My first year as a graduate student had been a challenging one, as I had expected it to be. I took a three graduate level classes (a full load) each semester from the Chemistry and Physics departments while being a TA each semester for undergraduate Physics courses on experimental physics, one in electronics and the other in optics. I went to a number of memorable talks. I also did a lab rotation each semester, one with Wendell Hill’s ultrafast laser lab and the other with Amy Mullin’s optical centrifuge lab. During the earlier half of this year, I participated in battle assemblies with a local Army Reserves unit, before transitioning into the Individual Ready Reserve. I had also participated in the George Washington Birthday Marathon Relay and the Terrapin Triathlon. From these activities I had met many wonderful people, struggled through hardships, learned many new things and gained valuable experiences.
Due to the length of this post, I’ve broken it up into two parts, the first of which I write about my coursework and the talks and seminars I went to, and the second of which I write about my experience as a TA, doing lab rotations, and my extracurriculars.
Coursework
The courses I took this year included “Structure and Bonds of Molecules and Materials”, “Chemical Thermodynamics”, “Quantum Mechanics I”, “Statistical Physics”, “Electrodynamics”, and “Quantum Mechanics II”. Coming in the Chemical Physics program having only taken lower division General Chemistry, I knew that one of my challenges would be to get up to speed on Chemistry. This first year of coursework is meant to prepare me for the upcoming qualifying exam.
While I struggled in the Structure and Bonds of Molecules and Materials course, it helped me review basic concepts about figuring out the shape of different molecules and introduced new concepts I had never studied before (like Group Theory, vibrational spectroscopy, and transition metal complexes). It helped shape my current knowledge in Chemistry and prime me for self-study in related subjects (to include making up for the knowledge I needed but didn’t have to be able to follow Mullin’s lab).
Chemical Thermodynamics was a very theoretical course. It gave me plenty of practice writing energy and entropy in differential form, applying Legendre Transforms and using Maxwell’s relations. The next class beyond this would have been the Statistical Mechanics course offered by the Chemistry department, but due to the cancelation of the Quantum Chemistry II course, I had to replan my schedule and take the equivalent course offered by the Physics department. The Ising Model and Mean Field Theory were difficult concepts to understand, and one which I would need to review before the qualifying exam.
The rescheduling did allow me to take Electrodynamics, whose content is not part of the Chemical Physics qualifier, but I feel would prove useful in my research under Wendell Hill. In this course, I got a lot of practice with special functions that are part of an orthogonal basis set and Maxwell’s Equations. It introduced a mathematical description of the electric quadrupole, covered relativistic electrodynamics, and a lot of topics.
Perhaps the most important series of courses I took was the Quantum Mechanics series. Some of the topics covered was familiar but involved new problems and methods, while others (including but not limited to Feynman Integrals, Electrodynamics in Schrodinger’s equation, parity and time-reversal symmetry, Spherical Tensors, the Wigner-Eckert theorem, the nuclear shell model, and the quantization of the electromagnetic field) were completely new to me.
Talks and Seminars
I went to a talk given by the Professor who taught the first of the Quantum Mechanics series, Dr. Yakovenko, where he talked about his application of Statistical Mechanics to Economics, which was a very interesting talk. The most interesting fact he presented in this talk was what would happen to the distribution of wealth if everyone started out with the same amount of money, with and without debt. He came up with a mathematical model of transactions and ran a simulation which showed that the distribution would become: 1) for the case without debt, a Gaussian-like distribution with a peak near the starting money value, and a skew towards higher wealth (where the region starts to become a Pareto distribution) and 2) for the case with debt, if I remember correctly, a simple Gaussian distribution. His analysis of Census data also confirmed this for income. Along with his discussion about economic bubbles, recessions, and bail outs, it has really raised my awareness of what had been happening in the world.
I went to several Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) seminars to hear about the research that had been going on at UMD. A lot of the talks were over my head, but I remember being able follow the one on Quantum Smearing by Brian Swingle (who had also taught the Statistical Physics course I took) pretty well. I do not remember the details, but I remember him mentioning the butterfly effect and Chaos theory, which hits close to my heart, because not only did I liked the movie starring Ashton Kutcher, but I also enjoyed the undergraduate Nonlinear Dynamics course I took during a Summer session at UCLA from the Math department. In another talk, there were slides on Markorov Chains and the Linblad Master Equation, both of which I can’t begin to explain because I do not understand them.
During the lunch of one of the JQI seminar talks, I saw a posting for a talk by Sarah Eno, who happened to be the Professor teaching one of the sections in electronics that I was a TA for. Out of curiousity, I went. The talk was about experimental particle physics and Sarah was rather surprised when she saw me walk in. A lot was covered in this talk that was unfamiliar to me, but what one thing I do remember were the complicated data sets that were presented and how efforts are made in trying out different algorithms (some of which I believe were Machine Learning algorithms) to glean insights from the data. Apparently, in high energy experimental physics, a lot goes into trying to determine whether something was observed or not - something which I am starting to learn is common in experimentation in general. When the talk was over, I recognized one of the audience members to be Sara Nabili, a student whom I remember was at the Kamp Qualifier in 2017 and was a very active participant there, often using the term “monstrosity” to describe the problems we were solving.
Through and invitation by the fellow graduate student, Davy Foote (now a Ph.D. holder), of Wendell Hill’s lab I went to a dissertation talk given by a student of Jacob Taylor’s. I remember more about what it was like being there than what the talk was actually about (which I only remember had something to do with Optomechanics). While there, I recall Davy saying hi to Gina Quan, whom I remember helped me find Min Ouyang’s office during my prospective graduate student visit to UMD. The talk was set up so that the thesis committee sat in a row in the front, and among them was whom I recognized to be Gretchen Campbell, an AMO researcher at UMD that I had considered working for. There was a spherically shaped camera which was connected to a computer and appeared to had been broadcasting the talk to an audience member on the internet. The public audience consisted of maybe 15-20 people.
Due to classes, I wasn’t able to be present during Davy Foote’s official dissertation talk, but I was able to be there for his practice talk. The audience
consisted of just me and then graduate student Nightvid Cole, who gave his dissertation around the time Davy did and was also a TA for the undergraduate
experimental physics course on optics. We ran into Angela Small, the student who ran the 2017 Kamp Qualifier, on the way to the practice talk. I figured
since she worked with Wendell Hill during one of her lab rotations, it would be a good idea to invite her to the talk, but she had other things to do at
the time. The talk Davy gave was about ultrafast laser physics as well as the femptosecond-scale dynamics of atoms and molecules that such lasers probed.
There is a lot about this field that I have yet to learn, but reading his dissertation should help me get up to speed.
End of Part 1. Continue to Part 2 »