In the midst of all the lamentations that their isn't enough spending on science outreach (read: grants to do it rather than simply doing it, like we do here) or enough spending on turning people who want to be veterinarians (insert any alternative career choice here) into scientists, young people who want to excel in science are still doing it, just like they always have.

Guerin Catholic High School senior Mark Babbey is co-author of a paper in Physical Review A on the properties of quantum particles that hop from site to site on a chain in which one site can absorb them and another can emit them, known as a PT-symmetric chain. 

The authors use a canal analogy.  A canal without tributaries has a constant flow of water. If a canal has one tributary carrying water in and one distributary carrying water out of it, the water flow in the canal will depend upon the distance between them and their sizes so they looked for the critical values of the tributary size and distance, below which the new system (a canal with a tributary and distributary) functions as the old one (just a canal).

Babbey and the team developed a MATLAB code which came up with a wide "U" shaped phase-diagram that, in the canal analogy, showed the relation between the constant-flow region and the distance between the tributary and the distributary. This diagram spurred further interest in and enabled theoretical analysis of the PT-symmetric chain problem. 

"We constructed a new model with properties that had not been previously explored. Although we didn't do this with a practical application in mind, a possible application might include novel optical or electrical devices," said Yogesh Joglekar, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics in the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue. "Going back to the canal analogy, and to oversimplify, we were not just calculating water flow, we were also calculating a variety of flow characteristics such as the water velocities at the inlet and outlet."

"Although I only had one year of high-school physics and had to learn a lot of math on the fly over the summer to do the work, it was an amazing experience and I couldn't have asked for a better opportunity. Working in a real lab, on a real project that had never been attempted before sparked my interest. This wasn't a textbook lab exercise that every other physics student had done before; this was research. Both graduate student Derek Scott, who helped me understand the math and checked my work, and Dr. Joglekar, who patiently explained to me the concepts and the importance of what we were doing, were great mentors," said Babbey.


Mark Babbey, a student from a suburban Indiana high school, at work in a laboratory in the Department of Physics in the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue.   Credit: School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University.

"Although theoretical physics research has traditionally been beyond the capability of beginning physics students and usually not tackled until the graduate level, the advent of new mathematical computing software with good user interfaces has enabled bright high-school and undergraduate students to carry out original research," says Joglekar, who was the recipient of a 2009 Indiana University Trustee's Teaching Award.

It's unusual for a high school student to co-author a paper but not unknown. Here's to young people defying stereotypes and the obstacles cultural pundits say they have when it comes to science - there is no obstacle but a willingness to learn and people patient enough to help.

Citation: Yogesh N. Joglekar, Derek Scott, Mark Babbey, and Avadh Saxena, 'Robust and fragile PT-symmetric phases in a tight-binding chain',  Physical Review A DOI:10.1103/PhysRevA.82.030103