Single photon emitters for Quantum 2.0

• Colour centres in III-Nitride materials
• Electronic and optical properties of defects in gallium oxide
• Single photon compressive imaging

MicroLEDs

• Carrier dynamics, optical polarisation and recombination efficiency
• Electronic and photonic correlative microscopy
• Rapid performance screening of devices

III/V micro-scale optoelectronics

• Nanowire and Micro-Ring lasers
• Quantum Dot-in-Nanowire devices

High-throughput characterisation for optoelectronics

• Automated microscopy
• Micro-photoluminescence and single photon counting
• Open data for novel materials

Dr Church is an Early Career Research Fellow, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and is part of the Photon Physics group based in the Photon Science Institute at the University of Manchester (UoM).

Dr Church was awarded his MPhys degree at UoM and remained in Manchester to join the research group of Prof. David Binks and Prof. Philip Dawson to study for his PhD, working in collaboration with the Cambridge Centre for GaN and Cardiff University. He defended his thesis in 2019, which was entitled “Optical studies of zincblende GaN-based semiconductors”, focussing on improving the efficiency of LEDs for lighting and display applications. Dr Church continued to work on the project as a Research Associate until October 2020 and retains strong links to the micro-LED industry through consultancy work, protected IP and industrial projects funded through the Henry Royce Institute.

In 2020, Dr Church joined the research group of Dr Patrick Parkinson, at UoM, as a Research Associate on the “Big Data for Nanoelectronics” project. In this work, he has developed a world-leading facility for automated high-throughput micro-photoluminescence characterisation of nanoscale optoelectronics. This facility studies 100,000s of samples from international academic and industrial researchers and has been recognised through rewards from the Rank Prize fund and the Institute of Physics.

In 2024, Dr Church was awarded an Early Career fellowship, by the Leverhulme trust, to expand his high-throughput research into the exciting field of Quantum 2.0, specifically novel Single Photon Sources, which are a fundamental building block of the next generation of photonic computers and communications networks. The project is entitled “Scaling up room temperature single-photon sources”, and, drawing on his expertise in III-Nitrides, predominately explores the use of defects in wide bandgap semiconductors for this purpose.

If you are an undergraduate student at the University of Manchester who is interested in my research, please feel free to get in touch by email. I currently offer projects though the following routes:

• Summer research placements: more info can be found here.
• BSc dissertation projects: available to 3rd year BSc students.
• MPhys projects: available to 4th year MPhys students.