Cindy Tran

This project was built upon Ben Eater’s programmable 8-bit breadboard computer, which is built from scratch using basic electronic components. The modules are built using simple logic gates and data is transferred between the modules through the bus. The computer was initially programmed manually to understand the steps being executed, and an Arduino Nano was ultimately used to program other computations. The EEPROMs are programmed with micro-code. The instruction and step change when the clock pulses high. Based on the instruction and step, certain bits on the control word are set to high—which would execute the commands used for computations. 

This project stemmed from my interests in gravitational wave detection and quantum computers. I worked alongside two Stanford Physics Ph. D students through the Stanford FAST program to design and run one-qubit and two-qubit circuits. 

I ran the circuits on IBM’s quantum computers and simulators, experimented with different quantum circuits, analyzed results of our data, and computed the math behind our experiments. We showed how photon entanglement enhances the sensitivity of the gravitational wave detectors at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Each gate in our circuits corresponds to a certain aspect of LIGO. We initialized the 0 state to represent a photon traveling through the arms of LIGO, Hadamard gates to represent the beam splitter, an Rz gate to emulate phase shift and took z-measurements that act as the detector. 

I was a research intern at the Manoharan Lab through the Leadership Alliance's SR-EIP program. I worked alongside two Stanford Physics Ph. D students to study tungsten ditelluride using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). We were interested in tungsten ditelluride because of its unique characteristics of having chiral electron pairs, allowing for highly robust surface electrons. 

I calibrated the tip quality using gold samples, executed processes of annealing, sputtering, and field emission to clean the tip, cleaved the tungsten ditelluride samples, carried out experiments, and analyzed our data. This enabled us to atomically study the structural and electronic properties of tungsten ditelluride. 

I am currently working at LIGO on a compact squeezed light source with a Ph. D Physics student. LIGO is able to achieve its level of sensitivity for gravitational wave detection with squeezed light. However, the setup to produce squeezed light states is fairly large. Our goal is to build a compact squeezed light source that only takes up a typical optics table and use it as a quantum resource.

I am synchronizing the clocks of two FPGAs together to enable them to produce signals with the same frequency. This will eventually be implemented in the experiment to produce entangled photons.