I am a Research Scientist at the Department of Physics at Yale University, working with Prof. Jack Harris in the field of optomechanics.

I started as a post-doc with Jack in August 2018. With graduate students Lucy Yu and Sean Frazier, I built an experiment to create non-classical states of massive objects (ug-mg mass) and am working toward entangling a couple of them. This work builds on the versatile optomechanical system realized by Jack with Anya Kashnakova and Alexey Shkarin — the massive object is a cylindrical chunk of superfluid Helium-4 bounded by optical and acoustic mirrors.

In September 2019, I joined forces with graduate students Judith Höeller, Parker Henry, and Chitres Guria to measure the topological structures of degeneracies that emerge in open systems (a coincidental segue to my PhD work, see below). Using 100-year-old theorems in Mathematics, we empirically demonstrated a generic topology of 3-level open systems using a ‘membrane-in-the-middle’ optomechanical platform. This work builds on the serendipitous findings of Haitan Xu, David Mason, Luyao Jiang, and the interim torchbearer Nenad Kralj.

In June 2021, I further teamed with graduate student Yiqi Wang and started working on levitating Helium drops to study optomechanics in new regimes. We also built experiments to levitate water drops, probing them with the toolset of optomechanics to shine light on unusual phases of water.

Previously
I was a Physics PhD (‘18) student at Cornell University working in the three labs of Prof. Mukund Vengalattore. My research focused on the study of open quantum systems — quantum systems that interact with their environment. Details

Even more previously
I hold a B.Tech. (2011) (equiv. to BS or BA) in Engineering Physics, with Honors, from the Department of Physics, IIT Bombay, as also a minor in Mathematics from the Department of Mathematics, IIT, Bombay.