Announcements

Prof. Dr. Miroshnichenko and Dr. Hattori are some of the authors of the paper entitled "Rydberg Atom-Based Sensors: Principles, Recent Advances, and Applications," published in Photonics (ISSN: 2304-6732).

Prof. Andrey E. Miroshnichenko obtained his PhD in 2003 from the Max-Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. In 2004, he moved to Australia to join the Nonlinear Physics Centre at the Australian National University. During that time, he made fundamentally important contributions to the field of photonic crystals and brought the concept of the Fano resonances to nanophotonics. In 2007, he was awarded an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship, and in 2011, a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. In 2017, he moved to the University of New South Wales Canberra and became an UNSW Scientia Fellow.  In 2019, Prof Miroshnichenko was recognized as one of the Highly Cited Researchers by the Web of Science Group. The topics of his research are nonlinear nanophotonics, nonlinear optics, and resonant interaction of light with nanoclusters, including optical nanoantennas and metamaterials.

Dr. Haroldo T. Hattori received a BSc (with honors) and an MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in 1998. He worked for Alcatel in Brazil and Spain on the development of optical fiber systems. From 1994 to 1998, while at Virginia Tech, he analyzed specialty optical fibers to reduce nonlinear effects in long-haul optical communications links. He worked as an assistant professor at ITA, where he conducted research in fiber Bragg gratings (for telecom and sensing applications). Between 2002 and 2005, he conducted research in the area of photonic crystals and microdisk lasers at the University of Glasgow and Ecole Centrale de Lyon. Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Engineering and Technology, UNSW Canberra. He is currently working with active opto-electronic devices (e.g., photodetectors, plasmonic devices, and lasers) and quantum sensing. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Association, Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Senior Member of Optica. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics.

1. Could you give us a brief introduction about yourself and your current research topic to our readers?

Prof. Dr. Miroshnichenko’s background is nanophotonics, with an emphasis on the resonance structures, dielectric structures, and metal surfaces, and together with Dr. Hattori, they have started looking into the time-dependent aspect of time-variant constructions, such as metasurfaces and Rydberg systems. This paper was about this special type of setup, where all the expertise can come together, and that is leading to more practical outcomes for those specific setups.

Like Prof. Dr. Miroshnichenko, Dr. Hattori also works with photonics and is more focused on devices such as photodetectors and sensing platforms at the moment. He has started exploring this new area of photonics since the middle of 2025. The whole Rydberg setup is operational now, and we hope to publish more work in MDPI and other venues.

2. Could you describe the difficulties and breakthrough innovations encountered in your current research?

We have a lot of experience in photonics, but we have begun working in this area recently. It turns out that there are not many groups actually involved in this area, and we see many opportunities, which is why we now want to focus and direct all our resources and attention to this specific field of sensing and setups. This allows us to get access to a specific type of measurement or sensing for different types of environments in different spectral ranges; this includes picking up very weak signals for different types of applications, including sensors, electromagnetic fields, spectral ranges, and communications. This is because a Rydberg setup can be thought of as a small, atom-sized antenna that can sense fields. This means it has a very high precision and unlocks various opportunities because it is not only a sense of the amplitude, like most sensors operate, but it is actually collecting all the properties, including the phase and polarization, which gives you full information about the electromagnetic environment, and it does not disturb the field. That means that for communication applications, you can actually kind of eavesdrop on what is going on without being noticed, and nobody will be able to detect your presence. So it is really unique in the setup there. Plus, given its small size, there is a possibility to get the current broadband spectral ranges up to terahertz.

In the beginning, it was very hard to start working on this topic because it is quite a defense-related area, and there is not much available information in journals and papers. So, we started small, working with a few megahertz, having reached 6 gigahertz, and trying to reach 10 gigahertz in the near future. We also started talking with big labs, and we got a positive response from agencies like NASA, which are interested in this topic for space applications.

3. What do you hope that readers will get from your paper?

This paper was more like an overview of the fields, with some inclusion of our results in there, because at first we were interested in the educational aspect, as we wanted to enter the field and observe what is available, known, and new, and what the current questions are in the field. As Dr. Hattori mentioned, it turns out that not much information is available. We found that general physics is known for such a mechanism and noticed that if you want to build it up yourself, there are many tricks and details you need to take care of. For us, it was a bit of a challenge to decipher it in the available literature. When we collected it, we wanted to present it in a way that the reader not only understands the process and mechanism but also knows how to replicate it and how to build a setup, and also understands how and what they can do with it and what it is useful for, such as the particular range of applications it can unlock. Our task was also actually how to fit first, as Dr. Hattori mentioned, into the existing benchmarks, so that we can obtain the results and what is published at the moment, but also to see how we can expand it right when we are focusing on a specific range of applications.

Of course, we were lucky to get some initial funding from our university in order to build this setup and construct this system, as it requires very special lasers with very narrow bandwidths, which are quite expensive.

4. Do you have any advice or experience that you would like to share with young researchers who want to pursue research in this field?

Being scientists, we want to find an exciting topic so that we can deliver not only new but also useful results in terms of applications, and the reason why we are actually focusing now on this type of application is that we see the huge potential this setup actually can bring us. We found that by building and fine-tuning it, you can unlock a high sensitivity, and the broadband-type devices can be used for different purposes for sensing fields like encrypted communications and monitoring electromagnetic environments. Currently, our setup is free space, which means that it is bulky and occupies the full optical table. The main goal for the future is to actually come up with an integrated kind of portable version, which later can be pulled either on the mobile platforms like UAVs or drones, and where you can start sensing large areas with high precision, and even intra-satellite communication and space applications, and defense, intelligence, and counterterrorism as well. We also wanted to know what is necessary in the calibration of the electromagnetic products.

At the same time, as a scientist, you need to focus on your goal and also keep in mind your limitations and boundary conditions, and not forget that other researchers or competitors may be working in the same area you are looking at. Having said that, a hard-learned lesson is that ‘you will never succeed if you don’t take calculated risks’ (Richard Branson), so you need to try different things until you succeed.

We also think that there will be some useful outcomes in the future, and that is why we want to be able to demonstrate, represent, and share them with the research community.

5. How were you first introduced to Photonics? What is your impression and experience with our journal?

We have been working with MDPI for a few years now. We were contacted initially, and so far our experience and communication with different journal editorial teams have been pleasant and successful in terms of the publishing experience; this also applies to our involvement as Academic Editors.

For this particular paper published in Photonics, we got a really short turnaround time between the submission time, review reports collection, and even the acceptance, followed by the publication being online. The short timeframe and effectiveness of the editorial process were two of the key factors that made us decide to submit to the journal.  Sometimes the deadlines were quite short, but with the help of our co-authors, we managed to handle this aspect in a timely manner. We found that the reviewer comments were very insightful, which led to the paper being improved in a good way; we found the reviewers to be very collaborative and not combative.