential changes at the cell membrane. The group has a strong record in noise spectroscopy â using 1/f and random telegraph noise as a diagnostic rather than a nuisance. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work â DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity â nanowire FET bioelectronic sensing is the principal electrical competitor to NV-based bio-magnetometry: both aim to read out cellular electrophysiology without patch-clamping, one via magnetic fields at pT/sqrt(Hz), the other via local potential. Borderline inclusion, kept because the bio-interface sensing thread is genuine.
Leonardo Midolo develops III-V optoelectronic quantum devices at NBI. Research: (1) nanomechanical quantum photonic integrated circuits (NOEMS) â GaAs waveguide phase shifters, routers, and switches for single-photon routing; (2) heterogeneous integration of quantum dot emitters on silicon and SiN platforms; (3) quantum key distribution with deterministic single-photon sources over field-installed dark fibre. Group established 2022; Beamfox spinout for proximity correction.
Miller develops nitrogen-vacancy nanodiamond quantum biosensors for rapid diagnostics, controlling the NV spin state with resonant green/microwave illumination to frequency-separate fluorescence signal from background and achieve single-molecule detection of nucleic acids (e.g. HIV RNA with a short isothermal amplification step) in lateral-flow and widefield formats. His current projects span nanodiamond sensors for point-of-care disease diagnostics, quantum sensing at neural-interface implants, and wide-field quantum sensing of large randomly-oriented nanodiamond ensembles in biological samples, actively recruiting PhD students through the Q-BIOMED hub.
Best known as a collider (ATLAS) physicist, Miller also leads the BREAD collaboration's broadband dish-antenna search for axion dark matter, converting axions to photons inside a solenoid magnet and reading them out with a THz receiver and Fourier-transform spectrometer to cover mass ranges inaccessible to narrowband cavity haloscopes. This is a fundamentally different quantum-sensing strategy than solid-state NV-ensemble magnetometers/thermometers, which reach pT/sqrt(Hz)-class sensitivity via DEER, NMR, and T1-relaxometry protocols on spin ensembles; Miller's approach instead pushes broadband photon-counting sensitivity for fundamental-physics searches. Actively recruiting postdocs for BREAD instrumentation and analysis.
Minor directs the National Center for Electron Microscopy at LBNL and develops in-situ TEM methods to observe how materials deform, fracture, and transform under mechanical load, temperature, and other stimuli in real time at atomic resolution.
Mintert's theoretical group works on quantum information and quantum control, including protocols to deterministically prepare highly non-classical (non-Gaussian, Wigner-negative) states of massive mechanical oscillators via optomechanical interactions, entanglement quantification, and quantum simulation.
Mirhosseini's group builds hybrid quantum systems that interface superconducting circuits with acoustic and optical modes - circuit quantum acousto-dynamics, phonon-mediated interactions, and microwave-to-optical transduction - for quantum networking and quantum-limited signal transduction. For context, this complements the established paradigm of NV-diamond ensemble magnetometry (Hahn-echo/DEER, nanoscale NMR, T1 relaxometry) operating near pT/âHz sensitivity.
Prof. Mohseni's group (Bio-inspired Sensors and Optoelectronics) pushes III-V semiconductor photodetector technology toward thermodynamic and quantum limits of photon sensitivity. Key directions: (1) Nanoscale IR photodetectors: shrinking pixel dimensions below the diffraction limit using quantum confinement effects (InGaAs/InAlAs quantum well and dot structures) to improve sensitivity, bandwidth, and resolution simultaneously; (2) Superlattice photomultipliers â high-gain, low-noise avalanche photodetectors at room temperature approaching quantum-limited sensitivity for mid-wave and long-wave infrared detection; (3) Quantum sensing applications including squeezed-light-enhanced thermoreflectance imaging of electronic hotspots, and photon-counting receivers for quantum communications. Co-author on 275+ papers, 33+ US patents; NAI Fellow 2023; W.M. Keck Foundation Award, DARPA YFA, NSF CAREER. Fellow of SPIE and Optica. Also Professor of Physics and Astronomy.
Moler's lab builds scanning SQUID microscopes -- magnetic-flux sensors cooled to cryogenic temperatures and scanned within microns of a sample -- to image supercurrents, vortices, and interfacial magnetism in unconventional superconductors and topological materials with sensitivity and spatial resolution that complements ensemble NV-diamond magnetometry (which reaches pT/âHz via DEER/T1-type protocols) at a very different length and field scale.
Monteiro works on the theory and control of levitated optomechanical systems, including a stable 3D velocity feedback cooling scheme for independently controlling all three translational modes of an optically levitated nanoparticle with minimal cross-talk. Levitated optomechanics of this kind is being developed both as a force/impulse sensor of exquisite sensitivity and, in collaboration with UCL colleagues including Peter Barker, as a testbed for macroscopic quantum states relevant to proposed gravity-entanglement experiments.