The global demand for energy is so high that we would need to invent radical methods of generating energy that is essentially limitless and could solve the problem of supplying clean and reliable power to the grid!
Dr Anchal Gupta, our next pathbreaker, works as Senior Staff Scientist at Blue Laser Fusion (California), a company that is addressing clean energy challenges through novel Laser Fusion technology.
Anchal talks to Shyam Krishnamurthy from The Interview Portal about his career path in Experimental Physics which lies at the intersection of precision control, optics, and high-impact scientific research in nuclear fusion based technologies that can mitigate climate change.
For students, the journey towards doing what you truly love, won’t be easy, but if you have the right attitude, every challenge becomes just another puzzle to solve.
Anchal, what were your growing up years like?
I grew up in a small township built around a coal-fired thermal power plant in Sarni, Madhya Pradesh. This remote town sat in the middle of the Satpura mountain forests, surrounded by wildlife and natural beauty but also somewhat disconnected from the world. The nearest railway station was 18 km away, and getting to cities meant taking the train. There were a couple of bookstores and a few good schools, but that was about it. I remember being mesmerized by both the natural beauty around me and the astonishing engineering feat of the thermal power plant. It felt like I got to experience a rare harmony between nature and technology.
I could see, though, how the coal-fired power plant was polluting the natural environment, and how over the years it was getting worse. My father was an electrical engineer at the power plant and would answer my endless questions about electricity and physics in general. He would bring home small electronic parts for me to play with, to build and explore new circuits, and to understand concepts of voltage and current at the tender age of 10!
One thing became clear to me very early in life: I liked to study the laws of nature and perform real-life experiments to see with my own eyes and feel for myself how things work. I remember figuring out how a motor must work by simply playing with a couple of magnets. I felt the rush of discovery. I asked my dad to confirm if my finding was correct. It didn’t matter that humans had figured out how to make a motor out of electricity and magnets a hundred years before me—the fact that I thought of something myself and solved a mystery was a thrilling discovery, a hundred times better than anything else I could experience.
What did you study?
I did my BTech in Engineering Physics from IIT Bombay followed by a Masters and PhD in Physics from Caltech. But the decision to become a physicist came much earlier than college, at about the age of 12. Honestly, I didn’t know very well what physics even was, let alone what being a scientist meant, but to me, working in a laboratory and figuring out the laws of nature was the only thing I could imagine myself doing when I got older.
This childish dream led to a concentrated effort to learn as much physics as I could, as soon as I could, to place myself in a good position to make an attempt at it. I knew that coming from the middle of nowhere, it sounded like a pipe dream to become a physicist, but I didn’t want to give up on it yet. I wanted to see how far I could really go. For my dream to ever become true, I had to believe that it was totally possible if I just tried hard enough.
One thing that helped me a lot was having an elder brother who was five years older. Not only did he give me a glimpse of life stages in the future, but he would also break down the stuff he was learning in school for me, because I was just ever curious about everything related to physics. By 9th grade, I started going through his 11th and 12th standard physics textbooks, JEE preparation books, and Russian physics problem books. It became clear to me that just because of how curious I was about physics, it felt easy to me—it felt like playing a game and not really studying. Doing this for life would mean a lifetime of enjoyment!
It was clear to me in high school that my overall career aspirations were different from my peers. Most of my friends wanted to become computer science engineers or somehow land high-paying, respectable jobs in finance, trading, or consultancy. Somehow, this path went through getting an engineering degree, which is a peculiar thing about India.
What were some of the key influences that led you to such an offbeat, unconventional, and unique career in Physics?
I knew that I needed to do something different from the herd, otherwise I would end up too far from my dream. Thankfully, I got a good enough rank in JEE to get into Engineering Physics at IIT Bombay. This was the one place from where I could see some students going on to do PhDs in physics at bleeding-edge laboratories around the world.
To my surprise, my parents and brother, who had been super encouraging all this time, suddenly didn’t want me to take up physics. It was almost a taboo field—like I was committing career suicide. I had to fight hard and be stubborn to do what I really wanted. Those few weeks in the summer of 2012 were very hard. My parents were disappointed in me. I felt guilty for trying to impose my will on them when they had made innumerable sacrifices so that I could be at this point where I even had a choice as privileged as pursuing a research career.
At this point, I emailed Prof. P.S. Anil Kumar at IISc Bangalore. I had met him briefly at a KVPY camp earlier in the year. He was kind enough to offer a phone call with my dad. I asked my dad to just talk to him. Prof. Kumar might not have been able to convince my dad at that moment, but the fact that a professor from a reputed institution was standing by my choice of career made a big impact. My family eventually agreed and let me choose Engineering Physics at IIT Bombay.
This was just the beginning of the struggle, though. For the next four years, I had to dig in and study hard and work hard—partly to prove my parents wrong about my career choice and partly to prove to myself that I had what it takes to be a physicist. I quickly realized that physics is so much more than what I had glimpsed in high school, and I was excited but also clueless. I was interested in too many topics and didn’t know how or why to pretend to be interested in just one.
