Hello Hello Hello!
Growing up in Mumbai taught me to prize curiosity, an outlook I now apply as a fourth-year Physics Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Jonathan Hood’s lab at Purdue University. I engineer optical-tweezer platforms that cool single lithium and cesium atoms to the micro-kelvin regime, assemble Li-Cs molecules, and probe exotic quantum matter one collision at a time.
If the intersection of fundamental physics and real-world quantum computing excites you too, I’d love to swap ideas either on campus, at conferences, or over a well-timed coffee.
I have summarized my projects and publications, along with all the conferences that I have participated in, on this website. You can also find blogs and poetry under philosophy, which I do in my free time!
Feel free to contact me, for any further details about the mentioned scientific projects.
Quick Links: HoodLab , Google Scholar page, CV, Linkedin page
Research Philosophy:
My goal is two-fold: advance basic science by arranging polar molecules in reconfigurable lattices and refine the building blocks that fault-tolerant quantum processors will need in the coming decade. That means perfecting cooling protocols, making molecule assembly repeatable, and translating every gain in coherence into hardware future quantum-software teams can program.
Our team captures individual lithium-6 and cesium-133 atoms in optical tweezers and cools them to a few microKelvin above absolute zero, giving us single-particle control that still feels magical even after thousands of experimental runs. The Hood group’s mission, as I see it, is to turn that control into practical quantum technology by pairing rigorous Atomic Molecular Optical (AMO) physics with inventive engineering. In this quest we not only want to achieve the goal but find an efficient route through innovative cooling/imaging techniques; a necessity as atoms only communicate in the language of resonances which is natural for particles of light i.e., photons.
The next step: we want to coax one Li atom to bind with one Cs atom and create LiCs ground state molecule, that is engineered, whose ground-state dipole moment of roughly 5.5 Debye ranks among the largest of any bi-alkali molecule. That built-in electric polarity lets neighboring molecules talk to each other over distances far larger than their size, a feature that theorists and quantum-information architects crave for fast entangling gates. Recent demonstrations of tweezer arrays now exceed six thousand coherent neutral-atom qubits, proving that the hardware can scale without sacrificing stability, and theory shows that dipolar molecules hybridized with Rydberg states can push two-qubit-gate fidelities toward the 99.9% regime. This is a slight tangent approach to the neutral atom computing platforms already leading, like for example QuEra, Inflection and Atom Computing, established to achieve quantum supremacy.