ZEESHAWN PHIROZE KAZI

Zeeshawn

I'm Zeeshawn. I have a lot of interests: quantum mechanics and quantum magnetic field sensing, DNA, the human body, the natural world, music, the nature of mind and awareness, love and compassion for myself and all forms of this universe. This site houses some of the fruits of those interests. I hope you find something here that inspires you.

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Quantum Magnetic particle imaging

The nitrogen-vacancy center is a quantum defect in diamond that enables high-sensitivity optical magnetic sensing at room temperature under ambient conditions. In my PhD work, I use a near-surface, high-density layer of these defects to image magnetic fields produced by ferromagnetic nanoparticles. A biological system is sandwiched between a magnet and the diamond sensor, and the imaged orientation of the magnet provides information about the bio-physical properties of single-molecule bio-systems.

DNA bend stiffness

An application of this quantum magnetic particle imaging platform is the measurement the bend stiffness of histone-sized (<100 nm) fragments of DNA. Conformal bends of DNA are the main mechanism for transcription regulation and DNA storage, and direct measurements of this type have not been achieved before. We attach one end of a short piece of DNA to a ferromagnet, and the other end to the diamond sensor surface. Using an external magnetic tweezer (MT) field, we apply a torque to the magnetic nanoparticle, and the balance between this torque and the torque exerted by the DNA on the particle enables measurement of the bend stiffness of DNA. The vector components of both the particle and applied fields are imaged using the diamond quantum sensing platform.

Dynamic particle reorientation

As a proof-of-principle experiment, fluid-flow was used to re-orient a ferromagnetic nanoparticle, and the reorientation was dynamically imaged using the quantum magnetic particle imaging platform. To perform this measurement, we developed a novel magnetic imaging technique to eliminate non-magnetic-fields and increase magnetic-field signal in video-rate imaging.

Nervous system imaging?

Ultimately, I see the final-frontier of magnetic sensing to be imaging magnetic fields associated with neuronal currents in the human body. I am interested in pushing quantum sensing technology to this end, leveraging the advantages of different quantum hardware platforms to achieve the sensitivity, spatial and temporal resolution, and interference rejection required to perform these unprecendented measurements.

Thoughts

Rolling wheel of time

I'm often perplexed by the present moment. Life seems to be composed of these moments of infinitessimal duration, all stacked up on top of each other. Looking closely, it's strange that things happen at all... if this moment has no duration, how do things move and change?

An analogy from classical physics comes to mind of a wheel that rolls without slipping. In the picture above we see the wheel, moving with some angular velocity and center of mass velocity. Without slipping, the point of contact of the wheel with the ground is stationary, velocity at the point is 0!

To me, this is the present moment: the point of contact with the rolling wheel of time. The moment is stationary, but the events of the world rotate around. Sometimes the attention is with the point of contact which can feel stagnant... but things are changing, swirling around. Sometimes the attention is with the rolling wheel, abiding in change.

MUSIC

Inspiration

Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';