2021 Physics Commencement Acknowledgement

Spring 2021 

Jeffrey Braun
Pamela Hernandez
Henry Jin
Ethan Klein
Alan Llamas
Siddhant Mehrotra
Zhi Peng
Aditya Sengupta
Peter Tatum
Ellie Wang
Richard Wang
Summer 2021
Eric Zhong
Physics MA Degrees
Summer 2020 
Omar Ashour
Fall 2020
Andrea Herman
Summer Zuber
Spring 2021
Jiaxi Zhao
Armin Eghdami
Burhan Ahmed

Physics PhD Degrees

Summer 2020

William Berdanier
Advisor: Joel Moore
Universality in Non-Equilibrium Quantum Systems

Vir Bulchandani
Advisor: Joel Moore 
Hydrodynamics of Integrable and Near-Integrable Quantum Systems

Yi Chen
Advisor: Michael Crommie 
Many-Body Ground States in Single-Layer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides

Elizabeth Hanson
Advisor: Stuart Bale 
Multi-Spacecraft Observations of Collisionless Shocks in the Heliosphere

John Mark Kreikebaum
Advisor: Irfan Siddiqi 
Superconducting Qubit Enabled Single Microwave Photon Detection

Robert Mcgehee Jr.
Advisor: Hitoshi Murayama 
Discoverable Matter: an Optimist’s View of Dark Matter and How to Find It

Chirag Modi
Advisor: Uros Seljak
Reconstruction of Cosmological Fields in Forward Model Framework

Daniel Parker
Advisor: Joel Moore 
Local Operators and Quantum Chaos

Pratik Rath
Advisor: Yasunori Nomura
Aspects of Holography and Quantum Error Correction

Arvin Moghaddam
Advisor: Raphael Bousso 
Aspects of Generalized Entropy And Quantum Null Energy Condition

Adam Stooke
Advisor: Pieter Abbeel, Michael DeWeese 
Advancements in Deep Reinforcement Learning: Algorithms and Implementations

Haoyu Sun
Advisor: Ori Ganor 
Number Theory in 3d Gravity and from 4d Gauge Theory

Fall 2020 

Samantha Dixon
Advisor: Saul Perlmutter
Using Empirical Models of Type Ia Supernovae to Prepare for Next-Generation Cosmological Measurements

Jeffrey Epstein
Advisor: Kranthi Kiran Mandadapu, Oskar Hallatschek
Statistical Mechanics and Hydrodynamics of Active Fluids

Justin Gerber
Advisor: Dan Stamper-Kurn
Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics with a Locally Addressable Quantum Gas

Charles Hill
Advisor: Adrian Lee
Sensitivity Simulations and Half-wave Plate Polarization Modulators for Cosmic Microwave Background Observatories

Robert Kealhofer
Advisor: James Analitis
Paths to interacting topological semimetals

Tsz Leung
Advisor: Dan Stamper-Kurn
Interacting Ultracold Bosonic Atoms in Geometrically Frustrated Lattices

Sylvia Lewin
Advisor: James Analitis
Symmetry-specific probes of strongly correlated materials: Angle-dependent magnetoresistance and resonant ultrasound spectroscopy

Chiu-Yun Lin
Advisor: Alessandra Lanzara
Symmetry-Controlled Spin Entanglement in Quantum Materials

Tairu Lyu
Advisors: Feng Wang
Dirac Fluid Physics in Monolayer Graphene

Thomas Mittiga
Advisor: Norman Yao
Sensing the local charge and strain environments surrounding Nitrogen-Vacancy centers in diamond

Meng Wu
Advisor: Steven Louie
Spin-Orbit Coupling, Broken Time-Reversal Symmetry, and Polarizability Self-Consistency in GW and GW-BSE Theory with Applications to Two-Dimensional Materials

Victoria Xu
Advisor: Holger Müller
Lattice atom interferometry in an optical cavity

Song Zhang
Advisor: Irfan Siddiqi, K Whaley
Measurement-based quantum feedback controls for quantum computation

Weicheng Zhong
Advisor: Holger Mueller
Precision measurement of the fine-structure constant with atom interferometry

Spring 2021 

Samuel Kohn
Advisor: Kam-Biu Luk
Measurement of the Neutrino Mixing Angle Theta-13 Using Neutron Capture on Hydrogen at the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment

Yen-ta Huang
Advisor: Dung-Hai Lee
Regularizability and bosonization of relativistic massless fermion

John Groh
Advisor: Adrian Lee
Design and Deployment of the Simons Array Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization Instrument

William Livingston
Advisor: Irfan Siddiqi

Da An
Advisor: Hartmut Haeffner
Electric-field noise scaling and wire-mediated coupling of remote ions in a novel elevator surface trap

Fangzhou Zhao
Advisor: Steven Louie
Topological Electronic Properties and Optical properties of Graphene Nanoribbons and Carbon Conjugated Systems

Sophie Weber
Advisor: Jeffrey Neaton
Prediction and Understanding of Functional Topological and Spintronic Materials from First Principles

Margaret McCarter
Advisor: Ramamoorthy Ramesh
Synchrotron-based techniques for studying emergent phenomena in complex oxide heterostructures

William McCormack
Advisors: Maurice Garcia-Sciveres and Marjorie Shapiro
Observation and measurement of photon-induced WW production in pp collisions at \sqrt{s} = 13 TeV using the ATLAS detector

Jacob Leedom
Advisor: Mary K. Gaillard
Topics in the Axions, Supergravity, and the String Swampland

Niladri Chatterji
Advisors: Peter Bartlett and Michael DeWeese

Vyassa Baratham
Advisor: Kristofer Bouchard
Constraining Ill-Posed Inverse Problems in Neuroscience via Biophysically Detailed Forward Simulation

Benjamin Stahl
Advisors: Alex Filippenko and Dan Kasen
Trash to Treasure: Extracting Cosmological Utility from Sparsely Observed Type Ia Supernovae

Summer 2021 

Micah Brush
Advisors: John Harte and Oskar Hallatschek
Macroecological patterns out of steady state

Venkatesa Chandrasekaran
Advisor: Raphael Bousso

Ahmet Coskuner
Advisors: Kathryn Zurek and Lawrence Hall
Dark Matter Detection Phenomenology

Siva Darbha
Advisor: Daniel Kasen

Hannah Klion
Advisor: Eliot Quataert

Jonathan Liu
Advisor: Hernan Garcia
Investigating the Dynamics of Non-Equilibrium Behavior in Eukaryotic Transcriptional Regulation

Jonathan Ma
Advisors: Patrick Naulleau, Andrew Neureuther, Naomi Ginsberg

Stephen Martis
Advisor: Oskar Hallatschek
Eco-evolutionary dynamics in high dimensions

Christopher Mogni
Advisor: Petr Horava

Stephen Randall
Advisor: Petr Horava

Pratik Sachdeva
Advisors: Michael R. DeWeese and Kristofer E. Bouchard
The impact of correlated variability on models of neural coding

Ian Shirley
Advisors: Susan Hubbard and Edgar Knobloch

Fernando Torales Acosta
Advisor: Barbara Jacak
Isolated Photon Hadron Correlations in pp and p—Pb Collisions

Tianrui Xu
Advisor: Joel Moore
Quantum Dynamics of Correlated Fermions In- and Out-of-Equilibrium