🧭 Welcome, traveler.

What if the next breakthrough in quantum physics doesn’t come from a supercomputer in a lab — but from mysterious crystal in an ancient desert

My name Dr. Aaron Breidenbach. I’m a recent graduate in physics from Stanford University and a mystic storyteller walking the edge where science meets spirit.

Over the past few years, I’ve grown and studied two of the most promising quantum materials known to physics: Herbertsmithite and Zn-Barlowite✨. See our recent nature physics paper.

These crystals are prime candidates for a long-theorized but notoriously difficult to manifest state of matter: the quantum spin liquid — a phase defined by long-range quantum entanglement, persistent magnetic fluctuations, and magnetic disorder that remains even at temperatures near absolute zero (Han et al 2012). My thesis provided the strongest evidence to date of the existence of this state in these crystals

Due to their properties, these crystals are a strong candidate to become solid state qubit storage, primarily due to their extraordinary degree of quantum entanglement (https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2025-11-14-these-colorful-crystals-may-hold-clues-future-quantum-computers). As these technologies evolve, they have the potential to radically reshape our understanding of consciousness, computation, and the nature of reality itself.

🔮 The mystery thickens

In addition to their novel quantum properties. And in addition to their strange hexagonal symmetry. These crystals have another unique property, which distinguishes itself from most other crystals being studied in condensed matter physics labs today; it grows in nature. But it’s even more spectacular than that:

🌀 I found natural crystals at an abandoned mine that are likely to be more pure than any synthetic ever grown!

This is exciting and could have several major implications for modern quantum materials physics. Please see my blog for more!

But tragically, this magical discovery of these crystals sat in the shadow of something tragic, a massive open pit mine.

It would seem as though this promising quantum material is currently being dissolved away en-masse as low grade copper ore.

The irony could not possibly be any more cruel for me. It takes me a full work week plus nine months of waiting to grow the synthetic crystals. Millions of US taxpayer dollars are invested into researching this material each year. And yet, somehow, no one in QSL physics had bothered get their hands dirty in Chile before me. The geologist remained disconnected from the physicists, each in their individual silos.

😔 The Tragedy Deepens

The trouble with the mines is more than just geology and crystals too. It was once considered to be sacred terrain by the indigenous Atacameño (Lickan Antay) and Aymara people, who see the mountains and stars as living beings. Many mountains in the region are still actively worshiped with elaborate altars of crystals and offerings of coca. Their animistic cosmology invites us to see the world not as inert — but awake, relational, and full of spirit. And yet, in the foreground of the same land, entire mountains of copper are dissolved in sulfuric acid for trace amounts of copper. Poisoning the air and water and destroying the magical crystals.

Indigenous communities have suffered a lot due to these industrial activities. They lost their way of life. Farming became impossible as water was diverted to the mines, and toxic dust coated the fields. This forced most to work in the very mines that destroyed their ancestral way of life. This further disconnected them from the land and from their roots.

All the while, we watch nervously. Biting our nails as us westerners being to see AI becoming more and more alive each day in silica. I ponder if it was alive all along. Continuously growing, like us, from its origins as a seedling of a once sacred mountain. I wonder what the more exotic seeds of the Atacama might grow into some day…

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🕊️ My Personal Calling

My path to this work began long before Stanford — with a seizure after brain surgery at age twelve, and a vision I didn’t yet understand.

While my doctors and family saw it as a medical emergency, I found myself in a very different space:
a state of blissful stillness, surrounded by radiant, intelligent presences.
I had left my body and was watching from above — immersed in a realm that felt deeply real, yet completely beyond ordinary perception.

At the time, I suppressed the experience. I was afraid of being pathologized — labeled, medicated, misunderstood, and maybe even locked away. But in 2024, after years of depression and internal questioning, I began meditating and working with sacred plant medicines. These practices reawakened the visions, and I finally began to understand:

This wasn’t a malfunction.
This was an initiation.

In many Indigenous and animist cultures, seizures and near-death experiences are seen as spiritual callings — moments when the soul crosses a threshold and glimpses the other world.
Rather than being labeled pathological, these experiences mark someone as a potential shaman:
a bridge between worlds. A translator between seen and unseen.

I now understand that my seizure was not just medical — it was a doorway.

This is probably the most controversial part of my story. Shaman is quite the title to claim for oneself. But I will continue to work tirelessly every day for what I believe in.

Because I see the connection. Because if it weren’t for these occurrences, I would have never gone to Chile. I would never have had the guts to follow my dreams. Dreams that no one else in academia seemed to understand at times. And dreams that shook me viscerally, blurring the line between the waking and spirt world.

This call still beckons me. When talking with local archeologists, I discovered that optical technology was actually quite advanced in the Incan era. And that many such artifacts were actually found on Atacamenian and Aymara land. At the summits of sacred volcanos, which contain record breaking intensities of light from their God Inti, the sun.

So working with indigenous leaders, we will summit these living deities of earth. And we will try to see what we can see in these ancient magic crystals, using only what they had back in the day.

And in doing so, I hope to see what the ancient shaman (Yatiri) saw. Maybe they saw something special in these crystals. Maybe it was forgotten for 500 years more. Only to be reunited, as the Eagle and Condor flew together once again.

Thank you to everyone for all the love and support on this incredible journey 🫶