Professor Jonathan Knight (Research Group Leader)
I’m interested in experimental photonics, and especially how one can confine light in waveguides and resonators. I explore how one might make new structures that can control the behaviour of light, and the development of novel optical fibres has been an especially fruitful area in this regard. Novel optical fibres can serve as testbeds for the study of a number of interesting and useful optical phenomena, including nonlinear photonics, soliton propagation, wavelength conversion and lasing, as well as outperforming existing fibre designs as a means to deliver light of different kinds from one place to another.

Professor Tim Birks
Tim Birks' research focuses on understanding light propagation along exotic optical fibres. He is best known for pioneering work on microstructured fibres including those with hollow cores, and tapered fibres including photonic lanterns. His team's work is experimental, using fibre drawing towers and tapering rigs to make fibres, but he is also at home with theoretical and computational work to support experiments, model trends in behaviour, build intuition and spark ideas. The motivation is curiosity - to understand the physics and explore what is possible - and applications including optical telecommunication, biomedical sensing and imaging, novel light sources, and astronomical instrumentation.

Dr Alex Davis
"Quantum technology" is the control of matter, energy and information on the scale where quantum effects such as superposition and entanglement manifest. Harnessing these phenomena, which are underutilised in existing "classical" technology, can unlock powerful new applications in fields from computing and communications to sensing and imaging. Photonics, and in particular fibre optics, provides an excellent platform for realising this potential. My research focuses on quantum light sources and processors in structured optical fibre, and its application to transformational next-generation quantum technologies.

Dr Andriy Gorbach
My general research interests lie in the area of nonlinear wave phenomena, nonlinear optics and photonics. I develop models and theoretically investigate how we can utilize combinations of geometrical and material parameters to control and manipulate light in complex nano-photonic structures, both at the level of classical electromagnetic waves, and individual photons. My primary focus is on guided structures, including optical fibres and nano-waveguides. I study nonlinear processes such as parametric frequency conversion, parametric instabilities, dynamical localization (solitons), photon-pairs generation, quantum frequency conversion.

Dr Peter Mosley
Dr Peter Mosley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics at the University of Bath and leads a research group in fibre-based quantum optics. He is a member of the Centre for Photonics and Photonic Materials and served as its director from 2015 - 2021. Mosley is known for developing high-quality sources of heralded single photons across a range of platforms and his group works on engineering photon-pair sources in photonic crystal fibre enhanced with optical switch networks. Mosley is an active member of the UK Quantum Technology community as a co-investigator in the Hub for Quantum Computing via Integrated and Interconnected Implementations within which his group is developing frequency-conversion interfaces to unify the operating wavelength of disparate network nodes. His broader research activities include hollow-core fibre for hosting light-matter interactions and topological modes in photonic crystal fibre.

Professor Dmitry Skryabin

Dr James Stone

Professor William Wadsworth

Dr Sarthak Choudhury

Dr Kerrianne Harrington
I specialise in optical fibre fabrication and post-processing (tapering and splicing), particularly hollow core fibres, which guide light in air instead of glass. In my previous postdoctoral work, I focused on developing low-loss, reliable, and mechanically strong interconnections to integrate hollow core fibres with existing fibre systems. My interests extend beyond telecommunications to the transformative applications of optical fibres as medical tools, sensing devices and laser sources. In my work with ‘U-care’, I build fibres for UV wavelengths and health-care applications. I want to advance speciality optical fibres to address diverse challenges and unlock their full potential as innovative solutions.

Dr Tommi Juhani Isoniemi

Dr Leah Murphy
I am an optical physicist and a microstructured fibre fabricator. I am interested in fibre optics in general: this interest spans linear and nonlinear optics, and classical and quantum applications. Following my PhD at the University of Bath specialising in designing and fabricating hollow-core fibres, I did a postdoc in ultrafast optics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, where I focussed on building ultrafast fibre lasers for driving nonlinear optical processes in gas-filled hollow-core fibres. My current role is in quantum optics, where I am building a fibre-integrated squeezed vacuum source using bespoke microstructured photonic crystal fibre.