I am incredibly honored to share that my work on the interband topological index is now published as a Letter — that’s also an Editors’ Suggestion — in Physical Review B. This project has played a crucial role in shaping my life.
I started this project as my Honors thesis in undergrad, and spent 4.5 years on it. In all honesty, I stupidly put so many things on hold – relationships, hobbies, coursework, self-care, mental health, etc – as I obsessively poured my life into figuring out real-life quantum physics applications of an abstract mathematical problem. (Happy to say that I found a second application in a different sub-field as well – more on this to come!). But yeah, without this project, I probably wouldn’t have turned into an ‘aCaDemIc‘ (eww, right?)… especially because I didn’t have grades good enough to start off as a theorist in a PhD program.
I really could not have done this without everyone who supported me throughout the years: my colleagues, my research advisor Ting, my friends, and most importantly, my family (father, mother and sister). Gosh, I would have literally dissolved into a pile of squishy undead goo without them.
Here’s the published Letter: https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.108.L081111, and here’s a free pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16893. Here’s the link to the official Twitter post: https://twitter.com/PhysRevB/status/1694143939832402258?s=20
Special shoutout to the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program reviewer who gave me a “Good” rating on my research proposal. This low rating very likely cost me the prestigious fellowship, because all other aspects of my application were very strong; and the other two reviewers gave me “Excellent” ratings for my proposal. I don’t mean to sound entitled, but it surely was a bummer that someone’s not-so-correct version of history may have gotten in the way of alleviating my quality of life, which was/is already very bad due to financial reasons. For your entertainment, this was the reviewer’s reason (\Theta is the interband topological index):
There has been substantial progress in electronic structure computations since 1998, including literature on the gauge-invariant parameter \Theta , which is more relevant to the candidate’s proposed research.
Quote from confidently incorrect NSF GRFP reviewer’s feedback.
Feel free to reach out to me to discuss anything about this, even if you are not familiar with the niche topic under discussion!
