Carolyn Beatrice Parker (1917-1966)
#nuclearphysicist

BA Fisk 1938 #Physics
MA U Mich 1941 #Math
MS MIT 1953 Physics

WWII Dayton (part of Manhattan) project #scientist

1st African-American woman to earn Physics graduate degree
fatal illness probably because of exposure during Dayton project

Photograph of Carolyn B. Parker standing before a bank of testing instruments, taken at Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, ca 1945. courtesy Leslie Carolyn Edwards, appeared in Mickens & Patterson 2021

#WomeninSTEM #histsci #AfricanAmericanHistoryMonth #atomicphysics

I am still alive, and there are big news for the project – news that are over one month overdue, but I was so focused on writing grant proposals that I couldn’t find time to write about it. Long story short: we finished the preprint of our spin liquid paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05630). This work originated much before I came to Darrick Chang’s group, thus I am only a third author, but I did my part within the QUINTO project.

What is it about? Basically, atoms can make photons interacting with each other. In general, the interaction of many simple objects can lead to unusual, counterintuitive behavior. For example, many interacting electrons can form fractional quantum Hall states, and many interacting spins can form spin liquids – both being complicated quantum states, whose unusual properties manifest themselves with emergence of “quasiparticles” – objects that behave like individual particles, although in reality they are collective states of many particles. These quasiparticles can behave unlike any elementary particle found in nature – for example, they can have a fraction of single electron charge, and be neither bosons nor fermions but “anyons”. In the paper, we ask: can we observe similar effects with atoms and light?

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#physics #science #quantum #CondMat #CondensedMatter #QuantumOptics #ColdAtoms #AtomicPhysics

Why electron shells exist.

Electron shells are not arbitrary quantum rules.
They are the natural result of wave dynamics under boundary constraints.
In an atom, the nuclear Coulomb potential defines boundary conditions.
Solving the Schrödinger equation is not choosing energies — it is identifying which waveforms remain self-consistent under those constraints.
Only specific standing-wave solutions survive.
These eigenstates correspond exactly to observed shell levels.

Continuous energies are excluded because they:
diverge
fail boundary conditions
violate probability conservation.
Discreteness emerges from constraint, it is not imposed.

This is the same mechanism seen in: harmonics on a string
resonant cavities
pattern formation
biological and cognitive systems
Change the boundary → change the allowed states.
Quantum mechanics works because nature selects stable modes under constraint.
#Physics
#QuantumMechanics
#FoundationsOfPhysics
#AtomicPhysics
#ScienceCommunication
#HybridMind42