Luckily, the folks at NREIP have created a short-term opportunity for those of us who missed out on the internship opportunity last year thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been assigned to work with the Quantum Technologies Group in the Advanced Electronic Warfare Prototyping Branch (B35), working on the solution of problems in materials science using quantum simulation.
While I do plan to update this blog with various writing of interest pertaining to the research we will be doing, I have to be careful with what I can discuss given the sensitive nature of DoD research (in other words, I won’t be able to give any details about the specific problems we are looking into). However, I do think that most of the work I will be doing is unclassified, since we are mainly conducting a literature review and most of the papers we are looking at are already publicly available.
Unfortunately, given the fact that this internship is only a month, it seems that the main thing I am supposed to get out of it is a familiarity with what research looks like in a government lab, rather than any technical proficiency with topics at hand. Quite frankly, as much as I find the things we are looking at to be exceptionally interesting, I think that it is WAY too much to ask that I develop a comprehensive knowledge of not only how quantum simulation works, but also how state-of-the-art techniques can be used to tackle modern materials problems. That being said, I still want to learn as much as I can in this short time, and working my way through some of the papers that I keep getting sent is a valuable exercise in understanding scientific literature that is far outside of my current skill set and educational background. Then again, if I was just learning about things with which I already have familiarity, there wouldn’t be much room for growth, would there?