Student from Kazakhstan Joins Harvard Team and Helps Revolutionize How We Look at the World

Harvard University doctoral candidate Arman Amirzhan remembers fondly as a high school student some 10 years ago studying in his dorm room at Haileybury and Imperial Service College in Herthford, United Kingdom. He would look out the window and marvel at the raindrops flickering against the incandescence of gas lamps lining the quaint lanes surrounding the campus. The campus secluded the then-young lad from any major city, including that of his hometown thousands of miles away in Kazakhstan. Even so, Amirzhan never felt unease. Instead, the separation suited the then teenager well, as he found himself exploring, without distractions, all those ideas of science and math that had fascinated him as a child and would later define his career as a researcher at the forefront of laser science, advancing everything from telecommunications and medicine to security and space exploration.

“It was very easy, very natural to just sit there and learn some theory. So, I will say most of my fundamental math, chemistry, physics—knowledge — I know from high school,” says the Harvard researcher.

The 27-year-old’s fascination with the sciences draws from even a much-earlier period—at a time, he says, when he thrived on his sense of curiosity. As a child, Amirzhan often found himself wondering how things ended up the way they did or how they worked. It wasn’t uncommon for him to ponder at the sky and reason why it was blue, or the sun yellow, or speculate about the earth and question how plants ended up green. Left thirsting for deeper explanations beyond what those around him—his parents and teachers—were able to provide, Amirzhan before long found himself guided to reference publications. “I was just curious about how the world works,” he says, “and I was gifted a lot of encyclopedias as a consequence, which I would read with a lot of passion.”

Beyond the encyclopedias, Amirzhan fed his inquisitive mind by embracing the basics of structural engineering. It wasn’t uncommon for him as a child to tinker with Lego pieces to build gears, cranes, pullies and even robots. Even the TV and movies he watched hinged off that sense of innovation—with his favorite characters, like Mr. Gadget, Jimmy Neutron and Ironman, inspiring his deep dive into physics and creativity.

And it was with that creativity that Amirzhan would rely on most. Growing up in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Amirzhan and his family—father, mother and three younger sisters—like most in the country after the fall of the Soviet Union, could not easily afford telescopes, science equipment or do-it-yourself kits to satiate the curiosity of a lone child. Amirzhan, instead, let loose with his imagination to push the limits of his understanding. He took apart old electronics and pieced them together, for example, or used stationery to engineer rotorcrafts like helicopters. For him, the world generously provided opportunities for growth and development. “It’s really how you see the world,” he says, “[and] taking an opportunity for what surrounds you.”

By the time he entered middle school, Amirzhan determined that his future would be in science. Although he excelled in physics, chemistry and other courses of the like, Arman showed little interest for studies outside of his STEM classes. He never enjoyed classes structured around the simple memorization of facts or long, iterative exercises, which he found was the case with most studies back home in Kazakhstan. It wasn’t till he began attending Haileybury UK between 2011 and 2013, that he discovered a different approach to studies based on discussions, critical thinking and storytelling. But even inspired by the new education system, he still struggled with discipline, “I was kind of bad in turning in homework or preparing for internal exams,” he says.

The experience, did, however give him a much-needed perspective. When Amirzhan asked of his chances for getting into Oxford or Cambridge to study engineering or physics, his advisor could only discourage him from applying to those universities because of his less-than stellar preliminary exams grades.

Crestfallen, Amirzhan continued his search for a university to call home and eventually came across Imperial College London’s Department of Materials, which appealed to him, if only because he thought he’d be able to study both physics and chemistry there. That’s when the soon-to-be high school graduate recognized that the focus should not be so much on the reputation of the university but the concentration. “This is where I made a mistake [looking for previous universities],” he explains. “I prioritized university ranking above the major.”

Amirzhan gained acceptance into Imperial College London. He learned about metallurgy and ceramics, microstructures, and metallic alloys but little of what he really craved for: physics and chemistry. As a result, he says, “I lost motivation to study.”

So, during the beginning of his second-year studying, Amirzhan stumbled upon a class on optoelectronics taught to third- and fourth-year students. Sneaking into the course’s lectures, Amirzhan found the class heavy in physics, and that fascinated him.

The lecture’s professor, Dr. Mark Oxborrow, whom Amirzhan refers to as a kindred spirit, took note of Amirzhan if only because of the zeal he put on full display. “I would ask too many questions at the end of each lecture, and at some point, he asked me, ‘Are you even taking this class?’”

