One of the regions where current global warming is most pronounced is Siberia and the Russian Far East (SRFE). Inconveniently, this is also one of the regions with least coverage of climate records in international databases. As a consequence, it is extremely difficult to analyse and understand the spatial and temporal variations of climate change in SRFE that can provide context for past changes and current warming trajectories, and data are inadequate for syntheses that can aid evaluation of simulations of past climate-an important way to assess how well models perform at projecting the future, whether it be the impact on communities and ecosystems of forest fires or the fate of carbon currently stored in soils and peatlands. The lack of records from SRFE partly reflects that there are few well established, multi-year international collaborations between Russian institutes and international partners. While scientists at Russian institutes have access to large datasets and field sites and have high-quality staff conducting laboratory analyses, they often have less access to the latest analytical approaches and data quality control protocols-or indeed the language fluency currently required for high-impact international publications and data syntheses. This can generate an imbalance of influence within projects and lead to one-sided and/or short-term scientific interactions that do not have long-term direction and coherence. We will address both the science and science culture issues via a network of researchers from the UK and six institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences in SRFE. Partners in this network have already expressed a strong interest to work together and pool resources to (1) synthesise existing data, (2) learn new methods, and (3) together create new high-quality records of climate and environmental change in this and future research projects. Our network is called DIMA ("Developing Innovative Multi-proxy Analysis"), because we will use multiple new approaches to get climate information from sediment records (proxies) to reconstruct climate change. Our partnership-building and collaboration have several aims. First an extant dataset that described past vegetational change, which has not yet reached an international audience, will be analysed by the DIMA groups to create value-added features (e.g., data formulated for climate-vegetation modelling exercises) prior to publication. Second, we will collect samples to apply a method new to this region for reconstructing past temperatures from insect remains in lake sediments; this will be underpinned by UK-based training of Russian collaborators in the use of the latest laboratory and statistical procedures during a month-long visit of three colleagues from SRFE to the UK. It will involve collecting modern reference samples and generating a high-quality long temperature record from western Siberia as proof-of-concept for an expanded programme. Project leader van Hardenbroek is a specialist in this field. The two selected Russian Project Partners have considerable experience in organising field campaigns and laboratory analysis and will provide the necessary personnel, support and infrastructure. The new data and the experience gained during this project will place the DIMA team in a competitive position to apply for larger collaborative project; the highly motivated team will be geared up to generate long-term climate records across SRFE, produce a high-quality regional temperature synthesis, and develop collaborations with, for example, groups using data compilations to explore climate-vegetation model performance (co-I Edwards current collaboration). This proposal addresses the UK government's expressed need for developing and maintaining strong science ties with key countries, including Russia and strengthening international collaborations outside Europe post-Brexit.

The fundamental principle behind research and development in the nanosciences is the need to manipulate the fundamental structure and behaviour of materials on the atomic and molecular scale. The aim in this proposed collaborative project is to investigate the integration of optical nanofibres as interface tools into novel nanoscale environments, including ion traps, cold atom traps and optical tweezers, for the manipulation and control of single nanoparticles. Such systems could have wide-ranging applications from biomedical instrumentation to quantum information technologies.

