# Alumni Listing

December 2014
Dissertation Title Dissertation Abstract Thesis Advisor

Tomas Aronsson
Cross section of bottom electrons in proton-proton collisions in the ALICE experiment High-energy heavy-ion collisions at the LHC allow for the study of the properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Heavy quarks, charm and bottom, produced in the initial hard scattering processes of the collision are excellent probes of the QGP. When... John Harris

Ana Malagon
Search for 140 microeV Pseudoscalar and Vector Dark Matter Using Microwave Cavities Dark matter plays an important role in structure formation and composes 26.8% of the total energy density in the universe. There are many postulated particles that are theorized to be the constituents of cold dark matter; however, none have been observed... O. Keith Baker

The Extent of the Two-Color Fundamental Conformal Window The $SU\!\left(2\right)$ gauge theories with $N_{f}$ flavors of massless vector-like Dirac fermions transforming in the pseudo-real fundamental representation have an enhanced global chiral symmetry and a distinct symmetry breaking pattern. These... George Fleming

Liyao Wang
Heat capacity bound, energy fluctuations and convexity In classical statistical mechanics, the heuristic that in the canonical ensemble the energy distribution is sharply peaked at the mean energy is crucial in justifying the equivalence between the canonical and microcanonical ensembles. It turns out that... Mokshay Madiman
May 2014
Dissertation Title Dissertation Abstract Thesis Advisor

Colin Bruzewicz
Continuous Optical Production of Ultracold Vibronic Ground State Polar Molecules Polar molecules present an exciting new test bed for ultracold physics with applications in numerous fields, such as chemical reaction dynamics, many-body systems, and quantum computation. Creating large samples of these molecules that can be trapped for... David DeMille

Bernard Hicks
Differential Production Cross-Section of Heavy-Flavor Electrons in √s = 2.76 TeV pp collisions at the LHC with the ALICE detector Recent results at RHIC seem to confirm T.D.Lee’s hypothesis that a new form of matter, the quark- gluon plasma (QGP), could be formed in heavy-ion collisions at high energies. Heavy quarks, being formed in the early stages of heavy-ion collisions, form a... Helen Caines

Lawrence Lee
A Search for B-violating Supersymmetry in Multijet Signatures at the ATLAS Experiment With supersymmetry (SUSY) increasingly constrained, more attention is placed on alternate flavors of SUSY that allow for an unexcluded natural theory. A search for new physics phenomena in all-hadronic signatures in \sqrt{s}=8 TeV pp collisions using an... Tobias Golling

Rongrong Ma
Jet measurements in pp and Pb-Pb collisions in ALICE Lattice-QCD predicts the existence of a new form of hot, dense matter called the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) above a critical energy density. Such matter is believed to be created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, where sufficient energy is expected to... John Harris

Tianqi Shen
Contact Percolation, Fragility and Frictional Packings This thesis presents four computational and theoretical studies of the structural, mechanical, and vibrational  properties of purely repulsive  disks, dimer-, and ellipse-shaped particles with and without friction.  The first study investigated the... Corey O'Hern
December 2013
Dissertation Title Dissertation Abstract Thesis Advisor

John Barry
Laser cooling and slowing of a diatomic molecule Laser cooling and trapping are central to modern atomic physics. It has been roughly three decades since laser cooling techniques produced ultracold atoms, leading to rapid advances in a vast array of fields and a number of Nobel prizes. Prior to the... David DeMille

Prasenjit Dutt
Strongly correlated quantum transport out-of-equilibrium The revolutionary advances in nanotechnology have facilitated the precise control and manipulation of mesoscopic systems where quantum effects are pronounced. Typical experimental settings are capable of driving these systems far from equilibrium, where... R. Shankar

Merideth Frey
Using Novel Pulse Sequences for Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Phosphorus-31 in Hard and Soft Solids Since its invention in 1973, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an invaluable tool for clinical medicine, fundamental biomedical research, the physical sciences, and engineering. The vast majority of all MRI studies, in medicine and beyond,... Sean Barrett

Kurtis Geerlings
Improving Coherence of Superconducting Qubits and Resonators Superconducting qubits and resonators with quality factors exceeding 10^7 are of great interest for quantum information processing applications. The improvement of present devices necessarily involves the consideration of participation ratios, which... Michel Devoret

Aaron Mertz
Collective Mechanics of Epithelial Cells Cell–cell and cell–matrix adhesions play essential roles in the function of tissues, yet little is known about how crosstalk between these two adhesion types regulate cells’ material properties and active processes. This dissertation combines experiment... Eric Dufresne

