School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 41-60 of 72 Results
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Aaron Breidenbach
Ph.D. Student in Physics, admitted Autumn 2019
BioHello!
In my physics PhD at Stanford, I grew crystals of Zn-Barlowite. These crystals are strong candidates to be a new state of magnetic matter called a “quantum spin liquid”. Much of my thesis work was dedicated to proving that these materials have novel quantum magnetic properties through neutron scattering. This work resulted in a nature physics paper that is currently generating a lot of buzz within my subfield of condensed matter physics (https://arxiv.org/html/2504.06491v1).
This novel state of matter is interesting to us because it is a strong candidate to store memory in future large-scale quantum computers. I did some calculations, and I think that it takes roughly 10^19 bits of information to faithfully represent the intricate internal quantum magnetic state. For comparison, the human brain encodes about 10^16 bits of information.
What’s most fascinating to me about these quantum spin liquid crystals is that they also grow in nature. I will emphasize that this is absolutely anomalous for a material with such unique quantum properties. The vast majority of materials grown by my colleagues at Stanford are specifically engineered by any means necessary to have exotic quantum properties like high temperature superconductivity. My materials are arguably among the most exotic grown at Stanford, and yet they grow naturally all over the world.
Unfortunately, these crystals are currently found in waste tailings of copper mines in the Atacama desert, a cruel irony of over-extraction. My main project now is to study natural specimen and to help improve desert conditions from both an anthropological and geological perspective. Water rights remain a key issue in the Atacama, and unfortunately, mining practices have greatly elevated local arsenic levels, among other concerns. My dream is that in helping to clean up the desert that I can learn something about the future of quantum computing.
I don't update this profile very much. Please see my linked website to follow my work! -
Sinead Brennan-McMahon
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2019
BioSinead is an ABD PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and is expecting to complete her dissertation in 2024. Her research investigates ancient Roman sexual culture and where it shows up in the landscape. It focuses on displays of sexuality that do not match up to any social or political identities, including statues of Priapus, emperors portrayed as sexual aggressors and agricultural language adopted as sexual slang.
Sinead comes from Auckland, New Zealand, where she received her M.A. with First Class Honours. Her M.A. thesis examined the reception of Martial’s sexually obscene homosexual epigrams in school texts and commentaries. Using a comprehensive statistical analysis, she argued that Victorian editors of Martial’s Epigrams expurgated the text to remove references to material they found offensive and to curate a culturally appropriate view of the ancient world for their schoolboy readers.
Sinead is also interested in the Digital Humanities, Data Science and programming. As a CESTA DH Graduate Fellow, she is developing an ngram viewer tool for the Latin literary canon.
