Research

Very Long Baseline Interferometry with radio interferometers. We want to use triggered VLBI observations to do single-shot, milliarcsecond localizations of fast radio bursts (FRBs)--bright, extragalactic, millisecond-duration radio pulses. We don't know what sorts of astrophysical objects produce such brief and powerful pulses (people think magnetars, such as SGR 1935+21, are involved), and knowing their sky positions is the secret to studying their origins and adding them to the experimental cosmologist's toolbox.

Searching for beyond Standard Model particles with atomic clocks. If there are new bosons that couple weakly to electrons and neutrons, they will shift the clock's transition frequency in a predictable way when you vary the number of neutrons (i.e. look at a different isotope). Measuring the transition frequency's dependence on isotope number is called an isotope shift measurement. We measured the isotope shift in Yb+ to a precision of ~300 Hz, enabling precise probes of nuclear effects. I performed multi-configuration Dirac Hartree Fock + CI calculations, enabling us to interpret our measurements in terms of limits on the coupling to new bosons.

Testing the foundations of quantum mechanics with astronomical sources of randomness, with two collaboration papers in PRL here and here. We can do extremely rigorous tests of quantum entanglement by leveraging the fact that patches of the universe at high redshift (z ~ 4) on opposite ends of the sky have been out of causal contact with each other since the inflationary epoch of the universe's history. My undergraduate thesis, supervised by Jason Gallicchio, was on measuring and understanding the predictability of random bitstreams generated by these quasars. This is work that I did as an undergraduate at Harvey Mudd College which I continued at the University of Vienna with Anton Zeilinger.

Optical pulsar timing for fundamental tests of gravitation. Using our astronomical random number generator, we measure the light curve of the Crab Pulsar with nanosecond resolution in two observing bands. We measure the pulse arrival time difference to microsecond-level precision, and interpret it in the context of violations of the Weak Equivalence Principle. This is a particularly clean measurement because at optical frequencies, the speed of light traveling through a low density plasma (i.e. the diffuse gas of the Milky Way) doesn't depend on its color. I built the instrument, made the observations, and analyzed the data as part of my undergraduate thesis.

Estimating gravitational wave bursts using particle swarm optimization and a fully coherent, time-domain network analysis method to reconstruct the shape of the GW waveform in both polarizations in the absence of a model. I did this project as part of the fantastic NSF REU program at UT Brownsville (now, UT Rio Grande Valley) in 2014 with Soumya Mohanty.

Measuring the spatial resolution of cameras in an undergraduate laboratory, which I did as an undergrad at Harvey Mudd College as part of PHYS 53, Physics of Photography, taught by Tom Donnelly.