Behind the Curtains
“I spend my days coaxing light into waveguides and cavities, teaching photons to behave like neurons, and listening for the stories they tell.”
Ciao. I’m Hashmitha Sugumar— a physicist who keeps wandering off the map, into the borderlands of quantum optics, photonics, and machine learning. I spend my days coaxing light into waveguides and cavities, teaching photons to behave like neurons, and listening for the stories they tell when no one’s quite sure if they are waves, particles, or something stranger in between. I’m drawn to the questions that slip between equations: how a single quantum can tilt a whole experiment, how fields of light become architectures of information.
Beyond equations and experiments, I believe in the quiet technology of story. I write Phy‑Fic—physics fiction (where wavefunctions become plotlines and photons learn to speak in first person! ) weaving scientific ideas into narratives that can be felt as much as understood. I write poems and songs, too, letting uncertainty, entanglement, and light slip out of symbols and into metaphor.