Description: UV laser inscription of optical waveguides and Bragg gratings directly into glass substrates; enables planar photonic circuits for sensing, quantum technology, and telecommunications.
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.
Peter Smith (Professor, ORC Southampton) develops integrated photonic devices for quantum technologies and sensing. Research: (1) direct UV laser writing — waveguides and Bragg gratings in silica/glass for atom-trap integrated optics; (2) quantum photonic circuits — integrated waveguides for quantum computing and communication; (3) PPLN and nonlinear optics — electrical poling of LiNbO₃ for wavelength conversion (Covesion spinout); (4) integrated sensing — chemical/biological sensors and optofluidic microfluidic chips; (5) applications to cold atom systems — 'Integrated optical elements for miniaturised atom traps'. Spin-outs: Covesion, Stratophase.