Physics at UC Santa Barbara.
Plasma physics · comets · avionics
Lumiere Research Program, mentored by Alejandro Mesa-Dame · Summer 2025
Derived the linear ideal MHD dispersion relation (slow and fast magnetosonic, Alfvén, and entropy modes) and a generalized relation unifying the Kelvin–Helmholtz and Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities.
University of Maryland, with Dr. Quanzhi Ye · Summer 2025
Enhanced telescope images and removed background stars, then estimated the comet's size and trajectory from incomplete data.
Q. Ye, T. L. Farnham, P. Cai, L. Feaga
Icarus 453, 117052 (2026)
Avionics and simulation, SB Aeronautics (UCSB) · Fall 2026 to present
Aerodynamics, stability, and mass models wired into ArduPilot SITL for simulated flight tests.
A 915 MHz Wi-Fi HaLow telemetry link, designed with a two-ray propagation model and NEC2 and FDTD antenna simulations.
The onboard Linux system (Yocto) for the Orange Pi companion computer.
Physics, B.S. · Class of 2030
Class of 2026 · Harvard Extension: Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra
2022 to 2026 · 7th in the New England District
2022 to 2026 · Drones for the Aerospace Robotics Competition
C++, Python, Java, LaTeX
Linux (Yocto), ArduPilot SITL, NEC2, FDTD
Every colour here is an electric field. The page is the flat slice z = 0 through an electromagnetic wave in three dimensions, and each pixel's red, green and blue show how strongly Ex, Ey and Ez oscillate there: how far each colour is from the background is the amplitude of that component.
Nothing is drawn directly. The screen is only a window on the slice: past every edge, and above and below the slice, space is open out to the far field. The light is ordinary light: massless, every wave moving at c, and every wave transverse, so Gauss's law holds exactly. The light comes from electric currents. One fills each side margin of the screen, the empty space beside the text, and two current sheets lie parallel to the slice, a little above and below it. The currents are shaped so that they send waves only inward, toward the text. When the page first loads they start from nothing, and send the page as a pulse timed so that all of its waves fall into step on the slice four seconds later. So nothing appears outside the margins while a page is forming, and at first nothing at all, until the light from the sheets has reached the slice. A wave tilted out of the slice can carry what a flat one cannot: the field along its own direction of travel in the plane, and Ez. So those parts of the colour arrive on steeper paths and only sharpen in close to the moment the page forms.
When you scroll, the field moves with the page, so text already formed slides along unchanged and out of the window. But the waves were held in step where the text used to be. A page that has formed is not stored anywhere: it is light flowing steadily through the slice from the sheets, every pattern carried by waves crossing at its own angle. When the currents switch to the page as it now is, they do it at once and keep running: the old light still on its way finishes crossing, and the new light is right behind it. Each pattern switches over as the last of its old light passes, broad shapes first, whose waves cross head-on, fine detail last, whose waves come in at grazing angles. Where the page has only moved, old and new agree and the text stays; text that has scrolled into view fills in, coarse shapes first, and for a moment the two pages mix. (A pulse still on its way when the page is replaced keeps going: it focuses and then spreads out of the slice and off the screen.)
Light of one wavelength cannot draw anything finer than that wavelength, and it cannot draw just anything coarser either: its phase is free, but every pattern it holds has to be made of waves crossing at real angles. So the page you see is the closest such light comes to the text, fitted for each page, and it is not quite the text. What is left over is what light really does when it is made to draw: speckle in the strokes, and small points inside them where the field cancels exactly and its phase winds around them (optical vortices), at different places for each colour, so they show as specks of the other colours. The wavelength starts at eight pixels, and the slider in the corner changes it (each change sends the page in again): a shorter one draws the page as closely as you like, a longer one leaves only the light's own patterns.