Adam Jermyn

Much of who I am I owe to cold New England winter nights spent stargazing with my grandfather. In August of last year I visited him and was reminded that the man who inspired my love of physics and astronomy had forgotten who I was and been reduced from a brilliant mind to an empty shell by Alzheimer’s disease. That same month, my simulation of that same disease ground one of the fastest supercomputers in the world to a halt. As principal investigator of a Department of Energy grant, I burned through twenty million core hours modeling protein folding, following work with Nobel laureate Dr. Ahmed Zewail. I patched my software quickly, eager to resume the simulation, eager to help understand a problem that hit so close to home. As a physicist, I had never expected to work in biochemistry, but my ability to model molecular motion allowed us to uncover the importance of salt levels in protein aggregation, a realization that is now shaping work at the Prusiner prion lab at Stanford. My grandfather passed away in May; I find the fact that he would have been fascinated by this work comforting. My experience with protein folding helped me realize that I wanted to use physics research for broader impact. I had made a friend while auditing a graduate quantum mechanics course as a freshman, and she invited me to work on solar energy. Researching solar energy in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, I found myself immersed in a driven and optimistic community, where phrases like “go save the world!” replaced “have a nice day.” The hope in the air propelled me forward, and I developed with my friend a model for how microscopic antennas absorb light based on quantized plasma oscillations. This model is informing new high efficiency solar panel designs, and was recently submitted to Nature Communications [1] to communicate our advances to the quantum plasmonics community. Around the same time that I started working on solar energy, Prof. Jason Alicea, my statistical mechanics instructor, asked me if I wanted to work with him in the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. The question he posed to me was related to the way that many electrons can come together to produce an emergent particle known as a parafermion, which has the remarkable property of being able to remember where it has been before. In addition to understanding the importance of this problem in constructing practical quantum computers, I was fascinated by the notion of a particle that remembers its history, as well as by its emergence from millions of electrons with entirely different behavior. I knew I had to understand this phenomenon better, and in investigating this question we discovered that while parafermions are very sensitive to the surrounding world, the residual effects they leave behind when perturbed nevertheless protect quantum information. These exciting, counterintuitive results pave the way for numerous future directions in the field of quantum computing. We published this work in Physical Review B, where it was chosen as an Editor’s Suggestion [2], and I presented it at the APS March meeting this year. Traditional quantum computing is like a house of cards. Like the slightest breeze, minuscule magnetic fields or thermal fluctuations destroy its integrity. We showed that parafermions replace the cards with welded steel, protecting quantum information in the beautiful order of a parafermion. In my research I constantly find relationships which are beautiful, at least to me. In solar panels and quantum information I found millions of simple electrons synchronized in an intricate dance, while in Alzheimer’s I caught a glimpse of millions of complicated proteins packing together into simple structures. These experiences were two sides of the same coin: the interactions of many pieces create emergent phenomena completely different from any behavior

Adam Jermyn

of the individual parts. I began to see this big picture last year, around the same time that my love of astronomy was rekindled by a trip to Palomar Observatory. There I looked through one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth and saw a collection of millions of stars thirty thousand light years away. This light had been traveling since before human civilization, and seeing it with my own eyes sparked a moment of awe. This inspired my senior thesis with Prof. Sterl Phinney, in which I modeled how one star can drive winds deep in the interior of another [3]. In the process I found the kind of relationship that I loved in my past research: the same eddies drive the flow of an ocean breeze and the steam above a cup of tea and the inferno inside every sun. I was fascinated to discover how these small whirls together control the evolution of entire stars. That was the key to my thesis: fluid mechanics and heat transport in stars are ‘renormalizable’: rescaling the parameters of the system leads to the same physics, at least in certain regimes. A friend told me that I was “never as excited” as when I spoke of this work. At that point I realized that the intersection of astronomy and emergent phonemena was where I wanted to work.