Konstantin Nesterov
Mesoscopic Effects in Chaotic Metallic Nanoparticles We study electron interactions in a nanosized chaotic metallic grain with a large Thouless conductance. We use the so-called universal Hamiltonian, which describes the low-energy physics of such a grain. The noninteracting part of this model fluctuates... Yoram Alhassid

Alice Ohlson
Investigating Parton Energy Loss with Jet-hadron Correlations and Jet vn at STAR A strongly-coupled, deconfined state of quarks and gluons, known as the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), is created in high-energy collisions of heavy nuclei. The QGP can be probed by high-momentum quarks and gluons (collectively known as partons) that are... John Harris

Kinga Partyka
Exclusive Muon-Neutrino Charged Current mu+Np topologies in ArgoNeuT Neutrinos remain among the least understood fundamental particles even after decades of study. As we enter the precision era of neutrino measurements bigger and more sophisticated detectors have emerged. The leading candidate among them is a Liquid Argon... Bonnie Fleming

William Pontius
The Molecular Origins and Functional Role of Noise in a Simple Sensory Network Biological pathways perform calculations with often-small numbers of constituent molecules, leading to potentially significant variability in their output. In this thesis, I use the chemotaxis pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli as a model to... Thierry Emonet

Matthew Reed
Entanglement and Quantum Error Correction with Superconducting Qubits A quantum computer will use the properties of quantum physics to solve certain computational problems much faster than otherwise possible. One promising potential implementation is to use superconducting quantum bits in the circuit quantum... Robert Schoelkopf

Charles Riley
Searching for Local Parity Violation in Heavy Ion Collisions Parity violation of the strong interaction is prohibited globally, however, it may be possible for parity to be violated locally in hot, dense, and deconfined QCD matter created in heavy ion collisions. Microscopic parity-odd domains in QCD are the... Jack Sandweiss

Flavius Schackert
A Practical Quantum-Limited Parametric Amplifier Based on the Josephson Ring Modulator This dissertation has addressed the problem of developing the Josephson Parametric Converter (JPC) as a practical phase-preserving microwave parametric amplifier operating at the quantum limit of added noise. The device consists of two superconducting... Michel Devoret

Extending Coherence of Superconducting Qubits: from microseconds to milliseconds Circuit quantum electrodynamics (Circuit QED) is the extremely successful framework for studying quantum devices developed along with the transmon, a superconducting charge qubit with an insensitivity to several types of dephasing. It involves the... Robert Schoelkopf
May 2013
Dissertation Title Dissertation Abstract Thesis Advisor

Sourpouhi Bedikian
A Search for the Charged Higgs: Using Tau Polarimetry with Proton-Proton Collisions at the ATLAS Detector A search for a 130 GeV charged Higgs boson in ttbar events containing a tau lepton is presented. Tau polarimetry is used in order to distinguish the signal, t → H±b → τνb, from the dominant Standard Model background, t → W±b → τνb. The signal extraction... Sarah Demers

Christopher Gilbreth
Ultracold Fermi Gases: Effective Interactions and Superfluidity Cold atomic Fermi gases are clean, highly experimentally tunable systems with connections to many different fields of physics. However, in the strongly-interacting regime they are nonperturbative and difficult to study theoretically. One challenge is to... Yoram Alhassid

Archana Kamal
Nonreciprocity in active Josephson junction circuits I will present different flavors of nonreciprocal photon dynamics realized using active parametric circuits based on Josephson junctions. The motivation stems from developing non-magnetic alternatives to existing nonreciprocal devices, invariably... Michel Devoret

Zuhair Khandker
Embedding Methods for Conformal Field Theor Conformal field theories (CFTs) are highly constrained by symmetry. For instance, based on symmetry considerations alone one can derive constraints on the form of correlators and on the scaling dimensions of certain operators. However, the full... Walter Goldberger

Nicholas Masluk
Purifying the environment of the fluxonium artificial atom Fluxonium is a highly anharmonic artificial atom, which makes use of an array of large Josephson junctions to shunt the junction of a Cooper-pair box for protection from charge noise. At microwave frequencies the array forms a “superinductance”, a... Michel Devoret

John Murray
Specialization of neural circuits for cognition: linking structure to function through dynamics The brain achieves flexible cognition through specialization of cortical areas for different functions. To subserve working memory, prefrontal cortex can maintain a persistent pattern of activity in the absence of a stimulus, whereas sensory areas do not... Xiao-Jing Wang

