In a consortium led by Heriot-Watt with St Andrews, Glasgow, Strathclyde, Edinburgh, Dundee, Huddersfield and NPL, the "EPSRC CDT in Use-Inspired Photonic Sensing and Metrology" responds to the focus area of "Meeting a User-Need and/or Supporting Civic Priorities" and aligns to EPSRC's Frontiers in Engineering & Technology priority and its aim to produce "tools and technologies that form the foundation of future UK prosperity". Our theme recognises the key role that photonic sensing and metrology has in addressing 21st century challenges in transport (LiDAR), energy (wind-turbine monitoring), manufacturing (precision measurement), medicine (disease sensors), agri-food (spectroscopy), security (chemical sensing) and net-zero (hydrocarbon and H2 metrology). Building on the success of our earlier centres, the addition of NPL and Huddersfield to our team reflects their international leadership in optical metrology and creates a consortium whose REF standing, UKRI income and industrial connectivity makes us uniquely able to deliver this CDT. Photonics contributes £15.2bn annually to the UK economy and employs 80,000 people--equal to automotive production and 3x more than pharmaceutical manufacturing. By 2035, more than 60% of the UK economy will rely on photonics to stay competitive. UK companies addressing the photonic sensing and metrology market are therefore vital to our economy but are threatened by a lack of doctoral-level researchers with a breadth of knowledge and understanding of photonic sensing and metrology, 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 this high-growth, export-led sector whose products and services have far-reaching impacts on our society. The proposed CDT will train 55 students. These will comprise at least 40 EngD students, characterised by a research project originated by a company and hosted on their site. A complementary stream of up to 15 PhD students will pursue industrially relevant research in university labs, with more flexibility and technical risk than in an EngD project. In preparing this bid, we invited companies to indicate their support, resulting in £5.5M cash commitments for 102 new students, considerably exceeding our target of 55 students, and highlighting industry's appetite for a CDT in photonic sensing and metrology. Our request to EPSRC for £6.13M will support 35 students, with the remaining students funded by industrial (£2.43M) and university (£1.02M) cash contributions, translating to an exceptional 56% cash leverage of studentship costs. The university partners provide 166 named supervisors, giving the flexibility to identify the most appropriate expertise for industry-led EngD projects. These academics' links to >120 named companies also ensure that the networks exist to co-create university-led PhD projects with industry partners. Our team combines established researchers with considerable supervisory experience (>50 full professors) with many dynamic early-career researchers, including a number of prestigious research fellowship holders. A 9-month frontloaded residential phase in St Andrews and Edinburgh will ensure the cohort gels strongly, equipping students with the knowledge and skills they need before starting their research projects. These core taught courses, augmented with electives from the other universities, will total 120 credits and will be supplemented by accredited MBA courses and training in outreach, IP, communication skills, RRI, EDI, sustainability and trusted-research. Collectively, these training episodes will bring students back to Heriot-Watt a few times each year, consolidating their intra- and inter-cohort networks. Governance will follow our current model, with a mixed academic-industry Management Committee and an International Advisory Committee of world-leading experts.

The vision of the Hub is to create ground-breaking embedded metrology and universal metrology informatics systems to be applied across the manufacturing value chain. This encompasses a paradigm shift in measurement technologies, embedded sensors/instrumentation and metrology solutions. A unified approach to creating new, scientifically-validated measurement technologies in manufacturing will lead to critical underpinning solutions to stimulate significant growth in the UK's productivity and facilitate future factories. Global manufacturing is evolving through disruptive technologies towards a goal of autonomous production, with manufacturing value-chains increasingly digitised. Future factories must be faster, more responsive and closer to customers as manufacturing is driven towards mass customisation of lower-cost products on demand. Metrology is crucial in underpinning quality, productivity and efficiency gains under these new manufacturing paradigms. The Advanced Metrology Hub brings together a multi-disciplinary team from Huddersfield with spokes at Loughborough, Bath and Sheffield universities, with fundamental support from NPL. Expertise in Engineering, Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science will address the grand challenges in advanced metrology and the Hub's vision through two key research themes and parallel platform activities: Theme I - Embedded Metrology will build sound technological foundations by bridging four formidable gaps in process- and component-embedded metrology. This covers: physical limits on the depth of field; high dynamic range measurement; real-time dynamic data acquisition in optical sensor/instruments; and robust, adaptive, scalable models for real-time control systems using sensor networks with different physical properties under time-discontinuous conditions. Theme II - Metrology Data analytics will create a smart knowledge system to unify metrology language, understanding, and usage between design, production and verification for geometrical products manufacturing; Establishment of data analytics systems to extract maximal information from measurement data going beyond state-of-the-art for optimisation of the manufacturing process to include system validation and product monitoring. Platform research activities will underpin the Hub's vision and core research programmes, stimulate new areas of research and support the progression of fundamental and early-stage research towards deployment and impact activities over the Hub's lifetime. In the early stage of the Hub, the core research programme will focus on four categories (Next generation of surface metrology; Metrology technologies and applications; In-process metrology and Machine-tool and large volume metrology) to meet UK industry's strategic agenda and facilitate their new products. The resulting pervasive embedding and integration of manufacturing metrology by the Hub will have far reaching implications for UK manufacturing as maximum improvements in product quality, minimization of waste/rework, and minimum lead-times will ultimately deliver direct productivity benefits and improved competitiveness. These benefits will be achieved by significantly reducing (by 50% to 75%) verification cost across a wide swathe of manufacture sectors (e.g. aerospace, automotive, electronics, energy, medical devices, optics, precision engineering) where the current cost of verification is high (up to 20% of total costs) and where product quality and performance is critical.

