Week 5: Full Speed Ahead

At the beginning of the week I still did not have my badge. The main reason being that my fingerprints were taken late, and I guess things were just working a little slow. I walked over to Tatte for some focused work time where I worked on the matrix representation of the Jaynes-Cummings Hamiltonian. I wanted to program a code to do this for us to make things easier/quicker when working in the Polariton Basis, but I ran into challenges of telling the computer the properties of each operator. The code is close, but it’s not quite there yet. I got far on the matrix representation, then walked back to Amsterdam Hall for a meeting with Jared, Giussepe, and two of our team members from West Virginia University. Dr. Alan Bristow and Hunter Louscher visited for 3 days at NIST to see the lab and to collaborate with us. Since I couldn’t go in, I attended meetings virtually. Giussepe did a few short lectures on Feynman Diagrams in the Polariton Basis so that we can tackle our goal in a different way. I like both methods of approach and I think understanding both very concretely will take us far.

I met up with the interns later that evening for ‘Astronomy on Tap’ at DC9. There were three speakers with presentations about Heliophysics, Exoplanets, and Black Hole Jets. We all participated in Bingo and Trivia and it was tons of fun!

As I continued working through the JC Hamiltonian Matrix, I refreshed myself on some linear algebra. I was able to find an expression for the energy of the Upper and Lower Polariton, and presented it to Giussepe.

Later on, I went to Julia and Eva’s room for a charcuterie board night, only the board was a table because – budget. It was fun hanging and chatting with everyone and it’d be great to do it again!

On Wednesday I logged into a meeting (remotely) again, but I was pleased to find out that Jared had received notification that my badge was ready! Giussepe went over putting the diagrams together and how to read them to get an expression, and I was told to prepare to come into NIST the next day.

After that exciting news, some of us went kayaking on the Potomac with the Potomac Conservancy. We had two hours to row wherever our heart desired. We played music, took many photos, and saw some flying fish. We all plan to go again in a week from now :).

In the morning, I made the long commute to NIST but I didn’t mind since I had been working from home for 3-ish weeks. I went to the badging office and they took my photo and handed the badge over. I was so excited to see Jared and Giussepe in person, and I got to meet another new intern, Audrey. I started working on the diagonalization of the JC Matrix and then went to a meeting with the team. This was our last session of Feynman Diagrams since Giussepe left for Italy the next day. Before he left, we talked for an hour in his office about the Polariton Basis and using the diagonalized matrix for future analysis. He recommended that I plot the energy I found so I can visualize what is happening, so here it is:

The next day, Ben, a former intern, came to visit me in DC. We went to the ‘Drink for America’ Bar Crawl as we had last summer, and we had an amazing time. I introduced him to all of the interns and we talked about our future plans and what’s been happening since we last saw each other. I also DJed at one of the places for a little bit which was – so fun.