After Amirzhan admitted he was only a second-year student wanting to study physics and who finally found something he liked, Professor Oxborrow led him from the lecture hall to a lab, where Amirzhan would end up working as a summer intern after being admitted to a paid UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Project) internship program. “This is a time when I really got seriously thinking about doing a Ph.D. and understood the roadmap to becoming a scientist,” Amirzhan says.

At the time, Oxborrow was working on the development of a room temperature laser, called a maser. While a laser focuses on light emission, a maser works in microwaves, Amirzhan explains. Oxborrow tasked the young protégé with building a prototype of a spectrometer for investigating microwave optoelectronic properties.

The experience thrilled Amirzhan, then a third-year student, who would go on to eventually develop a zero-field EPR spectrometer for maser crystal analysis under Oxborrow’s guidance. While the prototype proved to be not very useful for spectroscopic measurements, the project, he says, gave Amirzhan “a taste for science, a taste for work in the lab,” he says.

With this new taste for science, Amirzhan began, in May of 2017, exploring summer-internship possibilities outside of Imperial College London, inside the United States, which eventually led him to contact Harvard University’s Federico Capasso, a prominent applied physicist and inventor of the quantum cascade laser who would later become Amirzhan’s advisor. Just like any internship experience, Amirzhan says, “It’s a good way to get yourself recommended to do a Ph.D. in the USA.”

By fall of the same year, Amirzhan transitioned into Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His research work with masers at Imperial College London eased him into a quantum cascade laser (QCL) subgroup, one of two research groups within his new department at Harvard University before moving a year later, in 2018, to a newly developed project dealing with terahertz molecular gas, a subject Amirzhan already felt connected to because of his undergraduate research experience and the project’s physics-heavy focus.

Amirzhan’s research at Harvard brought him into contact with Capasso’s invention, the QCL, a laser that emits light in the infrared spectrum and whose output frequency can be continuously tuned, a property that is unique to solid-state devices. The research team began using the QCL to pump polar gas molecules inside a laser cavity, which produced a signal in the terahertz frequency spectrum. The terahertz signal, which spectrum lies between microwaves and infrared light waves, has always been hard to generate, as no technology could cover the entire frequency range with a single device. But that changed after the research team at Harvard developed a QCL-pumped molecular terahertz laser.

Essentially, the Harvard research team has created a new type of terahertz laser that uses QCL to excite any roto-vibrational energy state of gas polar molecules that then releases a terahertz signal through stimulated emission radiation. “Previously, carbon dioxide lasers were used to pump gas molecules, which limited output to a handful of terahertz frequencies,” Amirzhan says, “but, now, by using quantum cascade lasers, we can cover entire the terahertz spectrum and generate almost any frequency with just one device”.

“The higher the frequency is, the more data you can transmit,” Amirzhan says, adding that “smaller wavelengths lead to higher imaging resolutions, so you can detect much smaller particles” for detecting biomolecular diseases or deep-space imaging.

With the quantum cascade laser, the team, guided by Dr. Henry Everitt of the DEVCOM Army Research Lab, has been able to pump ammonia in a cavity that produces tunable terahertz frequencies between .3 and roughly 30 terahertz, allowing for, Amirzhan says, possibilities to pinpoint something as fine as a needle in someone’s pocket with a full body scanner or conduct industrial imaging to detect microcracks and prevent catastrophic failures in functional alloys.

As Amirzhan explains in one of his coauthored articles on the QCL, the group’s US-patented innovation creates a previously inaccessible type of radiation “for use in spectroscopy, communications, imaging and radar” technology—toward a greater source of power beyond the limited frequencies of gigahertz we currently rely on for our 5G, or even 6G, Wi-Fi networks.

As a doctoral student now living in Somerville, Massachusetts, not far from Cambridge, Amirzhan again finds himself fascinated by what lies on the other side of his window, by water and Earth. He sees himself at some point going to Antarctica, braving the elements of extreme weather with 30 other people, combining his knowledge of physics and optics, and his curiosity for biology. Who knows, but perhaps it will lead Amirzhan down a different path altogether.

For now, he knows there are more mountains to climb, so he is content looking out windows, because, for Amirzhan, in the end, it’s not about where we are but how we look at the world and see the beauty in all that surrounds us.