Junior Muhammad Awal Tahiru has always been fascinated by time.
“I’ve been thinking about it for God knows how long,” Tahiru said. “What is this thing? What is time? Why is it so elusive? Why do people think it’s an illusion?”
Tahiru’s project for this year’s Student Undergraduate Research Forum is focusing on how small-scale things move and how to bridge together quantum physics and classical physics.
Classical physics deals with the predictable behavior of human-scale objects; whereas, quantum physics deals with probabilities of the smaller, atomic world of particles. These two types don’t always fit together, according to chair of the department of physics and astronomy Martin Kamela, who served as Tahiru’s research mentor.
“It’s bizarre that, at small-scale, the rules that we are used to from classical mechanics don’t exactly work,” Kamela said. “So Muhammad’s project was basically to try to model how an object would move if it got a little bit more energy.”
Tahiru’s SURF project tried to help explain quantum physics in more digestible terms.
“A lot of these things that are happening in the quantum world, like maybe tunneling or superpositions and all those things, they don’t have classical outlooks,” Tahiru said. “It’s not something that’s intuitive because it doesn’t happen in our everyday world. So what, essentially, what we are doing is we’re trying to take something that is not intuitive and make it intuitive using the language of the world we live and understand.”
Tahiru said bridging the gap between these two concepts will help explain what time is and why it moves in one direction.
Tahiru used a mathematical tool called the Wigner Function to help visualize what happens to position and velocity in time as an object gets more energy, according to Kamela. Kamela and Tahiru worked together on the project by reading papers and then running numerical simulations.
Kamela said Tahiru was a quick study.
“We would think about what to do, and he would actually go back and figure out how to do it,” Kamela said. “He is resourceful in that he was able to find answers to many questions.”
Tahiru is also a Lumen Scholar, so he said this project was just the beginning and he continues to work on it. He said it was a “stepping stone” project and now he is focusing on how the environment around a particle affects it. He said once he understands the environment aspect, he can move to the question of why time seems to move forward in only one direction.
Tahiru’s favorite part of the project is getting the chance to explain concepts such as quantum physics, he said.
“You’re taking something that’s very abstract, something that’s very hard to explain, and then now you’re saying, ‘What if we can make this very easy to explain, not just to ourselves, but to everybody around us,”’ Tahiru said. “The whole idea is you’re taking this beautiful hidden world and then you’re bringing it to light. For me, I think that’s really the most beautiful and fun part of it.”
Tahiru is currently studying abroad so he will not give a presentation at SURF Day, but will give one next year. Kamela said it is important for students like Tahiru to take on SURF projects and be forced to visualize and explain their research in terms where others can understand.
“Folks underestimate the importance of communicating with the public, with folks who are not working actively on science,” Kamela said. “It’s part of the job description to be able to translate the ideas into everyday language so that folks can understand what we’re trying to do.”
What drives Tahiru to keep working on quantum physics and to continue looking for more answers is his curiosity, he said.
“Nature has a lot to offer. There’s a lot of things you’re not able to see,” Tahiru said. “Thank God people came up with mathematics. We can see a lot of things that are not obvious through the lens of mathematics. The whole point is, ‘OK, how much more can we see? How far can we really probe this thing? And that’s really what is interesting for me.”