If you are interested in working with us (PhD studentships and post-doc positions) or in collaborating with us, please contact us - daniele.faccio@glasgow.ac.uk

A new generation of single photon detectors and cameras allow us to record images at a trillion frames per second, sufficient to freeze light in motion. We can then investigate a range of fundamental phenomena, such as time-reversal of superluminal events. We are also using these cameras for a new generation of imaging challenges: imaging behind corners and imaging through scattering media.
Imaging behind corners allows to track and locate moving objects, for example a car or person even when these cannot be directly seen with applications for self-driving cars and surveillance.
Imaging through scattering media allows to image directly inside the human body or to image through multimode fibres with many medical applications. These imaging capabilities are obtained by fusing together new detector technologies and new computational techniques, including inversion approaches and deep learning with neural networks.

This research is funded through the Quantum Technology Hub for Quantum Imaging, QuantIC, through the EPSRC project UltraImage, the Leverhulme Trust and DSTL.

The physical properties of materials can be tailored by nano-structuring (so called MetaMaterials) and, as discovered more recently, by working in very specific wavelength regions where the refractive index is very close to zero. Not all materials exhibit such a behaviour or do so in a readily accessible region but an important class of transparent conductive oxides (ITO, used to cover your cell phone screen) does just this. We are investigating these materials and the near-zero-index regime for new physics and applications such as fundamental studies (creation of photon pairs from the vacuum) and applications that rely on the very strong response to external fields of these materials for the control of both classical and quantum states of light.

This research is funded through the EPSRC programme grant "The Physics and Technology of Photonics Metadevices and Metasystems".

In 1969 Penrose predicted that matter falling into a rotating black hole could gain energy from the rotational motion of the spacetime geometry. A few years (1971) later a similar concept was proposed by Zel'dovich who realised that waves may be excited from the quantum vacuum state by a rotating black hole or, by analogy, from a rotating metallic object. The amplification of waves from a rapidly rotating object is now known as superradiance. These ideas formed the foundations for Hawking's prediction that black holes might evaporate through the emission of entangled pairs of photons excited from the vacuum.
We are developing experiments based on the creation of a superfluid of light: waves and ripples move across the beam following the same equations of waves and ripples moving across a water surface. The photon fluid is then made to flow in the same way as a draining bathtub and the vortex flow can be used to simulate a rotating black hole. These studies are interesting in their own right as they allow to create (in a room-temperature system) superfluids where various related phenomena such as superfluid instability and turbulence may be studied.

This research is funded through the EPSRC project SURF, the European Research Council, ERC fellowship "Light in Moving Media" (ended in 2017) and the Leverhulme Trust.

Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference is an exquisitly quantum effect: two photons hitting a beamsplitter from opposite sides and at the same time will exit bunched together. This effect can be used to precisely time the propagation of photons thorugh free space or through a material. We have used to demonstrate that photons travle slower than speed of light in a vacuum and also that ``twisted'' photons (photons with angular momentum) travel slightly faster than un-twisted photons. By applying information theory concepts to the experiment design, we have also shown that the ultimate resolution of a HOM interferometer can rival that of standard phase-sensitive interferometers, achieving attosecond time-of-flight resolution. Combining this high-precision technique with quantum imaging techniques will hopefully lead to improved microscopes.

This research is funded through the EPSRC project "nanoHOM" and the EU FET-Open project, "Q-MIC".