Fizaan Khan

The pursuit of physics, to me, is the pursuit of meaning — an attempt to understand why the universe behaves as it does, while flexing everyday intuition beyond its limits.

I'm finishing a dual BTech (honours) + MTech in Engineering Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, and I'm headed toward a PhD. My research lives where experiment meets computation: I've measured photon–magnon hybridization on a vector network analyzer, modeled it with input–output theory, and written the lab software that sits in between.

My first paper, published in physica status solidi (RRL), demonstrates photon-mediated coupling between two spatially separated magnonic films — magnons talking to each other through a shared photon, with no direct interaction at all. Before that, I spent a summer at TU Dortmund building a variational quantum eigensolver for Floquet states in spin-ladder systems, and a year with the University of Houston simulating conductivity in tilted, disordered Dirac fermions on the Param Shivay supercomputer.

Quantum devices are, to my mind, the way forward — whether that's quantum sensing and control for fine-tuned measurement, superconducting circuits, or simulation that lets a computer access physics we otherwise couldn't. That's the frontier I want to spend my career on.

Away from the lab, I play bass (my band won IIT BHU's Battle of the Bands), follow Formula 1, build 3D art in Blender, and be pretentious on Letterboxd.