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Coronado High School (CHS) junior Abraham Berke has a passion for spending time in the family garage lab he has developed over the past six years. It is filled with tools and supplies he acquired from eBay, Amazon, chemical and electronics supply companies, fellow scientists, and the local hardware store. Abraham states, I consider myself to be a lab rat.

His path as a maker and a researcher began at age 10, building an electric Nerf gun with his dad at the kitchen table. His first projects in his Coronado garage workshop/lab were building remote controlled planes and experimenting with ultrasonic sensing. He built an Ultrasonic Radar (affectionately named Andy), and a remote-controlled cereal dispenser for his middle school science projects. More recently, he has been experimenting with laser power transmission.

As an AP Physics 2 student during the Fall 2022 term at CHS, Abraham sent a letter to over 100 physics research labs in Southern California expressing his interest in an internship. He reported that 20 of those labs responded no, three yes, and I was invited to interviews at SDSU, UCSD, and USD. I visited all three.

Abraham was also invited to collaborate with the Campbell Research Group in UCLAs Physics and Astronomy Department. With guidance, and tools and supplies they sent to him, he designed and built his own Paul trap, a device used in physics research to trap and study charged particles. Physicist Wolfgang Paul developed the ion trap technique in the 1950s, and he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 for that work. After Abraham sent the Campbell Group images of oscillating dust particles which he trapped and filmed, they gave him a congratulatory write-up in a March 6, 2023 post on their website (https://campbellgroup.physics.ucla.edu/index.html).

According to the UCLA Physics Departments Campbell Group website, Trapped ions offer a premiere platform for testing and manipulating isolated quantum systems. Atomic clocks, quantum sensors, and matter-wave interferometry all require exquisite isolation from the decohering effect of their environment. The website explains that isolating these systems enables researchers to see nature as it behaves according to the rules of quantum mechanics. Abraham further clarified that quantum mechanics describes the behavior of particles and energy at the subatomic level. Thus, its effects are not directly observable on a human scale because they tend to average out and become negligible when observed at larger scales, where classical physics laws apply instead. Because of this, the behaviors predicted by quantum mechanics are only observable on the microscopic level.

Abraham is observing and photographing particle behavior in his trap to learn how quantum mechanics principles work. The Paul trap he built sits on a laser table which came to him from a physics PhD student who no longer needed it. The laser table provides a vibration-free work surface for conducting experiments in optics, laser technology, and for Abraham, studying how charged dust particles behave when trapped and isolated from the cacophony of our everyday world.

This is the pride of my work so far, he stated, explaining, In quantum computing, you use an analogous system on a much smaller level to trap individual atoms. My trap is not really meant to discover new things; this is a teaching apparatus. It can really help me to see the system that is used on a quantum computer and understand that. It can also help me understand how charged particles react to a changing electric field. It is useful for understanding electrodynamics. Quantum computing is a cutting-edge field with promise for revolutionizing studies in finance modeling, customized healthcare treatments, cybersecurity, transportation, and more.

This summer I will intern at the UCSD Photonics lab. It is run by Prof. Tenio Popmintchev. In 2016, Dr. Popmintchev worked on his PhD in one of the top physics labs studying ultrafast lasers at University of Colorado, Boulder, and participated in making the first tabletop Xray laser. Ultrafast lasers have many research applications because they can freeze atoms and molecules by illuminating them with flashes that pulse on the order of attoseconds, or billionths of a billionth of a second. In a 2016 ScienceNews article, Dr. Popmintchev said, The same kind of revolution that happened with lasers in the 1960s is happening now in X-ray science.

Abraham is excited to be participating in that revolution. Under a sign on the wall of his lab that reads, Have fun. Dont die. signed by a graduate student in the UCLA Campbell Lab, Abraham mindfully continues his experiments. He will keep sharing his work with university physics researchers when possible. Next year, he plans to apply to research universities as a physics major.

VOL. 113, NO. 15- Apr. 12, 2023

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CHS Student Experiments With Hands-On Quantum Science In ... - Coronado Eagle and Journal