Optical metrology plays a vital role in an astonishing array of important research areas and applications, from basic science discovery to material processing, medicine, healthcare, energy, manufacturing and engineering. Optical metrology instruments are normally large, heavy structures that require a well-stabilised environment to maintain accuracy, stability and functionality. These physical and functional features prevent optical metrology from moving into future smart and autonomous applications across many sectors. The proposed programme aims to challenge fundamental barriers to the use of optical measurement techniques in highly integrated, smart and autonomous 'Industry 4.0' metrology applications and emerging nanotechnologies, by establishing a unique, world-leading research collaboration in the UK that brings together advanced metrology and nanotechnology. It will translate the latest advances in nanophotonics, plasmonics and metamaterials research, in which the UK has played an internationally-leading role, into metrological applications. This will have a transformational impact on optical metrology by enabling cheaper, smarter and much more compact solutions. Research will be channelled through three complementary streams: 1. Nanophotonics-enabled components for metrology. This strand of the programme will draw on the wealth of recent fundamental developments in nanophotonics, for example, the fact that surfaces patterned with subwavelength-sized features can offer exquisite control over the wavefront of propagating light. Replacing one (or several) bulky element(s) with a single surface that carries out the same (combined) function offers hugely significant savings in size and weight, complexity and robustness (e.g. against misalignment), and opportunity to develop new measurement functionalities and instrumental configurations that are not otherwise possible. 2. Novel metrology concepts for nanotechnology. We will develop two ground-breaking ideas for metrological technologies: (1) The "optical ruler", which allows for non-contact displacement measurements with potentially sub-nm resolution using a sensor that could ultimately be manufactured on the tip of an optical fibre; (2) An approach to dynamic "nano-motion imaging" based upon the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) platform, to spatially map high-frequency nano- to picometre amplitude movement. 3. Novel metrology tools for manufacturing and nanotechnology. Using the nanophotonic components and concepts described above, we will develop novel metrology tools and measurement techniques to perform in real-world, as opposed to laboratory, conditions. Target applications will include, for example, surface/geometric metrologies compatible with manufacturing tools such as diamond turning machines and multi-axis (sub-) nanometric displacement encoding for translation stages. This programme will bring together the expertise of world-leading research groups in metrology and nanophotonics, with key industrial project partners including Renishaw and Taylor Hobson. Together, we aim to address long-standing challenges for optical metrology and to develop new, disruptive metrological technologies. These advances will be vital to support the high-value manufacturing sector in the UK. The impact of this work, however, will be felt across a far broader range of disciplines, as size and weight are significant issues in, for example, instrumentation for space science, optical instrumentation for surgical applications, and robotic arm-mounted instruments.

