Nicholas LaRacuente

My father is Puerto Rican, having chosen to live most of his life in New York City. My mother is more mixed than I can entirely piece together - Cuban, English, Irish, German and possibly Spanish. I was born in Upper Manhattan and have lived in the same tiny apartment most of my life. Intellectualism defined the spirit of this household. Above the television hang a picture of Einstein and all around books on science of all types. Until 13, I studied in Christian schools, first Presbyterian and later Catholic. Dress was coded. Card games and dating were non-existent, then forbidden. Middle school was especially serious. This was a predominantly Hispanic institution with a focus on opening quality education to those with neither the means to afford private school nor the location to avoid the worst of New York's failing public school districts. Mistakes were too expensive there.

In contrast, four years of liberal, private school, followed by college in famously leftist Swarthmore, left me with a different experience. I was into computer hacking for some years. I wound up majoring in physics in my undergrad years. On graduation day, I thought I'd likely never return to the academic sciences. I spent the next 3 years attempting to found a startup company. This took me to Chile, where the StartupChile project helped fund this venture.

The startup failed, as usual. The world of entrepreneurs is almost a polar opposite of that in middle school - rule-bending is tolerated and even glorified, and failure is expected on the way to success. In the aftermath, though, I had a chance to re-evaluate what I was doing with my life. The simplest, easiest path would have been to return to the tech industry as a software engineer, but I could feel that it wasn't the right path for me. I needed to work on something stranger to be satisfied.

As I began to sort out my options and choose physics as the most probable path, my interest in information theory came to the forefront. The takeaway point from my interpretation of it is that we can quantify the extent to which something is informative by looking at what might have happened, comparing it to what did happen, and measuring how unexpected the actual event was, which essentially tells us how much we've learned. So, as an example, discovering that the next word in a text is "zugzwang," an obscure term for a phenomenon in certain games, tells us a lot more about that text than if the next word is "the," the most common word in English.

So what does this have to do with physics. It turns out that certain physical objects, especially exceptionally small objects like the particles that make up atoms, have an entirely new and fascinating set of rules known as quantum physics. These have their own theory of quantum information and open up an entirely new world. There are many applications of quantum physics, from the transistors that make up current computers to the next generation of quantum computers, but to me, it is fascinating enough just to imagine that such a thing exists.

My specific research this summer relates to the quantum behavior of light. Light is made of a quantum particle, the photon, that appears wave-like in large numbers. It has the capacity to carry quantum information and even create quantum "circuits." I am trying to create the quantum analog to memory, a way of saving a single photon's information for later. The challenge here is that light does not normally stop or slow down - we have to be clever about sending it on a long, winding path within a small space in order to essentially keep light in a box.