Isaac Gallegos

GPA: 3.99

Concentration: Quantum Science, Laser Physics and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Senior Thesis: Emergent Holography from Information Geometry of Ising Models (Advisor: L. Haddad)

Advisors: D. Veysset, N. Uribe-Patarroyo, B.E. Bouma

• Leading a polarization-resolved spectroscopic OCT project on a 1310 nm swept-source VCSEL system (100 nm bandwidth, 5 µm axial resolution), acquiring and spectrally post-processing data from 20+ fabricated biomaterial phantoms
• Wrote physics-constrained inverse models in Python to recover wavelength-dependent optical properties from depth-resolved spectra
• Built the first comprehensive open-source library and software tool for laser safety evaluation; first author on a manuscript targeting the Journal of Open Source Software

Advisors: D. Veysset, B.E. Bouma

• Built the first micro-LED-based OCT system prototype, replacing swept-source lasers with individually addressable narrowband LEDs, and wrote its hardware control and acquisition software
• Applied spectral unmixing to multi-spectral photoacoustic data from a custom all-fiber stimulated Raman scattering optical amplifier, determining per-pixel lipid and collagen concentrations from imaged samples

Advisor: L. Haddad

• Developed an information-geometry approach to emergent holography, reparameterizing the 1D Ising model through a Gaussian dressing whose Fisher metric yields an emergent AdS₂ metric
• Evaluated the partition function by transfer-matrix methods and worked out the dressing's two limiting regimes as dual descriptions of the lattice; first author on a manuscript in preparation for JHEP

Advisor: C. Durfee

• Led a five-person undergraduate team designing micron-scale, supersonic gas-jet nozzles for high-harmonic generation experiments, designing 5+ converging-diverging geometries in SolidWorks and Mathematica toward an optimized configuration

Produced polarization-entangled 810 nm photon pairs from dual-crystal Type-I SPDC under a 405 nm diode pump, using a YVO₄ crystal to compensate birefringent walk-off. Measured a CHSH violation of S = 2.51 ± 0.04 with silicon SPADs and four-channel FPGA coincidence counting with nanosecond gating.

Designed, built, and characterized a CW diode-pumped Pr³⁺:LiYF₄ laser (640 nm, 35 mW, 18% slope efficiency). Checked four-level rate-equation models against the measured pulse trains, fluorescence spectra, and output power.

Demonstrated short-pulse generation by passively Q-switching an Nd:YAG laser (1064 nm, Cr:YAG saturable absorber, repetition rates to 3.5 kHz). Computationally modeled the Q-switching dynamics in Mathematica to verify the experimental results.