I figured the best way to find my true interest was to try a bunch of topics throughout my undergrad, learn skills, mathematics, and theoretical physics. I did online courses to study ahead of my class schedule and applied for various programs and workshops so that I was always doing something, including during winter breaks and each summer. I got selected for an internship program at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. There I worked with Prof. Lilian Childress, which was my first hands-on experience with hardcore optical and quantum physics experiments. Even though I worked long hours, I enjoyed every single minute of it and learned valuable experimental skills at the Childress lab. My work resulted in my first publication.
Tell us about your career path
When I came back to India, I worked with Prof. Pradip Sarin at IIT Bombay on the characterization of single crystal diamond particle detectors and picked up electronics and physics metrology experience that turned out to be very useful later in my career. Prof. Sarin was also very supportive of my applications for PhD programs in the US and Canada. I applied to 15 graduate schools because I didn’t want to leave any room for not having a PhD program to join later. To my surprise, I actually got accepted at 11 universities and chose Caltech for my graduate school.
The story of graduate school is very convoluted. Fresh off the boat, I reached Caltech to join a group in applied physics and work on superconducting qubits. I was interested in quantum computation from my earlier introduction to the field at the Childress lab, but in hindsight, I knew little about superconducting qubits and the day-to-day work at a typical quantum computation laboratory. I stayed in that group for over 20 months, feeling that something was off but couldn’t put my finger on what exactly. The relationship with the advisor was not good—he was abusive, and I had the weight of my dreams to carry and couldn’t see clearly what was happening to me. Even though I was still convinced that I wanted to be an experimental physicist, the lab work I was getting to do just didn’t feel right. The environment felt toxic, and I felt guilty about failing myself. I dreaded going to work and was in constant fear of getting yelled at by the advisor. There was a period when I felt I’d run too far from where I started and was out of breath. Maybe coming from a small town in India and wanting to be a physicist in the way I imagined wasn’t really possible, or maybe I’d already lost that chance. Maybe I wasn’t good enough.
Thankfully, my partner (who is now my wife) helped me get through this time and convinced me to quit this group and look for a better fit elsewhere at Caltech. This was the first time I had failed at something, and I felt miserable. I also didn’t know how or where to start next. I worked as a teaching assistant at Caltech while looking for other research groups where there was a vacancy and where I would be a good fit. It took me over six weeks to find a group.
I joined Prof. Rana Adhikari’s group in the physics department, who worked in experimental gravitational wave detection with the famous LIGO collaboration—members of which had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in the preceding year. I think it took me just one day working in one of his sub-basement labs on the optical table to realize: this is it! This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.
This group was pure experimental physics—a little bit of electronics, a little bit of optics, mechanics, signal processing, controls, everything. I just enjoyed working there so much that I couldn’t wait for the next day to come. The way I got absorbed into this work, it just felt like a natural fit. I was that kid again who was trying out many things to learn and understand, to fix something that got damaged, and to devise new methods of solving problems in our experiment. There were still challenges that come with graduate school, but when you like your work, everything else becomes secondary. Every passing month and year, I felt like I was growing in skills and knowledge exponentially. I wouldn’t have believed I could ever be an expert in optical cavity locking and precision measurement sciences. I was measuring displacements half the size of a proton in my tabletop experiment every day!
What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you address them?
In the latter half of my graduate school, as I gathered more experience, I started reflecting on what I would do after getting my PhD. Some students did postdocs at universities and attempted to become faculty in academia, but I wanted to remain in the laboratory, doing science among other experts and solving something hard and challenging. At the same time, I also became increasingly aware of the way humanity is destroying Earth. The way global warming is affecting us all, endangering millions of species, and changing the world as we know it forever.
Suddenly, doing science for the sake of my pleasure and curiosity about the Universe felt like a selfish quest, a privilege that maybe we had lost, or at least that some of us physicists with the right skills needed to divert our attention toward climate change.
How did you get your 1st break after your career in Experimental Physics?
I decided that I would put myself in a career where my skills as a precision measurement scientist could be put to good use to help solve climate change. I might not be able to single-handedly change everything, but my work hours were the biggest contribution I could make toward this goal. I became interested in the problem of achieving controlled nuclear fusion for the purpose of energy generation. Almost every problem we face on Earth—greenhouse gas emissions, water scarcity, plastic trash—could be helped with if we had a vast, cheap, and practical source of energy.
I tried to contact multiple places that were working on controlled nuclear fusion. I had never studied plasma physics, but I knew that I was good enough to pick up a new topic, learn it, and solve problems. I landed a postdoctoral research position at General Atomics, where I worked on US Government Department of Energy grants on controlled nuclear fusion with tokamaks.
