Institute of Physics: Photon 2018

Last week I attended Photon 2018, the UK’s largest photonics conference hosted by the Institute of Physics. I presented a poster titled: Development and field testing of an automated portable optomechanical accelerometer with the following abstract:

The exquisite detection of mechanical motion in optomechanical systems can be used to create ultrasensitive inertial sensors that look to surpass current standards. We have demonstrated an optomechanical accelerometer capable of measuring micro-g accelerations (g=9.81 ms^(-2)) due to a dispersive and dissipative coupling between a whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonance and the center-of-mass motion of the WGM cavity itself. This optical system is suitable for applications such as navigation or gravity gradiometry but will become invaluable for calibrating & stabilizing quantum sensors which have inherently low bandwidths and sampling rates. The development of a portable WGM accelerometer prototype is also described. Results from both the lab and successful outdoor field trials are analysed to characterize the sensor performance.

I also tweeted a lot during the conference under the hashtag #IOPPhoton18
You can read my tweets here