Quantum Mechanics

Aswar Chennapraganda is an 11th grade student from Delhi Public School Nacharam, Hyderabad, India. He is interested to major in Physics/Aerospace Engineering, and decided to dabble his hands on quantum mechanics in this research mentorship program.

Aswar has huge interest in web development and machine learning projects. He is proficient in programming languages of C, C# and Python. He has represented his school for technological festivals in Raspberry Pi Smart Parking Lot and Arduino Rocket Stabilization System. He takes on a quantum mechanics research coded a range of models.

Scope of the program

Overall structure

Each session was divided between the following topics: General concepts of Quantum Mechanics Applications to Condensed Matter Physics Short Computational Physics Project Developing scientific reading skills

Learning objectives

The mentor and Aswar covered fundamental questions of Quantum Mechanics with modern day applications and easily solvable computational questions. This included, but was not restricted to, the Shrodinger equation, particle wave duality, magnetism and Bragg scattering.
The main goal was to provide context and motivation to learn complicated physical concepts without getting into mathematical concepts unfamiliar for.

What challenges did he face?

He would like to grasp a higher level of theoretical physics in preparation for university in the near future.
He was trying to advance his Python skills to plot more useful statistical graphs, which will be helpful for his coursework when he goes to university.

How did our program help him?

He managed to understand and calculate concepts of Quantum Mechanics that are normally taught at undergraduate college level. That jump in knowledge is certainly challenging!
He explored more in details and managed to run computational calculations applied to Condensed Matter Physics.

Student Testimonial

“I am very grateful for this opportunity to learn from such an experienced and professional mentor, Dr Alberto, who guided me over these two months to learn a lot about computational, quantum, condensed matter physics. This mentorship program changed my overview about physics and gave me a lot of insight into what studying physics is like at the undergraduate level and how python coding is used in physics experiments and research.

I started these sessions with 0 knowledge about quantum mechanics or condensed matter physics and my mentor made everything very easy and intuitive to understand in his lectures sometimes referring to his own experiments and projects too to help me get a better understanding of the topics.

Our homework mainly consisted of applying the theory taught during the sessions into practical coding projects which mainly consisted of performing computations and plotting results in graphs.

……….

To conclude I would like to state this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I am forever grateful to all parties involved for making this possible. I would finally like to thank my mentor for guiding me in these sessions and for always being there to clarify my doubts, my mentor’s lectures were always clear and to the point and I was able to understand all the concepts being taught and apply them in the coding projects, I was also able to solve some undergraduate quantum mechanics problems on my own after the lecture thanks to my mentor, I was always very interested in this field but never had the opportunity or guidance necessary, until this mentorship program.“
Aswar Chennapraganda

Matched professor in Physics:

A Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Physics at Brown University. He has been a referee for Physical Review X, Physical Review Letters, Physics Review B and Physical Review Materials since 2016.

Recommendation letter

Based on your knowledge of this student, would you recommend this student to selective universities?

“Yes. His intelligence, work ethic and dedication will help him succeed at any university. Aswar was an incredibly polite and a very smart student. He answered pointed questions and solved his homework/computational project with ease. Excellent student that will do well at any top University.“
Mentor from Brown University