In a consortium led by Heriot-Watt with St Andrews, Glasgow, Strathclyde, Edinburgh and Dundee, this proposal for an "EPSRC CDT in Industry-Inspired Photonic Imaging, Sensing and Analysis" responds to the priority area in Imaging, Sensing and Analysis. It recognises the foundational role of photonics in many imaging and sensing technologies, while also noting the exciting opportunities to enhance their performance using emerging computational techniques like machine learning. Photonics' role in sensing and imaging is hard to overstate. Smart and autonomous systems are driving growth in lasers for automotive lidar and smartphone gesture recognition; photonic structural-health monitoring protects our road, rail, air and energy infrastructure; and spectroscopy continues to find new applications from identifying forgeries to detecting chemical-warfare agents. UK photonics companies addressing the sensing and imaging market are vital to our economy (see CfS) but their success is threatened by a lack of doctoral-level researchers with a breadth of knowledge and understanding of photonic imaging, sensing and analysis, coupled with high-level business, management and communication skills. By ensuring a supply of these individuals, our CDT will consolidate the UK industrial knowledge base, driving the high-growth export-led sectors of the economy whose photonics-enabled products and services have far-reaching impacts on society, from consumer technology and mobile computing devices to healthcare and security. Building on the success of our CDT in Applied Photonics, the proposed CDT will be configured with most (40) students pursuing an EngD degree, characterised by a research project originated by a company and hosted on their site. Recognizing that companies' interests span all technology readiness levels, we are introducing a PhD stream where some (15) students will pursue industrially relevant research in university labs, with more flexibility and technical risk than would be possible in an EngD project. Overwhelming industry commitment for over 100 projects represents a nearly 100% industrial oversubscription, with £4.38M cash and £5.56M in-kind support offered by major stakeholders including Fraunhofer UK, NPL, Renishaw, Thales, Gooch and Housego and Leonardo, as well as a number of SMEs. Our request to EPSRC for £4.86M will support 35 students, from a total of 40 EngD and 15 PhD researchers. The remaining students will be funded by industrial (£2.3M) and university (£0.93M) contributions, giving an exceptional 2:3 cash gearing of EPSRC funding, with more students trained and at a lower cost / head to the taxpayer than in our current CDT. For our centre to be reactive to industry's needs a diverse pool of supervisors is required. Across the consortium we have identified 72 core supervisors and a further 58 available for project supervision, whose 1679 papers since 2013 include 154 in Science / Nature / PRL, and whose active RCUK PI funding is £97M. All academics are experienced supervisors, with many current or former CDT supervisors. An 8-month frontloaded residential phase in St Andrews and Edinburgh will ensure the cohort gels strongly, and will equip students with the knowledge and skills they need before beginning their research projects. Business modules (x3) will bring each cohort back to Heriot-Watt for 1-week periods, and weekend skills workshops will be used to regularly reunite the cohort, further consolidating the peer-to-peer network. Core taught courses augmented with specialist options will total 120 credits, and will be supplemented by professional skills and responsible innovation training delivered by our industry partners and external providers. Governance will follow our current model, with a mixed academic-industry Management Committee and an independent International Advisory Board of world-leading experts.

Our tangible cultural heritage, both historic and contemporary, is made from a plethora of complex multilayer materials. What we see is often only the surface and form of an object. Hidden below are the materials and evidence of the processes by which the objects were originally created. By using state of the art imaging / spectroscopy systems which can map the composition and reveal the stages of their creation, we gain an understanding about the meaning and significance, both in their original context and our present day. This is at the heart of the disciplines of technical art history, archaeology and material culture studies. It also informs collections care, access policies and conservation of cultural heritage. Infrared imaging and spectroscopy is particularly well suited to looking below the surface, as the scattering which normally occurs with visible light is usually much less. Thus the infrared penetrates further into the object. Depending on the material and its structure the infrared light will be absorbed or reflected. This can either be directly imaged or modulated (Fourier Transform Spectroscopy) to acquire spectroscopic information indicating the chemical composition. Most techniques employed at present within the field of cultural heritage can only make spot measurements; to map large areas would take hours to days to acquire the data and therefore is not usually viable or suitable for in-situ measurements. Other techniques require samples to be taken and are therefore invasive. We aim to explore state of the art IR imaging strategies that will be "fit for the job". This implies wide bandwidth, full field and fast techniques coupled with signal processing/ photonics methods to analyse, visualise and manipulate large multivariate data sets. By exploiting state-of-the-art laser sources developed at Heriot-Watt and providing massively tunable infrared light, we will explore and develop several complementary strategies for 4-dimensional imaging (3 x spatial, 1 x wavelength). Compressive sensing illumination techniques and machine-learning based data processing will allow us to image rapidly and efficiently while also extracting the maximum value from our datasets by automatically classifying surface and sub-surface features. In this way we expect to produce outcomes of shared value for both the ICT and Technical Art History researchers in our team. Contextual information from art history will inform the photonic design and computational anaylsis strategies we deploy, while powerful ICT-led techniques will provide the Technical Art History community with new technical capabilities that reveal previously hidden structure and history. The significance to the public of our cultural heritage has motivated us to integrate outreach activity from the start, in particular a dynamic website using 4D data to allow an interactive tool for exploring the chosen case studies, reflecting the People at the Heart of ICT priority. The project includes industrial partners who will contribute resources and expertise in mid-IR lasers (Chromacity Ltd.) and mid-IR cameras (Thales Optronics Ltd.). Our partners have committed substantial in-kind support in the form of access to their technology and contributions of staff time. Furthermore, their engagement ensures that activities within the project, and the outcomes these generate, can be rapidly evaluated for adjacent commercial opportunities. EPSRC priorities are reflected in the project's structure. Cross-Disciplinarity is embedded as collaborations within the ICT community (Photonics & AI Technologies researchers) and with researchers from the AHRC-funded Cultural Heritage community. Co-Creation is essential: only by combining the distinct technical, contextual and material resources of each research group in our team will the project succeed in delivering new capabilities for IR imaging and analysis and new insights into culturally important objects of shared value.

