A former QCSYS student was awarded the CAP Physics Prize and Excellence Award – Senior Silver Medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair 2015 in Fredericton, New Brunswick for a project that he did with IQC researchers.
Twesh Upadhyaya first heard about the Quantum Cryptography School for Young Students (QCSYS) while attending a workshop at Waterloo Unlimited that was being given by Senior Manager, Scientific Outreach, Martin Laforest. He applied and was one of the 42 high school students that attended QCSYS in 2014. It not only gave him an introduction into research at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), but also connections to researchers at IQC.
With those connections he was able to work with faculty member Michal Bajcsy and his team to develop his project for the Canada Wide Science Fair (CWSF) that won him the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) Physics Prize. In January he visited Michal and had a tour of his lab. After an introduction to nanoscale optics, Twesh stayed in touch with Bajcsy’s group and had access to the lab computer and use of the simulation software Lumerical. “They were very patient and provided me with great advice,” said Upadhyaya. “I found Professor Bajcsy and PhD student Jeremy Flannery very helpful.”
Upadhyaya was trying to figure out if there was a way to selectively reflect light with a given polarization using photonic crystal membrane in silicon nitride. Conventional mirrors reflect both polarizations of light the same way, however there are ways to control the reflections and what passes through. This type of crystal could have applications as a component of an all-optical, single-photon transistor. According to Bajcsy, “Twesh was very quick to pick up on the content and was confident enough to work on his own.”
Now that Upadhyaya has finished grade 12 at Bear Creek Secondary School in Barrie, he’ll be heading to the University of Toronto in the fall. Upadhyaya will study Engineering Science and hopes to apply to the Undergraduate School on Experimental Information Processing (USEQIP) to learn more about quantum information.