Avi Vadali started researching at Fermilab for class credit his senior year of high school. Now that work is being published in a journal article. Photo: Avi Vadali
Quantum computing is a ripe research area for aspiring young scientists, but few find themselves authoring a research publication before higher education. This was not the case for Avi Vadali, an enterprising young researcher who sought out a research position at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory the summer before his senior year of high school. He ultimately helped author a journal article about machine learning and quantum computing that has gone through the peer-review process and will appear in Quantum Machine Intelligence soon.
It all started the summer before his senior year of high school when Vadali decided he wanted to join a research lab. “I was really into physics; I had been doing math research up until then and wanted to explore research a bit more,” he said. So, Vadali said he started reaching out to a variety of professors and researchers, ranging from academics at universities to national labs, such as Fermilab.
Responses were few and far between, but that didn’t dissuade Vadali. He said that he remembered attending a Saturday Morning Physics lecture with Fermilab scientist Gabriel Perdue. “He presented quantum computing in a really approachable way,” said Vadali, “So I thought, ‘Yeah, I’d definitely love to work with him.’”
When Perdue got Vadali’s email, he said he was glad to hear from a student who had participated in Saturday Morning Physics. The 11-week long program connects students with researchers through a series of lectures and virtual lab tours. Students who sign up are encouraged to attend all the lectures. When they complete the series, they get a certificate that they can use as part of their college application package.
When Perdue responded to Vadali’s email, he wasn’t entirely sure how much research Vadali would be able to accomplish. It wouldn’t be the first high schooler he had invited into the lab, and Perdue said he was wary about any young student’s productivity. “School needs to be their main focus,” said Perdue, “Vadali had to get A’s in all his classes, and I didn’t want to tell him to skip class to do research.”
But Perdue was pleasantly surprised; every time he threw Vadali a task, Vadali would take it and run. “He was really impressive,” Perdue said, “I basically treated him like a senior graduate student.” Rather than sit with Vadali and go line-by-line through code, for example, Perdue said that they would talk about high-level problems, and Vadali would “go off and solve them.”
The group’s research goal was to write a program that could predict if a quantum computer could reliably solve specific problems. Although quantum computers can solve problems over one million times faster than high-performance supercomputers, quantum computers suffer from high error rates. It can be risky performing incredibly complex calculations on quantum computers because the reliability of the output is not guaranteed and running the computer requires an abundance of resources.
Vadali and the Fermilab team wanted to use classical computing to predict how much error would be on a result calculated by a quantum computer. “If you’re able to get a sense of the error, you can determine if running an experiment is worth it,” said Vadali, pointing to a scenario where the predicted error is so high that running a quantum computing experiment would be pointless because the result would be completely inaccurate.
To make these predictions, the researchers built a machine-learning algorithm — the kind of computer program that uncovers nuanced patterns in data — and fed it complex datasets that embodied the kinds of problems a researcher might try to solve with a quantum computer.
“When I came in, they already had some code written,” Vadali said, “and I started doing the machine learning stuff.” Vadali had coding experience, which helped him get into the swing of things, and he’d even taken a few machine-learning classes.
Even so, Vadali said it was a “big learning curve,” figuring out the scientific jargon and how to do real research successfully. “I learned a ton about what it means to be an academic conducting research at a high level,” said Vadali. “It is really hard to get research opportunities as a high schooler, and I’m really grateful that Gabe was willing to take a chance on me.”
In total, Vadali spent about a year working with Perdue, first as a class credit and then, after graduating, working as a summer student. When Vadali was accepted into the California Institute of Technology in 2022, he said he decided to dive into research. Now his research focuses on studying fracton phases of matter, a subfield of condensed matter theory, which he said is “basically just mathematical physics.” He attributes his decision to continue research in part to his experience at Fermilab.
“Getting early experience with quantum technology, academic paper writing and being part of a research group was really, really nice for me,” Vadali said. It gave him a sense of the field and the kind of research he liked doing, he said, but also how to integrate into a research group.
He encourages other high school students to reach out to professors to experience research before going to college. “Don’t be discouraged when people don’t respond or people say no,” he said, “And when people say ‘yes,’ that’s a big opportunity; don’t let it slip by.”
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
Neutrinos are the most abundant matter particles in the universe. Lightweight and elusive, they may hold the key to answering some of the greatest mysteries in particle physics and astrophysics. But these fundamental particles rarely interact with other matter, making them extremely difficult to detect and study.
The international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, an experiment hosted by U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, promises to crack wide open the field of neutrino physics. DUNE will be the most comprehensive neutrino experiment in the world when it starts receiving the world’s most powerful neutrino beam, provided by an upgraded particle accelerator complex at Fermilab.
Lia Merminga, director of Fermilab, and Joachim Mnich, CERN director for research and computing, signed a project planning document that details CERN’s contributions to the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Photo: Dan Svoboda, Fermilab
On Sept. 11, Fermilab and the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, signed a project planning document to advance DUNE. This document follows two initial agreements signed in 2017 and 2021 in which CERN agreed to provide two large, approximately five-story-tall cryogenic vessels for the experiment. Each would house one of the DUNE particle detector modules planned for the experiment’s site in South Dakota, and each would be filled with 17,500 tons of liquid argon. The project planning document lays out the details of the equipment that CERN will provide, the quality standards it has to meet, and when it will be shipped to the United States.
Excavation of the large caverns of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility that will house the cryogenic vessels, detector modules and related infrastructure a mile underground in South Dakota is nearly 80% complete.
“The signing of the project planning document is an important milestone for the project at a timely moment,” said Joachim Mnich, CERN Director for Research and Computing, who signed the document on behalf of CERN. “The construction of components for the large cryostats — CERN’s contribution to the infrastructure of the project — is in full swing.”
DUNE will study neutrinos that are produced at Fermilab, outside Chicago, and then sent straight through earth and rock to Lead, South Dakota, 800 miles away. No tunnel is needed: Neutrinos’ ghostly nature, which makes them hard to catch with a particle detector, allows them to fly through normal matter unimpeded.
To study how neutrinos change along the way — a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillations — physicists will measure the neutrinos with a near detector hosted at Fermilab and huge far detectors in an underground laboratory at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead. DUNE will also be able to detect neutrinos from astrophysical sources such as supernovas and will search for new subatomic phenomena such as proton decay.
DUNE is remarkable for its international character: More than 1,400 scientists and engineers from over 200 institutions in more than 35 countries, plus CERN, make up the DUNE collaboration. Collaborators are contributing expertise and resources to the design and construction of the experiment, providing economic benefits to partner institutions and countries.
“This is a historic moment for LBNF/DUNE. CERN is our largest international partner, and we are grateful for their contributions to this enormous particle physics experiment,” said Lia Merminga, Fermilab director. “We are looking forward to receiving the first components of the large cryogenic vessels next year. Then the installation can begin, bringing us one step closer to physics!”
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.