Our proposal unites a multidisciplinary team of researchers from mineralogy, palaeontology, deep-sea biology and genetics to provide an integrated picture of when and how some of the most remarkable environments on our planet were colonised by highly-specialised animals, and inform modern deep-sea conservation challenges. The discovery of hydrothermal vents in the deep sea during the late 1970s revolutionised our understanding of the limits of life on our planet. These explorations uncovered incredibly lush ecosystems supported by chemosynthesis, a carbon-fixation process previously deemed insignificant, and faunas with many novel adaptations to surviving in this dark habitat characterised by the ejection of extremely hot, toxic fluids from the seafloor. Despite their seemingly-hostile conditions, we now know that animals have thrived around vents for at least 440 million years, and that diverse taxonomic lineages have continually adapted to this environment over the course of Earth's history. Surprisingly, rather than functioning as evolutionary refuges in which ancient relict faunas have survived in isolation from large-scale environmental changes, evolution at vents appears to have occurred numerous times. This suggests that vents have an intriguing role as incubators of evolutionary novelty, their importance in evolution also highlighted by theories that life itself originated within this setting. Since their initial exploration, significant milestones have been achieved in surveying these ecosystems and in understanding the intimate interactions that modern vent faunas have with the microorganisms that support them. However, answers to fundamental questions of when animals first transitioned to occupy this environment, the processes driving the adaptation of new vent animals and the biological basis for vent colonisation are still lacking. A grasp of these principles is vitally important to understanding how animals adapt to unstable temperature regimes, and of how large-scale environmental changes affect the deep sea, the world's largest ecosystem. This is particularly pertinent today as the deep sea is increasingly affected by human activities, but how it responds to impacts such as climate change and mining operations is unknown. To gain vital evolutionary insights into the colonisation of hydrothermal vents, both in the modern ocean and throughout Earth history, we propose a comprehensive research programme guided by four hypotheses: H1) animals colonised hydrothermal vent environments soon after the Cambrian Explosion of life; H2) new vent habitat formation has repeatedly driven vent animal evolution over time; H3) ancient vent animals exhibited similar associations with microorganisms to modern vent animals to survive within harsh vent environments; and H4) adaptation to vent environmental regimes is evolutionarily rapid. We will assemble primary data for this project from field studies of key geological localities in Norway, Canada and Tasmania, which likely contain the oldest known bone-fide vent animals, and the southern Ural Mountains where a remarkable 100 million year fossil history of ancient vents is preserved. Together, these regions contain some of the best-preserved ancient hydrothermal vent deposits in the world. Collected fossil samples will be subjected to new detailed palaeontological investigations, and high resolution sulphur isotopic analyses. To investigate recent and ongoing adaptation at modern hydrothermal vents we will work on samples of traditional non-vent fauna that we can observe colonising new hydrothermal systems, using advanced DNA techniques.

Ancient records of magnetic fields stored in rocks and meteorites hold the key to answering some of the most fundamental questions in Earth and Planetary Sciences including the evolution of the Earth's Core and geodynamo, and the formation of the Solar System. In particular, it is the estimates of ancient field intensities that allows us to solve many of these questions, from constraining theories of Solar evolution, to ideas that link the start of the geodynamo to the beginning of life on Earth. To recover ancient field intensities, we study igneous rocks that have recorded thermoremanent magnetisations (TRM) during cooling. A TRM is the remanent magnetisation recorded by magnetic minerals as they cool from above the Curie temperature (~600 C) in weak magnetic fields like the Earth's. The Curie temperature is a key parameter that defines the maximum temperature at which a material exhibits magnetisation. During TRM acquisition it is assumed that the magnetic minerals are chemically stable, and do not physically or chemically alter during cooling. Such TRMs can be stable for times greater than the age of the Universe. The magnetic mineral in igneous rocks, particularly basalts, is usually titanomagnetite Fe2.4Ti0.6O4. Basalts are ubiquitous on Earth, for example, most of the top of the ocean crust (70% of the Earth's surface) is basalt. It has been known for many decades that as Fe2.4Ti0.6O4 cools it unmixes (exsolves) into a magnetic magnetite phase (Fe3O4) and a non-magnetic ulvöspinel phase (Fe2TiO4). The unmixing has been extensively studied since the 1950s and has been shown to occur at temperatures above and below the Curie temperature. The exact temperature at which unmixing stops depends on many factors like the cooling rate, with slower cooling rates more likely to give rise to exsolution structures at low temperatures. For many years palaeomagnetists who study ancient field intensities have assumed that exsolution processes stop at temperatures above the Curie temperature, and that rocks acquire TRMs; however, there is growing evidence to suggest that the minerals continue to unmix below the Curie temperature, thereby chemically alerting and recording another type of magnetic remanent magnetisation termed a thermochemical remanent magnetisation (TCRM). This is a problem, as methods for ancient magnetic field intensity determination assume that rocks carry a TRM not a TCRM. The Earth Science community maintains a database of global ancient field intensities. Analysis for this proposal indicates at least ~51% of the 4293 intensity estimates (site-level) in the database collected over the last 60 years, could be compromised by the incorrect assumption that the magnetisation is a TRM when it is in fact a TCRM. This maybe the reason for the large scatter found in the database. Hitherto little attempt has been made to determine the effect of TCRM on ancient field intensity determination, primarily because of the complexity of the problem. In recent years the PI, CoIs, Visiting Fellow and Project Partners, have developed new nanometric imaging, numerical algorithms (MERRILL) and magnetic measurement protocols to study TRM acquisition, that now make the TCRM problem tractable. We aim to nanometrically image magnetic structures in Ti-rich iron oxides during unmixing at temperature, to allow us to understand how the magnetisation is affected by the unmixing process. We will combine this information with nanometric chemical mapping to build numerical models, using a new multiphase addition to MERRILL. The numerical model will allow us to: (1) make predictions which we will ground-truth against magnetic measurements, (2) determine the stability of TCRM on geological timescales, and (3) to determine the contribution of TCRM to ancient magnetic field intensity determinations. We will use the results to develop new ancient field intensity estimations protocols and provide corrections to legacy data.

