Ari Dyckovsky was 15 when a Bose-Einstein condensate hit him right between the eyes. It didn’t really hit him between the eyes. That’s just a metaphor. But metaphors are thoroughly appropriate when you’re discussing a trip from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., into that alternate universe known as quantum mechanics. When he was 15, Dyckovsky sat down to watch a PBS documentary that culminated with a group of physicists creating a new form of matter called the Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. First predicted in the 1920s by Albert Einstein and an Indian scientist named Satyendra Bose, BEC isn’t a solid or a liquid or a gas. It’s not even a plasma. Existing only at extremely low temperatures, where it exhibits the seemingly magical properties of quantum mechanics, BEC is something different — a group of atoms that act like a single super atom, particles that behave like waves.

Sitting in his home in Leesburg, Virginia, about 30 miles west of D.C., Dyckovsky was intrigued by the counter-intuitive nature of the quantum world. But he was also struck by the idea of spending a lifetime building something the world had never seen. That Bose-Einstein condensate hit him so hard, he decided that quantum physics was the life for him too. No doubt, there are countless other teenagers who decide much the same thing. But Ari Dyckovsky took the express route.

“Yes, he’s very young, but he’s the first author on that publication and rightfully so.”

Dyckovsky is now 18, and his paper on another mind-bending aspect of the quantum world — quantum entanglement — was just published by Physical Review A, one of the world’s leading physics journals. Co-authored with Steven Olmschenk — a researcher with the Joint Quantum Institute, a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland at College Park — the paper breaks new ground in the ongoing effort to build a quantum computer, so often called the holy grail of technology research. “Yes, he’s very young, but he’s the first author on that publication and rightfully so,” Olmschenk says. “All of the brute force calculations and things like that — Ari did most of it, if not all of it.” The paper — a theoretical analysis of how two distant and very different particles can be entangled with light — is about 90 percent brute force calculation.

The publication is no surprise to Ari’s mother, Amy Dyckovsky. She traces his quantum ambitions all the way back to a cross-country car ride the family took when he was little more than 3 years old, moving from California to Virginia. At an age when most children are still learning to put words together, Ari sat in back seat solving math problems tossed out by his father, a market researcher and high-tech exec with a degree in economics and a Yale MBA.

In the beginning, the games were simple — addition and subtraction — but they quickly progressed into multiple-digit multiplication and the square roots of very large numbers. They continued through elementary school, Ari says, and they soon morphed into something akin to physics. “I would get bored at school, but when I got home, he would make me these math worksheets … algebraic word problems,” he says. “After a while, they became less about math and more about how would you use math to describe something, to show what’s going on. That’s what physics is.” But there’s not a direct line to that PBS documentary. Ari’s rather accelerated education slowed when he was 9. His father died after an unexpected heart attack, at the age of 47, and as Ari tells it, his interest in education of any kind almost dried up completely. “He took a serious downward spiral,” his mother says. “We all did.” This continued for years. “I lost hope in many ways, especially when it came to my education. I immediately adopted the notion that my education was no longer important without my father,” Ari says. “For two weeks, I refused to leave the house, and I was finally forced to attend school. I was not happy about it. It really was a major setback.”

Ari credits his grandfather — his mother’s father — with reviving what had been a natural curiosity. “School was very easy for me, even after I lost interest,” Dyckovsky says. “But my grandfather kept telling me to look at it in a different way. He told me that an A meant nothing. I was dumbfounded. But he told me that wasn’t the best you could get — not even close. It took me a while. But eventually, I figured it out.” As a young teenager, after a nudge from his mother, he was accepted at the Loudoun County Academy of Science in Sterling, Virginia, a selective, part-time high school for promising science and math students. But in some ways, he outgrew this as well.

After that BEC hit him between the eyes, he taught himself the basic tenets of quantum mechanics, and when he reached his limits there, he emailed about 70 university professors and researchers, asking if they would help take him further. Only one responded: Steven Olmschenk at NIST. Originally, Olmschenk was little more than a teacher. But eventually, their relationship morphed into a collaboration, and it was only natural that their research would settle on quantum entanglement, the subject of Olmschenk’s Ph.D. thesis.