Research Overview
My research interests and passions sit broadly at the intersection of electrical engineering and applied physics. More specifically, dealing with applied condensed matter topics such as spin physics and topological material conditions, and electromagnetic topics such as quantum optics, RF/microwave & THz physics, and photonics. The unifying focus that bridges all of these topics relates to how geometric, fabrication, and material design can govern the way we think about quantum systems, and how they can exchange energy and information.
At the core of much of this work lies a pretty simple question. When a quantum system, whether it be a single atomic defect or a collective magnetic excitation, is placed in a carefully engineered environment, what are the characteristic parameters that can determine how strongly and selectively it couples to incident light? Answering this question draws on tools from condensed matter physics, microwave engineering, and optical spectroscopy simultaneously, and requires a fluency across length scales that stretches from nanometer for thin film interfaces, to millimeter-wave resonator geometries. The applications for real-world engineering here are endless, however I have focused on this idea within the realm of thin-film quantum sensors and potential information processing architectures.
My current focus centers on hybrid quantum systems built from NV-diamond and yttrium iron garnet (YIG) thin films. This is a pairing that uniquely combines atomic-scale spin sensitivities with a quasi-macroscopic magnonic tunability. We can use electromagnetic simulation and spin Hamiltonian modeling to essentially “map” out how a device-level heterostructure geometry shapes the strength of spin-photon coupling across a certain frequency band. Microwaves happen to be an ideal candidate here, as their frequency falls nicely within magnonic resonance modes, as well as NV-diamond’s resonant frequency. However including a THz probe to drive the time resolved dynamics of attributes such as magnon relaxation times, or magnetic coupling between incident materials allows us to dig deeper into this phenomena. The realm of THz spectroscopy and field-driven dynamics is largely unexplored within this domain, and remains a research area that interests me for future topics and applications.
More broadly, I’m drawn to problems where a physicist’s instinct for fundamental mechanisms/first principles, and an engineer’s instinct for systematic design can greatly reinforce each other, as a sort of mental architecture for problem solving. The mindset follows that simulation or experimental grounded theory can greatly influence actionable design and intuition about device architectures or systems that haven’t been built yet. This is the core engineering component that interests me, and is what drives my overarching research goals at a high level.