Damian Musk

Hometown: Los Angeles, CA (SoCal native!)

Three favorite Physics courses and why:

• Topological Quantum Field Theory (Ph 232) — Topology is indispensable for understanding nonperturbative QFT, and only grows more central as we probe quantum gravity.
• Sophomore Physics Laboratory (Ph 6/7) — My first real immersion in experimental physics. It's hard to pick a favorite experiment, but the Mössbauer effect in Ph 6 still stands out.
• Statistical Physics of Interacting Systems, Phases, and Phase Transitions (Ph 127ab) — The modern theory of critical phenomena and universality is a triumph of human thought. Few courses so radically deepen one's sense of how Nature organizes itself.

Labs or projects you have worked in/on during your time at Caltech: I'm broadly interested in fundamental theoretical physics as explored at the interface of high energy theory and quantum information. My first exposure to Caltech research came through Prof. Maria Spiropulu's group, where I studied holographic duality and wormhole dynamics on quantum processors. I went on to a 2024 SURF at Fermilab on supersymmetric wormhole teleportation, and in 2025 to CERN, using string theory to probe quantum chaos and black hole microstate counting. Recently, I've become increasingly interested in quantum cosmology, including applications of TQFT to gravity in de Sitter space.

Hobbies outside of academics: I write both prose and poetry, especially drawn to the paranoid literature of the '60s and '70s. (As an English double major, I'm always happy to talk books.) Become some works are meant to be seen and not read, I also act in Caltech theater productions: this spring we're staging A Midsummer Night's Dream (I'm Demetrius!). And, though hardly off-campus, I'm proud to serve as Editor-in-Chief of The California Tech.

Favorite study spot/s on campus: The fourth floor of Lauritsen—the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics—captures the difference between funding experimentalists and theorists: the former need multimillion-dollar apparatus; the latter, chalk, chalkboards, and really nice chairs. (There may, in fact, be a measurable relationship between furniture quality and scientific output.)