SUMMARY OF THE ORIGINAL PROJECT: Accurately monitoring the composition and flow-rate of natural gas from a petroleum reservoir is critical for extraction companies to quantify the productivity of their oil and gas fields. Our new project "Quantitative multi-species hydrocarbon metrology in gas pipelines" (ST/T000635/1) identified an opportunity for a first-to-market system integrating broadband, high-resolution mid-infrared spectroscopy into a conventional gas-flow meter. The project is supported by >£400K direct and in-kind contributions from industrial partners GM Flow Ltd. (a leader in dry-gas metering) and Chromacity Ltd. (a tunable laser manufacturer), and seeks to use fibre-delivered light from a pre-existing 3 - 4um laser to quantify the abundance of gaseous alkanes carried in pipelines from the production reservoir. The project methodology exploits high-resolution Fourier-transform laser spectroscopy and an innovative baseline-extraction algorithm, both emerging from an earlier STFC project (ST/P00699X/1), which resulted in a recent patent application and journal paper. Broadband mid-IR light is modulated by a scanning Michelson interferometer functioning as a high-resolution Fourier-transform spectrometer. This light is then fibre-coupled and used to interrogate gas sampled into a metrology cell at a flow meter. Our unique algorithm is used to extract the concentrations of the multiple gas species present. Heriot-Watt will manage the project and take responsibility for the hardware and software development associated with the multi-species gas spectrometer, and will collaborate with three partners as follows: * GM Flow manufacture flow meters for the "dry gas" market, and will engineer an integrated module that uniquely allows in-situ gas composition sampling and spectroscopy at the flow meter. * Chromacity, a HWU spin-out manufacturing near- to mid-IR femtosecond lasers, will lead the system integration of the laser, spectrometer, delivery-fibre, gas flow meter and software. * Southampton University will provide new "airguided" mid-IR fibres, complementing commercially available solid-core fibres and potentially offering superior long-range transmission characteristics. SUMMARY OF THE PROPOSED CAPITAL EQUIPMENT AND THE ADDED VALUE IT WILL PROVIDE: Our request to STFC is for 65% funding of a variant of a Chromacity Spark-OPO, providing broadband coverage across the 2.4-3.1-um region. Co-funding of 25% from Heriot-Watt and 10% from Chromacity has been secured. A formal quotation is provided. Our original project proposal anticipated re-purposing a 3-4-um broadband laser purchased for an earlier STFC project in atmospheric spectroscopy, where the weak ambient concentrations (e.g. 1.8 ppm CH4) require wavelengths aligned to the strongest molecular cross-sections. While the IPS project could proceed with this laser, there are considerable benefits from replacing the previously earmarked laser with the proposed shorter-wavelength source, namely: a. Avoiding line saturation, due to the 100x lower cross-sections, thus improving measurement accuracy. b. Improving species distinguishability, due to lower spectral interference, again improving accuracy. c. Extending sensitivity to other important species, due to the presence of absorptions for H2S and CO2. d. The added commercial value introduced by these new features, including higher confidence in the concentration data, monitoring of safety critical and highly toxic H2S, and monitoring of reservoir quality through the CO2 information. e. The acceleration of lab research enabled by having a dedicated laser source for the project, rather than one shared with another grant. In summary, moving to this wavelength band would now allow ALL of the main components of natural gas to be analysed, with the exception of N2 (a non-infrared active gas presnt at <5% concentration).