The Fibre Optical Parametric Amplifier (FOPA) has been investigated by many research groups over the preceding thirty-five years as a potential "holy grail" of optical amplification, but has yet to evolve outside of the laboratory. The tantalising prospect of significantly increasing fibre capacity within optical systems by simply and directly employing FOPAs, each with gain bandwidth far exceeding that of the ubiquitous EDFA, has always been historically somewhat offset by a range of challenging physical barriers. Chief amongst these is the innate polarisation sensitivity of the parametric amplification process. This demands that close alignment must be maintained between the polarisation state of an incoming signal and an optical parametric pump which supplies energy to the signal via a nonlinear medium. In a DWDM system, this requirement scales extremely problematically - multiple signals of differing wavelength and in random states of polarisation (often with data carried on both orthogonal modes), must each correlate polarisation-wise with the pump or pumps to receive gain. We believe we have uncovered a ground-breaking new architecture for the FOPA which will ultimately effectively eradicate this significant hurdle, and forms the basis for this proposal's research direction. Other FOPA performance issues must also be overcome. For example, the transfer of intensity noise from the pump to the signals, and the unwanted generation of nonlinear crosstalk within the FOPA via signal-signal interactions are certainly drags on the performance ultimately achievable and will require significant investigation to minimise their effects. However, we do not consider these latter challenges to be such a considerable brick-wall against real-world operation as 'the polarisation question'. FPA-ROCS, is a focused research programme which will provide the required breakthrough to transition the FOPA from problematic laboratory experiment to an amplifier with real potential to impact across the optical communications world. This key advance will be based on our recent first experiments of an innovative FOPA design based on what we are calling the Half Pass Nonlinear Optical Loop or HPL NOL as shown in. We have recently demonstrated the world's first amplification of polarisation-multiplexed DWDM signals using this architecture , and believe it solves several of the large issues highlighted above, most notably offering polarisation independent black-box gain together with exceptional potential for significantly expanded bandwidth beyond the 20nm so far demonstrated. This potential has been outlined by separate characterisation studies undertaken by our team which demonstrated a single polarisation gain bandwidth of >110nm (i.e. 3x greater than that of the EDFA) with a gain variation across the band of only 1dB . We envisage using the HPL NOL to supply gain in regions of the fibre transmission spectrum which are currently untapped, such as at 1300nm (O-band) or 1500nm (S-band). By exploiting new bands in this way, together with considerably wider gain bandwidth per band, the capacity increase offered by FPA-ROCS will be extremely large (>500% current capability) and thus industry and, perhaps, world changing. The technology will be able to operate in parallel with existing optical communications infrastructure due to the transparency of the HPL-NOL outside its gain region (a feature not present in doped fibre amplifiers), enabling co-deployment with field-deployed EDFAs. This will enable a low-cost future upgrade path for network operators without the expensive and environmentally-unfriendly need to lay new fibre as capacity limits are approached. We envisage massively increased data throughputs from our radical redesign of the optical amplifier, allowing fibre systems to be future proofed to some degree at a UK-wide level and beyond.