Alicia Sit

Alicia Sit is currently pursuing her master’s degree in physics at the University of Ottawa. In the summer of 2012, before beginning university, she was awarded the Faculty of Science’s Undergraduate Research Scholarship, which gave her the opportunity of starting her research career in a lab at the University of Ottawa. She thus worked in the mass spectrometry lab of Prof. Paul Mayer, where she studied the energetic and entropic behaviours of organic gas phase ions, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, found in the interstellar medium through their distinctive dissociation pathways. In 2015, she joined the Structured Quantum Optics group, though the co-op program, where she explores the uses of photonic orbital angular momentum for securely encrypting information with quantum cryptographic methods. She completed her honours thesis entitled “Secure Quantum Communication with Structured Photons in Fiber” under the supervision of Prof. Ebrahim Karimi in 2016, and obtained her honours B.Sc. with a specialization in Physics-Mathematics the following year. Currently, she is exploring the application of new high-dimensional quantum cryptographic protocols with structured light through different various quantum channels, including, fiber, underwater and free-space channels. In particular, she is building free-space quantum communication links across the city of Ottawa with the possibility to create a quantum network.