Undergraduate research shines at APS March Meeting

The March Meeting is the largest annual event by the American Physical Society, which has more than 54,000 members worldwide and celebrates its 125th anniversary this year. Two undergraduates from the group of Bardeen Professor of Physics  Paul Kwiat were among IQUIST attendees at the March Meeting's poster session, attending the conference for the first time. The poster of Physics undergraduate Aarya Mehta won one of the APS Future of Physics Days Undergraduate Top Presenter awards.

“I wanted to meet a lot of other physicists—undergraduate physics majors and professors—and talk to them about their research to see what is going on in the field [of quantum information],” says Dmytro Papaianki, a fourth-year undergraduate student in Physics. His poster, “Raman Noise Measurement in Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate at Telecommunication Wavelengths,” presented the past year’s results of a research collaboration in the Kwiat group.

“This work is a part of the ‘upconversion’ project, in which we are seeking to convert two telecommunication wavelength (lower frequency) photons to a single visible wavelength (higher frequency) photon”, Papaianki explains. In particular, his poster addresses a method by which to eliminate noise which disrupts the upconversion process. Because it is at the same wavelength as the incoming (signal) photons, some of the noise will thus be mistakenly upconverted as well. In response, Papaianki’s project shifts the interfering noise to no longer affect the outcoming photons.

Papaianki enthusiastically points out future work and improvements on this successful result: “Our next work will consider different kinds of upconversion crystals—a crucial element of the experimental setup—and analyze the resultant noise in the hope of finding the material that gives the best signal-to-noise ratio.”

Another Kwiat group Physics undergraduate who attended the March Meeting for the first time is Aarya Mehta, who joined the lab last year. Mehta’s poster, “Single Photon Vision: A Quantum Optics Lens on the Human Eye,” was awarded an APS Future of Physics Days Undergraduate Top Presenter award. The collaboration includes Physics graduate student Samantha Isaac (who presented a separate poster about a different project at the meeting). “It’s been 100 years since light was understood to be quantized; now we ask if a single quantum of light, a photon, can be seen.” Mehta introduces the work’s motivation. His project studies the perception of the smallest unit of light by human subjects, who must indicate where the photon appeared in their field of vision to prove that they really saw it.

The work is not just motivated by simple curiosity, however. “If we can perceive a single photon, there is potential to reconcile quantum mechanics with ourselves (human observers). By sending light in a quantum state, we can ask our observer how they perceive quantum superposition! We could have them perform a novel ‘Human Bell Test’,” Mehta says, referring to the test that can be performed on quantum particles, showing them to be strongly entangled.

Before undertaking the next research phase, the March Meeting presented itself as a wonderful opportunity for Mehta. “It was absolutely amazing,” he concludes. “I was questioned to my wit's end and came out far more knowledgeable about my work. I was also honored with the award, for which I got cool socks!”