Smridhi Mahajan
Many advanced materials form through self-assembly, a process in which microscopic building blocks spontaneously organize into complex structures. While we often know the initial reactants and final products, the dynamic pathway connecting the two states remains largely unknown. This research aims to achieve three-dimensional tracking of the material formation process in real time via holographic microscopy, an interferometric imaging technique that records both the intensity and phase of light. By reconstructing how particle size and composition evolve in time, this work combines optical imaging with ideas from statistical physics to […]
Jiatong Li
Photons, with their natural parallelism as bosons, low heat generation, and extremely high speed, are an ideal medium for large-scale linear operations. Therefore, photonic computing can be a promising alternative for AI-related hardware because of the neural networks’ heavy reliance on matrix manipulations . However, one major challenge is implementing efficient nonlinear operations in photonic systems. This picture changed in 2025, when Qixin Feng’s group at UC Berkeley successfully developed the Nonlinear Optical Microdevice Array(NOMA), an electro-optical hybrid device that realizes nonlinear responses with femtojoule-level energy consumption using incoherent light. […]
Kamya Malhotra
Less than 1% of the corn grown in America is eaten as corn. Over 95% is field corn, grown for livestock feed and fuel, and it consumes roughly 800,000 gallons of water per acre each season, which is enough to fill nearly two Olympic swimming pools. Corn ethanol, often marketed as a green alternative to fossil fuels, barely breaks even on its energy balance once farming inputs are accounted for. Smarter biofuels start with different feedstocks: grasses, woody crops, and agricultural residues that don’t compete with food or demand the […]
Alejandra Meza
Motivated by gravitational-wave signatures from binary mergers, my research probes the evolution of triple systems in which a binary is embedded within the gas-filled envelope of an aging single star. Massive stars commonly reside in hierarchical triple systems, where a binary is gravitationally bound to a single star. The post-main sequence expansion of the single star leads to the engulfment of the binary, initiating a common envelope episode. I investigate under which conditions these triple interactions lead to gravitational wave events with electromagnetic counterparts and how they inform the formation […]
Barbara Borcherds
By analyzing the waves generated by earthquakes as they travel through the Earth, we construct seismic tomography models. These models have helped support the theory of mantle plumes–columns of hot rock rising from near Earth’s core to the surface, driving inter-plate volcanic activity at places like Hawaii, the Canary Islands, and Réunion Island. However, many different models exist, depicting disagreements on anomalies. This summer, I will investigate five leading global models accuracy at reproducing real earthquake data recorded in the south-central Atlantic Ocean, a region rich with mantle plume activity. […]
Frank Yin
Topological phases beyond Landau’s symmetry-breaking paradigm are central to quantum many-body physics. Since analytic non-perturbative methods are often limited, their study relies heavily on numerical simulations, with tensor networks emerging as powerful tools. Fractional quantum Hall states are a paradigmatic example, traditionally studied with one-dimensional matrix product states on cylinders, while recent work has explored related chiral and bosonic phases using two-dimensional tensor networks. Here, we study interacting bosons coupled to background gauge fields using two-dimensional isometric tensor networks. This framework allows us to probe bosonic Laughlin-like phases directly in […]
Tin Htoo
Cooling and trapping molecules has applications in precision measurement and quantum simulation. Unfortunately, laser cooling, which provides a powerful tool to cool molecules to microkelvin temperatures and load molecules into traps, is only possible on a special class of molecules with favorable energy level structures. To overcome this, we are developing a new trapping method that uses ultra-high laser intensities generated inside a high-finesse cavity, deep enough to confine buffer-gas-cooled molecules at temperatures up to 10 K. However, the cavity’s near-concentric geometry makes the cavity very sensitive to vibration and […]
Jesse Hart
Multimessenger astronomy combines gravitational waves and electromagnetic observations to study cosmic events. Due to multimessenger methods, binary neutron star mergers are believed to be the progenitors of the mysterious short gamma ray bursts (sGRBs) observed in telescopes. The joint detection of a gravitational wave (GW) with an associated sGRB demonstrated the potential of GW and sGRB observations to study the progenitors and environments of compact object mergers. However, only one confirmed joint detection exists, leaving sGRB emission mechanisms and their progenitors unclear. The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) is a […]
Andrew Nguyen
In experimental sciences, effectively extracting “signals” hidden in noisy data is a constant challenge. Often, this data is “mixed” from several hidden subpopulations. For example, consider radii measurements of newly discovered exoplanets: we may not know how many distinct types of exoplanets exist, how common each type is, nor characteristics of each type (e.g., average radii). Currently, a well-established method called Non-Parametric Maximum Likelihood Estimation (NPMLE) is capable of isolating these signals. However, it extends poorly into high-dimensional data and lacks “uncertainty quantification,” (UQ) meaning that it cannot tell scientists […]
Aaron Zeng
Serpentinization is a low-temperature hydration reaction in which water infiltrates rocks rich in ferromagnesian minerals (those containing iron and/or magnesium), causing chemical alterations and producing new materials including serpentinite, brucite, etc. This reaction can cause volumetric expansion of the host rock, generating internal stress and in turn creating fracture networks within these rocks. Although such systems are well studied in terms of analyzing fracture patterns and quantifying generated stress, little research has been done regarding the influence of reaction-induced stress (RIS) on fracture development in relation to other external stresses […]