Richard Wall
A study of heavy flavor quarks produced in association with top quark pair events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV using the ATLAS detector In this thesis, we show evidence for the production of ttbar + b + X and ttbar + c + X, together refered to as ttbar + HF, at the Large Hadron Collider. A sample of dilepton ttbar candidate events with three or more b-tagged jets is used to isolate a \$\... Paul Tipton

Brian Walsh
SEARCH FOR STOP SQUARK PAIR PRODUCTION IN FINAL STATES WITH ONE ISOLATED LEPTON, JETS, AND MISSING TRANSVERSE MOMENTUM IN SQRT(S) = 7 TeV COLLISIONS USING 4.7 fb^(-1) OF ATLAS DATA A cut-and-count search for stop squark pair production in pp collisions at √s = 7 TeVwith 4.71 fb−1 of 2011 ATLAS data is presented. Events with one isolated lepton, four or more jets, and missing transverse energy are selected to study a simplified... Tobias Golling
December 2012
Dissertation Title Dissertation Abstract Thesis Advisor

Steven Eckel
A Search for the Electron EDM using Europium-Barium Titanates The discovery of a permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) of a fundamental particle would prove a great discovery in modern physics, as such an EDM would violate some of the core symmetries of the fundamental forces of nature. Many models that go beyond... Steve Lamoreaux

Matthew Phillips
Sensory Processing in the Olfactory Bulb: From Lateral Inhibition to Behavior Sensory perception is the fundamental process by which all organisms gain knowledge of their world. Perceptions arise from stimulations of sensory receptors that are translated into neuronal signals. These signals become processed and refined greatly... Gordon M. Shepherd

Hasuk Francis Song
Entanglement in Quantum Many-Body Systems The scaling of entanglement entropy and, more recently, the full entanglement spectrum have become useful tools for characterizing certain universal features of quantum many-body systems. We motivate the importance of entanglement in the study of many-... Karyn Le Hur
May 2012
Dissertation Title Dissertation Abstract Thesis Advisor

Hanghui Chen
A first principles study of oxide interfaces Both theoretically and experimentally, enormous progress has been made toward understanding and controlling materials at the atomic scales. The advances in thin film deposition techniques make it possible to grow artificially designed heterostructures... Sohrab Ismail-Beigi

Andrew Jayich
Laser cooling a 261 kHz harmonic oscillator Optomechanics is a diverse field where mechanical harmonic oscillators are coupled to an optical field via radiation pressure. The mechanical devices range from atom clouds and nanotubes up to the kilogram scale mirrors used in the LIGO observatories.... Jack Harris

Benjamin Kaplan
Testing the Standard Model of Particle Physics: A Search for New Phenomena in Multilepton Events with the ATLAS detector at the LHC An excess of events over the Standard Model predictions in final states with three or more high momentum charged leptons would constitute evidence of new physical processes. Presented is a generic search for new phenomena in such events. To reduce the... Paul L. Tipton

Sarah Lockwitz
A Search for the Standard Model Higgs Boson in CDF II Data This dissertation presents a search for the standard model Higgs boson in the associated production process proton anti-proton to ZH to electron positron b quark anti-b quark. Data amounting to an integrated luminosity of 7.5/fb at a center of mass... Paul Tipton

Superinductance: a New Element for Quantum Circuits No abstract available Michel Devoret

Carl Schreck
Mechanical and vibrational properties of model granular media This thesis describes comprehensive computational and theoretical studies of the mechanical and vibrational properties of athermal particulate systems, such as granular media, foams, and emulsions, modeled as frictionless particles with spherical or... Corey O'Hern

Benjamin Zwickl
Progress Toward Observation of Radiation Pressure Shot Noise Abstract: It has been over 100 years since the first conclusive demonstration of radiation pressure by Lebedev and Nichols and Hull. Cavity optomechanical systems—high finesse optical cavities coupled to mechanical resonators—are good testing... Jack Harris
December 2009
Dissertation Title Dissertation Abstract Thesis Advisor

Ke Han
Search for Stable Strange Quark Matter in Lunar Soil Strange Quark Matter (SQM) is a proposed state of hadronic matter made up of roughly one-third each of up, down, and strange quarks in a single hadronic bag. For the last three decades, a wide range of experimental searches for strangelets (small lumps... Jack Sandweiss
May 2008
Dissertation Title Dissertation Abstract Thesis Advisor

Yong Jiang
Progress Towards Searching for Electron Electric Dipole Moment Using PbO No abstract available David DeMille