Calvin Leung ’17 Wins HMC’s Fourth Apker Award

Calvin Leung has been awarded the American Physical Society’s LeRoy Apker Award for outstanding research in physics by an undergraduate. The Committee cited his work ‚Äúfor development and experimental implementation of astronomical random number generators for loophole-free tests of Bell’s inequality and other applications in quantum fundamentals, astrophysics, and tests of general relativity.‚Äù

Calvin graduated with high distinction and departmental honors from Harvey Mudd College in 2017 with majors in physics and mathematics. His undergraduate thesis was supervised by Jason Gallicchio and focused on closing a potential loophole in Earth-based tests of quantum mechanics. These tests use terrestrially generated random bits to control the polarizers used to observe pairs of entangled photons. In principle, if there were some unidentified iteraction that produced the right sort of correlations in these random bits, the spooky correlations of quantum mechanics that so disturbed Einstein might be explained using local realism. To close this loophole, Calvin and Jason developed an instrument to use photons from astronomical objects in spatially remote parts of the sky to push any correlated cheating of the random bits back from milliseconds to thousands of years. Eventually, they and their collaborators hope to use distant quasars to push the frontier into the inflationary period of the early universe. The high time resolution of the instrument Calvin helped develop also makes it capable of performing precise astrophysical tests of general relativity.

This work has led to a publication in Physical Review Letters, a poster at the 2016 Sigma Pi Sigma Quadrennial Physics Conference which won the Optical Society of America’s Best Poster Award, and two additional publications, one in review and another in preparation. Calvin is currently continuing his research at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information-Vienna while pursuing other investigations in quantum optics.

In Fall 2018, he will begin his PhD in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Calvin is a member of the American Physical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a recipient of the 2016 Astronaut Scholarship, the Louise and Graydon Bell Prize, the Mindlin Prize, and the Alfred B. Focke Award. He enjoys teaching and tutored freshman and sophomore physics classes for three years at Mudd. In his spare time he likes to cook and play the cello.

See the APS website for more information on the Apker award and Calvin’s selection.