About Planckeon Labs

Who We Are

I'm Baalateja Kataru—physics grad turned systems programmer. Planckeon Labs is where I build high-performance computational physics tools.

The work spans neutrino phenomenology, quantum computing simulation, numerical relativity, and AI infrastructure. The common thread: make software go zoom.

The Neutrino Story

My path into neutrino physics started during undergrad at Krea University (2020-2023). My thesis, supervised by Dr. Sushant Raut, explored the Eigenvalue-Eigenvector Identity (EEI)—a elegant result from linear algebra that simplifies neutrino oscillation calculations.

The idea: instead of solving cubic eigenvalue equations, use 2×2 submatrix diagonalization. The math is cleaner and the physics more transparent.

That work became pytrino, a Python/Cython library published on PyPI.

The Correspondence with Denton

In October 2024, I emailed Peter Denton (Brookhaven National Lab) about extending EEI to 4-flavor oscillations—the sterile neutrino case that might explain short-baseline anomalies.

His reply: "Four flavors is analytically much much worse, and also numerically somewhat unstable."

But he pointed me to NuFast, his ~100 ns algorithm for 3-flavor oscillations. Used in production by T2K and JUNO.

I thought: can I beat that?

The Result

The Zig port of NuFast runs at 21 ns per calculation (SIMD f32). That's 4.7× faster than the original.

Not because I'm smarter—because Zig gives you explicit control over everything LLVM cares about. No hidden allocations, no ownership overhead, comptime everything.

The full nufast package now includes:

  • Rust crate on crates.io
  • Zig implementation with SIMD
  • WASM for browsers (13 KB)
  • PREM Earth model for atmospheric neutrinos
  • NSI support for new physics searches
  • 3+1 sterile neutrino model

And Imagining the Neutrino—an interactive visualization powered by nufast WASM.

Why "Planckeon"?

Planckeons are theoretical entities at the Planck scale (~10⁻³⁵ m) where quantum mechanics and gravity merge.

Recent work by Licata, Tamburini, and Fiscaletti (2024-2025) models planckeons as the "mouths" of quantum wormholes—realizing the ER=EPR conjecture proposed by Maldacena and Susskind. The idea: entanglement is geometry. Quantum correlations between distant regions are geometrically realized as wormhole connections.

In this framework, spacetime isn't fundamental—it emerges from the entanglement structure of planckeons.

Just as planckeons bridge quantum and gravitational physics, we build software that bridges theoretical physics and practical computation.

Philosophy

Speed matters. If your simulation takes hours, you'll run it once. If it takes milliseconds, you'll explore the parameter space.

Systems programming is underrated in physics. Most physicists default to Python. That's fine for prototypes. But production tools should be fast.

The best abstractions are zero-cost. Zig and Rust let you write high-level code that compiles to what you'd write by hand.

Open source is the way. All our tools are MIT licensed.

References

  1. Licata, I., Tamburini, F., & Fiscaletti, D. (2025). Planckeons as mouths of quantum wormholes. arXiv:2505.02804
  2. P.B. Denton & S.J. Parke. NuFast. arXiv:2405.02400
  3. Maldacena, J. & Susskind, L. (2013). Cool horizons for entangled black holes. arXiv:1306.0533