Host: Mark Lawrence

Title:
Quantum sensing for gravitational cartography

Abstract:
The world beneath our feet contains our history and provides a home for much of our critical infrastructure and resources. It also gives rise to significant hazards such as sinkholes and subsidence, and the need to perform maintenance on underground infrastructure leads to major challenges in productivity through interventions and road congestion. Current technologies are limited in how well they can see through the ground, making these interventions difficult to perform. Gravity sensing offers an exceptional advantage in inspecting the underworld, through not being attenuated by the intervening media. However, conventional gravity sensors are strongly limited by ubiquitous vibrational noise – requiring long measurement times that result in such surveys being too costly for wide spread use in the majority of applications.

My group has developed a quantum sensor that suppresses this noise through performing differential atom interferometry, suppressing common mode noise through reading out two quantum sensors with a common reference laser beam. This has the potential to significantly increase future survey speeds, and to open gravity surveying for wider use. We are now engaged with industry in their creation of prototypes based on our sensor.

In this talk I will give an introduction to our work, and discuss atom interferometry and the challenges in bringing it to field applications, and discuss some of our recent results. I will also present our new endeavours for bringing quantum sensing to new regimes of sensitivity in the hunt for mid-wave gravitational waves and dark matter searches.

Bio:
Michael Holynski is an Associate Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at UOB, where he leads the Atom Interferometry research group and is part of the School leadership through his role as Head of Innovation. His work focuses on gravity gradient sensing with cold atoms, with a particular focus on developing field devices and new concepts for high sensitivity devices. He is Co-Investigator and member of the management board for the UK National Quantum Technology Hub in Sensing and Timing and is co-lead of the Geophysics work package. He is Co-Investigator and technical lead of the DSTL Gravity Imager project. As part of this work, he has led the development of the UK’s first transportable atom interferometers and first cold atom gravity gradiometer with on-going work focused on realising novel approaches to reaching high sensitivity. He has been active in a range of innovation focused projects that were strongly connected with UK industry, including over 19 industry partners. In particular, he is the academic PI and scientific lead of the Industry Strategy Challenge Fund project Gravity Pioneer, led by end users RSK. In addition, he is the Principal Investigator responsible for the Large Momentum Transfer activity of the Quantum Technologies for Fundamental Physics project AION, which targets far beyond state-of-the-art atom interferometry. He has a personal grant income of over £7 M and is associated with over £75 M of grants in quantum technology from sources including DSTL, EPSRC, Innovate UK, EC, UKSA and ESA. His portfolio includes a total project size exceeding £20 M of collaborative projects with industry, which includes industry commitment exceeding £6 M. His advice has been sought nationally and internationally, including being invited to brief senior stakeholders in connected to government and industry. This includes interacting with national and international government ministers, Chief Scientific Advisors, senior industry figures, and providing expert input into innovation dialog for foreign national programs. In his teaching, Michael lectures in optics and provides laboratory courses and projects in quantum technology, while providing supervision to doctoral students in atom interferometry.