Resonant and shaped photonics for understanding the physical and biomedical world

几个世纪以来，光一直被用来描绘我们周围的世界，并继续为物理学、化学、生物学、材料科学和医学提供深刻的见解。然而，光作为测量工具的局限性是什么？例如，我们可以用光来成像单个细菌，但我们也可以用光来捕获单个细菌，识别细菌菌株并评估其对抗生素的敏感性吗？我们如何在多个长度尺度上成像，从单个细胞到多个细胞组织，以便全面绘制大脑中所有神经元的连接？我们是否可以将共振与光的波动性质和动量结合起来，来测量与单个神经元细胞的自然和受激运动相关的力，甚至是与经典-量子界面现象相关的极小力？这项提案旨在通过探索新的创新方法来回答这些问题，我们可以利用光来测量自然世界。这项研究建立在我们最近在光子学（产生、控制和检测光的科学）方面的进展基础上，特别是将利用共振结构和成形光。这些为我们提供了控制光和物质相互作用的工具，具有精致的灵敏度和准确性。我们将并行运行三个研究链，并通过结合他们的产出，我们的目标是解决抗生素耐药性，神经退行性疾病，多模式功能成像和下一代力量的主要全球挑战，扭矩和微观流变学。我们的工作得到了英国和国际项目合作伙伴的支持（学术界和工业界）谁是热情与我们合作，并已承诺超过0.5M英镑的实物计划。

Light has been used for centuries to image the world around us, and continues to provide profound insights across physics, chemistry, biology, materials science and medicine. However, what are the limits of light as a measurement tool? For example, we can use light to image single bacteria, but can we also use light to trap a single bacterium, identify the bacterial strain and assess its susceptibility to antibiotics? How can we image over multiple length scales, from single cells to multiple cellular tissue, in order to comprehensively map all the neuronal connections in the brain? Can we use a combination of resonance with the wave nature and momentum of light to measure the forces associated with the natural and stimulated motion of a single neuronal cell, or even the extremely small forces associated with phenomena at the classical-quantum interface? This proposal aims to answer these questions by exploring new and innovative ways in which we can use light to measure the natural world. This research builds on our recent advances in photonics - the science of generating, controlling and detecting light - and in particular will exploit resonant structures and shaped light. These provide us with tools for controlling the interaction of light and matter with exquisite sensitivity and accuracy. We will run three research strands in parallel and by combining their outputs, we aim to address major Global Challenges in antimicrobial resistance, neurodegenerative disease, multimodal functional imaging and next generation force, torque and microrheology.Our work is supported by a suite of UK and International project partners (both academic and industry) who are enthused to work with us and have committed over £0.5M in kind to the programme.