A tokamak is a highly specialized reactor that uses powerful magnetic fields to confine superheated plasma in a torus (doughnut) shape to achieve nuclear fusion, the same process that powers the sun. This process, where hydrogen isotopes like deuterium and tritium are heated to over 100 million degrees Celsius, fuses them into helium and releases vast amounts of energy. The tokamak is the leading concept for magnetic confinement fusion, and it aims to produce clean, virtually limitless energy.
I quickly realized there was a lot I could contribute from my control systems background to the problems this field was facing. It was a steep learning curve to understand plasma physics, but unlike the young graduate student who had just arrived in the US from India, I was much more confident in my skills and abilities. I soon ramped into productive research, contributing to designs for future fusion reactor control systems and developing control systems and operations support for an existing superconducting tokamak in the Republic of Korea. Last year, I visited there to perform live experiments with a state-of-the-art fusion reactor—a moment I never could have imagined as a 12-year-old boy who dreamt of being an experimental physicist.
I’m so glad I pushed through with grit at every moment of doubt and hardship in my path. It certainly wasn’t easy, but I wouldn’t have done anything differently. Even the hard experience in the first year of my graduate school was a valuable life lesson. All of it resulted in me getting a PhD in physics from Caltech—a life event that I’m extremely proud of, which gives me a sense of fulfilment that nothing else can provide.
Can you tell us about your current work? What problems do you solve?
This year, I joined a new company called Blue Laser Fusion (BLF) in Santa Barbara, California as a Senior Scientist. BLF is also a nuclear fusion company, but it’s approaching the problem through a different method known as inertial confinement fusion, in which a pellet of fusion fuel is ignited using an intense laser beam. In 2022, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in the US demonstrated ignition using this method, although they had to use over 100 times more energy than was emitted by the reaction. Our company’s goal is to generate a powerful laser with enough efficiency that we generate at least 10 times more energy from the reaction than we use to create the laser pulse.
The move to this company was partially because the United States government has drastically reduced research funding in climate change-related sciences. At the same time, my skills from gravitational wave astronomy were directly applicable at this company, much more so than at my previous postdoc position. In that way, this is a perfect fit. I get to work with lasers, optical cavities, electronics, and control systems, doing the day-to-day experimental work I love while also tackling a very hard physics problem and contributing toward helping stop climate change. In fact, Prof. Adhikari’s research group at Caltech is also involved with us in our work.
What do you love about your work?
I passionately believe in the physics idea of our company, and that’s a very powerful motivator to work every day. An exhausting workday feels like a good day as I accomplish more toward our goal. Typically, when I get to work, we first discuss the status of our experiment and plan the experimental work we’ll do that day. It often includes working with our vacuum systems in cleanroom attire to install and adjust optical components on a 15-meter-long experimental setup. We often work with advanced control systems, set up electronics and data acquisition systems to “lock” the laser frequency to the resonant frequency of a 15-meter-long optical cavity. It’s a hard thing to achieve, and there are always many places where we keep improving the setup to reach the goal of higher output laser power. The lasers we work with are infrared, so they’re not visible, but they’re intense enough to burn skin or permanently blind someone, so we work with safety goggles and ample safety precautions. Even though that sounds like an extra burden, it’s kind of cool to be working in a laboratory like that—at the edge of science and on the verge of making world records and inventing new devices and methods.
How does your work benefit society?
While my work doesn’t directly provide a service to anyone in society, the role of scientific research is to push the boundaries of the unknown and bring new knowledge and technologies to the world. Specifically, if we’re successful, we would be inventing a method of generating energy that is essentially limitless and could solve the problem of supplying reliable power to the grid, which currently is only done through fossil fuel power plants or expensive and dangerous fission power plants. If scaled up, humanity might cross a threshold where we’d be living in a society where energy scarcity is a thing of the past, where every piece of discarded trash is either recycled and reformed into a non-polluting thing, and where fresh water is available to everyone easily.
Even if we’re unsuccessful in our methodology, science always moves forward by many groups of scientists trying multiple methods to solve a problem. Every negative result is a path explored for future researchers, with scientific data and knowledge available. So it’s a drop in the ocean of continued scientific push toward finding more and achieving more.
Your advice to students?
My advice to students is to be a student first and foremost. That sounds odd, but the best way to become an expert at anything is to relentlessly learn all the time. Stay curious, don’t be afraid to fail, and when you find what you love, pursue it with everything you have.
Note that I’m saying, “when you find what you love,” because I know how it feels to be unsure about what to do. It might feel odd coming from someone like me who decided early on to become a physicist, but I didn’t really know what that meant — I was open to exploring and discovering along the way. In the same way, you should be open to exploring different paths in life. Try different things before settling on what resonates with you. Modern life is long and full of opportunities; you just need to be willing to step outside your comfort zone and try something new. The journey won’t be easy, but if you’re doing what you truly love, every challenge becomes just another puzzle to solve.
Career choice is a much more nuanced topic than simply finding a job. Every career can be fulfilling and give back to society. At the same time, you’ll spend about a third of your adult life at work, so it makes sense to choose a career where you enjoy that time and feel fulfilled by the life that comes with it.