Accurately monitoring the flow of natural gas from a petroleum reservoir is a critical capability that enables petroleum companies to quantify the productivity of their oil and gas fields. Conventional flow meters operate on "dry gas" (in which no oil or water is present) and offer no compositional information about the gas, simply providing an average mass-flow rate. A product delivering the flow rates of individual hydrocarbons would add significant value by allowing the energy transported to be calculated, opening up new markets such as "custody transfer", in which oil and gas are transferred from one operator to another. A further generalisation would be a meter providing compositional information of "wet gas", in which oil and water are also present, as is common from gas fields that are nearing the end of their productive lifetime. Enhancing conventional flow meters with compositional information would increase the addressable market from £2.4B to £6.7B. This market is both large and timely, with customers who are able to invest in development once a working prototype has been demonstrated. It is therefore well suited to IPS funding, offering a potentially high return on investment on a timescale of 3 to 6 years. This proposal is a partnership between Heriot-Watt University and two companies -- GM Flow, a leader in dry-gas metering, and Chromacity, which spun out from Heriot-Watt in 2013 and has commercialized our mid-infrared laser technology. STFC investment of £353K will be leveraged by direct and in-kind contributions > £400K from the industrial partners and £88K (20% FEC) from Heriot-Watt. Post-project investment of a further £400K is committed by the industrial partners to complete commercialization of the technology. The project will lead to the commercialization of an innovative gas metering product providing laser-based multi-species gas concentration measurement, and drawing on our recent STFC-funded (ST/P00699X/1) research in this area. The vision is that by the end of the project the partners will be ready to bring to market a complete system, comprising an integrated laser and spectrometer, with fibre delivery of mid-IR light to a remote flow-meter head. Chromacity will lead the system integration, GM Flow the flow-meter design and Heriot-Watt the optical design and data processing aspects. A collaboration with the ORC in Southampton will give the project access to innovative low-loss "hollow core" mid-IR fibres, as an alternative to commercially available but higher loss fluoride glass fibres. STFC IPS funding will be used strategically to resolve the technical or commercial "known unknowns" that currently stand as roadblocks to the technical realization of the concept or its commercialization. Technical questions which will be addressed include: understanding the range and limitations of fibre-delivered broadband light for mid-IR spectroscopy; assessing the capability and limitations of algorithms for extracting concentrations of multiple hydrocarbons; and identifying the best practical embodiments for fibre-fed spectroscopy within a flow-meter. Similarly, the project will answer commercially important questions, such as whether the measurement uncertainty provided by the technique is compatible with customer requirements. Field trials with potential early adopters will also provide vital feedback needed to define the minimum viable product acceptable by the market. The project will leverage resources (notably a £90K Chromacity mid-IR laser) from an earlier STFC funded CLASP project project, with the main STFC funding being used for consumables and PDRA resource. As a practical knowledge exchange mechanism, the PDRA will transition in Year 3 to spending 50% of his time in Chromacity, with the associated cost met by the company.

The ability to accurately measure the power and frequency (or wavelength) distribution of an optical signal is crucial to a vast range of applications, for spectroscopy in medicine, ensuring the safety of food or pharmaceuticals to remote sensing of gasses and fundamental science, e.g. characterising short laser pulses or finding the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. Currently, this is achieved using Optical Spectrum analyzers or optical monochromators, which have a key limitation. To achieve high-resolution they need a large optical path length and therefore large footprint (optical path length on the order of 0.5-1 m is common). Thus these devices are bulky and expensive. While not an issue for lab-based low-volume applications, this excludes their use - and thus the use of high-resolution spectroscopy - in large volume, or footprint and weight-sensitive applications, e.g. integration into lab-on-a-chip devices, mobile phones and low mass satellites (e.g. cube-sat). These applications can only be served by integrated on-chip spectrometers. Here the use of speckle spectrometers, using the random scattering of light to achieve a high wavelength resolution in an ultra-small footprint would be highly promising if it were not for the case that typical the multiple scattering needed to create the speckle results in most of the light being scattered out of the device before it can be detected. However, over the last decade, several groups (including myself) have shown that the statistical distribution of scattering sites can be used to control the amount and direction (e.g. within the plane of the device vs out-of-plane) of light scattering. In this project we merge these advances with speckle spectrometers, i.e. using controlled disorder to efficiently generate a speckle pattern, while virtually eliminating out-of-plane scattering and optical losses. Building on this advance we will demonstrate a high resolution, low footprint on-chip spectrometer that outperforms the state of the art by orders of magnitude (in device footprint) without sacrificing the device resolution. We will also demonstrate that these devices are suitable for future large scale manufacturing, using pre-existing CMOS facilities, are suitable for gas spectroscopy and laser pulse spectrum analysis and compatible with future integration with optical detectors for a direct electronic readout. This would present a game-changing advance in the field of integrated spectrometers and lay the foundation for future commercialization of integrated speckle spectrometers.