Since the beginning of humanity our societies have been based on commerce, i.e. we make things and we sell them to other people. Relatively simple beginnings led to the Industrial Revolution and now to the technological age. Over-generalising, the Far East are currently the masters of mass manufacture and the West are (or wish to be) the masters of advanced manufacture - the production of high-value goods, often involving a significant degree of innovation. To be able to manufacture goods in a cost-effective, environmentally-sustainable manner, quality control procedures are required. And quality control in turn requires an appropriate measurement infrastructure to be in place. It is a sub-set of this measurement infrastructure that is the subject of this fellowship. The UK government has been investing heavily in advanced manufacturing. In the academic arena, there are the sixteen EPSRC Centres of Innovative Manufacturing. To ease the pain of transferring academic research to the manufacturing sector, there are the seven High-Value Manufacturing Catapults (the Manufacturing Technology Centre being the main one of note here). For industry, there are a number of funding initiatives and tax breaks. To support this burgeoning UK advanced manufacturing infrastructure, there are a small number of academic centres for metrology - those based at Huddersfield and Bath are the main players. And, at the top of the measurement tree, there is the world-class National Physical Laboratory - a centre of excellence in metrology. But, there are still some gaps in the manufacturing metrology research jigsaw, and the aim of this fellowship is to plug those gaps. Coordinate metrology has been used for decades in the manufacturing industry as the most dominant form of process control, usually employing tactile coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). However, due to the slow speed of tactile systems and the fact that they can only take a limited amount of points, optical CMMs are starting to flourish. On the smaller scale, there are many optical surface measuring devices that tend to be used off-line in industry. When making small, high-precision, complex components, with difficult to access geometries, it is a combination of the surface measurement systems and the CMMs that is required. This requirement is one of the main aims of the fellowship - to develop a suite of fast, high-accuracy, non-contact measurement systems, which can be employed in industry. These principles will also be applied to the field of additive manufacturing - a new paradigm in manufacturing which is seeing significant government support and, in some cases, media hype. As with high-precision components, a coordinate metrology infrastructure for additive manufacturing is required, in many cases in-line to allow direct feedback to the manufacturing process. This is the second field of metrology that the fellowship will address. The outputs of the fellowship will be in the form of academic publications; new measurement instruments, along with new ways to use existing instruments; methods to allow manufacturers to verify the performance of their instruments; and the necessary pre-normative work that will lead to specification standards in the two fields (currently lacking). The academic world will benefit from the fundamental nature of elements of the research, and the industrial manufacturing world will benefit from the techniques developed and routes to standardisation. But, ultimately, it will be the UK citizens that will reap the greatest benefit in terms of new and enhanced products, and the wealth creation potential from precision and additive manufacturing.

We propose a Centre for Doctoral Training in New and Sustainable PV. It will support the transformation of PV in the UK will that will in turn aid the country to achieve its renewal energy obligations, and will generate jobs in the technology sectors as well as local manufacturing and installation. The CDT allows for the distributed nature of PV research in the UK with a multi-centre team of seven partners covering all aspects of PV research from novel materials through new device architectures to PV systems and performance. The PhD projects and training span engineering and physical science expertise in materials and device physics, electronic engineering, physical and synthetic chemistry, operations management and manufacturing. The CDT graduates will be capable of transforming state of the art R&D across the PV technologies and, in so doing, contribute to the production and implementation of improved PV products and systems. All partners are members of the SuperSolar Hub and hence already coordinate integrated PV research and training. Students in the CDT will join a thriving research community. The team has unrivalled access to shared facilities in the best state of the art laboratories in the UK. Our group approach brings together expertise with a breadth and depth for training and research that could not be assembled in any other way. Moreover, the collaboration allows us to cut across the traditional boundaries in PV and enables exciting research vectors to be followed in New and Sustainable PV CDT agenda. International collaborations and formal exchange agreements will emphasise the global aspects of advanced research that are important for the development of a leadership group. The CDT members will interact with related research themes such as photochemical conversion of fuels for energy and other applications, and heating and cooling by solar radiation and will be a proactive member of the UK wide Network of Energy CDTs. Our goal is to train the best researchers with a flexible mindset able to communicate across different disciplines and be leaders in the emerging PV industry for advanced technologies. We will provide the training required for graduates to join the sustainable energy and PV sectors. We will establish a real identity of purpose and commonality in each cohort through a training programme designed to give students an understanding of all aspects of PV, including implications for society and an experience of a commercial environment. Students will be provided with a bespoke curriculum and training programme that exposes them to: (i) underpinning fundamentals across all the relevant disciplines, (ii) current state-of-the-art in knowledge and challenges in scale-up and systems, and (iii) unparalleled opportunities to engage in leading-edge interdisciplinary research projects as part of a national team. We will create a doctoral training environment in which students benefit from leading academic expertise and world-class facilities to develop their knowledge as well as the tools to innovate and create within their selected research theme. The unique cross functional skill-sets that our graduates will have will make them highly valuable to the academic community seeking to address ambitious basic manufacturing research challenges, and to industry, who have an urgent need for appropriately trained scientists and engineers able to support PV technologies within their commercial operations. To allow the students the chance to develop a common sense of purpose, each cohort will attend training events together. Courses will cover fundamental aspects common to all PV technologies and also advanced courses based on the partners' research expertise. There will be industrial and international placements. Coherence across the CDT will be aided by a virtual collaboration medium containing webinars and video lectures and pages where students and staff can collaborate via groups, and online forums.