about
driven by velocity, in every sense.
i'm a motivated rising junior studying Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton, drawn to the intersection of technology, physics, and the ambition to push the limits of what's possible. whether it's harnessing light at the femtosecond scale or optimizing airflow around a rocket or airfoil, i'm interested in the science of extremes.
as of late
i just wrapped up summer research with ultrafast lasers -- which, even after two months in the lab, still feels like dystopian science fiction. i'm working under Professor Julia Mikhailova and mentor Arunava Das on the material characterization of subdiffraction laser writing of nitrogen-vacancy centers in doped diamond lattices: a quasi-classical window into quantum optics i never imagined to find myself staring through.
our work builds on the framework proposed by Prof. Mikhailova and Aleksei Zheltikov, showing that when you write a single lattice defect with a laser pulse tighter than the diffraction limit, the position of that defect can't be pinned down deterministically, rather, only described statistically, as a Poisson process. the nonlinearity of multiphoton ionization actually helps: because defect formation scales with the n-th power of laser intensity, the effective "writing spot" shrinks well below the beam waist itself. The tradeoff is that higher precision comes at the cost of a lower success rate per pulse. our project aims to test this model directly in NV-doped diamond, characterizing how precisely we can localize individual color centers as we push toward the same subdiffraction regime.
in addition, my fellow undergrad Vincent Stone '29 and i drafted a proposal for a new experiment (under guidance of Arunava) to research unexplored conduction band dynamics and carrier recombination timelines of sapphire when excited with IR light and probed with XUV light (XUV transient absorption spectroscopy) generated from gas-phase HHG, so that's pretty exciting.
how i got here
flipping through the pages of the national geographic kids magazine in the winter of 2012, six year-old me was flabbergasted by visuals of the curiosity rover landing scrawled across the pages in vivid detail. i told myself, "i'm gonna do that someday."
thus my love for space was born.
as my eyes were opened to the limitless disciplines within mechanical & aerospace engineering after freshman year of college, i began (and still continue) to seek experiences in as many fields as i could, through extracurriculars and research, with a Space Physics Lab course this upcoming semester as the next stop.
in my free time, i'm . . .
