Dr. Jacquiline Romero, a former science scholar and University of the Philippines (UP) alumna, bagged the prestigious L’Oréal Australia For Women in Science fellowship for her exceptional research in quantum physics.
Romero was a Merit Scholar of the Department of Science and Technology-Sience Education Institute (DOST-SEI) for her bachelor’s degree in Physics. Now a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia, she was chosen for her work on quantum alphabets where she unraveled key information in quantum science.
With still so much to explore in the field, her work is anticipated to make a huge contribution in its further development and utilization.
Romero rose to prominence in 2015 for her breakthrough experiments and researches in quantum physics. She was part of a research team at the University of Glasgow that discovered a method to slow down light particles in free space.
Not resting on her laurels, she dug deeper into quantum physics and brought the public closer to understanding the theory of entanglement. This fascinating theory explains that particles share information regardless of distance.
A scientist and a mother of three children, she proves that the two roles can go together. For Romero, winning the L’Oreal United Nations Educations, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) for Women in Science Australian fellowship gives her the opportunity to “bring this story that mothers can also succeed in science.”
She joins four other women researchers from Australia and New Zealand who were awarded a $25,000 fellowship to help further their research.
“This award will help me accelerate my research. By exploring high dimensional quantum physics, I believe that I will be able to unlock a new physics information that is currently unknown to us,” she said.
The fellowship is part of the For Women in Science program that L’Oréal and Unesco started in 1998 to highlight and encourage women’s participation in science.
SEI Director Dr. Josette Biyo lauded Romero’s feat and urged current DOST scholars to follow her footsteps.
“Quantum physics may still be an enigma to most, but its influence is not isolated from the knowledge and technology-driven world we have today. Thanks to the efforts of scientists like Dr. Jacquiline Romero, we may soon utilize the untapped potential of the quantum world,” Biyo said.
The quantum world is relatively unknown, but holds a lot of potential for the future, in terms of increased capacity to transmit data, increased security, but more important, unlocking a new science not yet fully understood, forwomeninscience.com.au web site said.
“Jacq creates large quantum alphabets using a less well-known property of light, known as the orbital angular momentum [OAM]. By creating an alphabet where the different OAMs, which are the different helical twist formations of a beam of light, serve as the different letters, Jacq is able to create a unique quantum encoding system of a much larger capacity [theoretically infinite!],” the web site said.
By creating quantum alphabets, Romero is able to unlock some of the mysteries of the very puzzling properties of higher dimension quantum information, it added.
Romero will provide the first experimental evidence to an existing theory to verify the fundamental differences in the way information works for larger quantum alphabets, compared to the classical encoding system used today. Her findings will provide critical knowledge as we start to access more of the benefits of the quantum world, the web site added.