Dr Rachel Oliver from the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride has received a prestigious RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering.
The Royal Academy of Engineering has awarded seven Leverhulme Fellowships to talented engineering researchers, including Dr Rachel Oliver from the University of Cambridge.
These Fellowships support the researchers' careers while they focus on the development of new technologies. Dr Oliver's Fellowship will enable her to concentrate on research into understanding and utilising nitride nanostructures.
The emerging fields of optical quantum computing and encryption have the potential to bring great improvements in the speed at which we can process data and to improve the security of data exchanges. These technologies use single photons, particles which constitute the smallest possible quantity of light, to carry information.
Developing reliable and robust photon sources is essential to ensure the advancement of the field, especially if it is to find more widespread application.
Gallium Nitride (GaN) has great potential for the development of sources of single photons and pairs of entangled photons for use in these systems, as it allows sources to work at room temperature, while most other materials that have been explored for these applications require cryogenic temperatures.
However, several engineering challenges need to be overcome to make GaN systems commercially viable and Dr Oliver, already successful in developing a single photon source based on GaN and its alloys, will work to understand the link between the structure of single photon-emitting structures and their properties and performance.
This new knowledge will allow her to develop optimised structures for single photon sources that are robust and provide efficient performance.
Professor William Milne FREng, Chair of the Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowships selection panel, said: “Academic career progression often comes with increased administrative and teaching commitments, at the expense of the time available for personal research projects.
“The Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowships are awarded to relieve mid-career academics of the additional workload to enable them to go back and personally focus on their research.
“Like all research supported by the Academy, the Fellowships are designed to foster world class engineering that is directly useful to industry and society.”
View a full list of this year's RAEng/ Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowships.