Alumni

Electron neutrino appearance is the signature channel to address the most pressing questions in neutrino oscillations physics, at both long and short baselines. This includes the search for...

The asymmetry of polarized neutrons scattered elastically from (‘209)Bi has been measured as a continuous function of neutron energy from 2 to 5 MeV, and at scattering angles between 3(...

In this thesis, we analyze unitary conformal field theories in three dimensional spaces via analytic techniques of conformal bootstrap program through correlation functions of nonscalar...

Chalcogenides, compounds containing the elements S, Se, or Te, are a class of materials that includes those with two-...

Nuclear-spin-dependent parity violation (NSD-PV) effects arise from exchange of the Z boson between electrons and the nucleus, and from interaction of electrons with the nuclear anapole...

When placed in a cavity, an atom experiences forces due to its interaction with the cavity’s electromagnetic field. We have studied the effect of these forces on the trajectory of an...

We present a search for anomalous production of the signature lepton + photon + b-quark + missing transverse energy produced in...

The observational study of galaxy cluster outskirts is a new territory to probe the thermodynamic and chemical structure of the X-ray emitting intracluster medium (ICM) and the...

Almost a century after the dark matter problem was first posed, dark matter’s expectedly minute experimental signature continues to elude direct detection and remains one of the most...

The origin of fermion masses and mixings is the least understood aspect of the standard model of particle physics. In this thesis, we try to understand part of it by exploring a framework...

MicroBooNE is a liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) on the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermi National Laboratory. Its primary goals are to conduct a ν_e appearance search...

At extremely high temperatures, the quarks and gluons that compose the fundamental building blocks of our universe undergo a phase transition from stable hadronic matter to become a...

We search for the lepton flavor number violating decay $K\sp+ \to \pi\sp+\mu\sp+e\sp-$ in Experiment E865 at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Data...

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment located in the Atacama Desert in Chile at an elevation of 5200 m. It consists of one 6 m Large...

This experimental thesis focuses on two distinct themes: developing NMR techniques to probe many-body spin systems, and extracting the maximum amount of information from the minimum amount...

The polarization of neutrons elastically scattered from ⁴He at laboratory angles of 20°, 40°, 60°, 80° , and 110° has been measured as continuous function of neutron energy...

At sufficiently high temperatures and pressures, QCD matter becomes a hot and dense deconfined medium known as the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Collisions of relativistic heavy-ions are used...

              In this thesis we examine the viscous and thermal transport properties of chiral topological phases, and their relationship to topological invariants. We start by developing a...

The field of optomechanics studies the interactions between light and the motion of an object. One of the goals in this field is to generate and control highly non-classical motion of a...

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....

The study of low dimensional antiferromagnetic systems in recent times has led to major advances in our understanding about states of strongly correlated electron systems. The low...

Despite the abundance of crystallographic and structural data and many recent advances in computational methods for protein design, we still lack a quantitative and predictive understanding...

This dissertation is an account of the first calorimetric detection of individual He2* excimers within a bath of superfluid 4He. When superfluid helium is subject to ionizing radiation,...

After the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, many particle physicists have focused on measuring its various production methods and decay modes. One channel that has previously only been...

In this thesis we generalize and extend the steady-state ab initio laser theory (SALT), first developed by Tureci and Stone, and apply it problems in laser design. SALT as first formulated...

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...

Dark energy and cosmic inflation are two enigmas in fundamental physics. We have a wide range of theoretical models for these two enigmas and we need precise observational constraints to...

After reviewing the minimal SU(2) Skyrme model, we generalize it to a composite model. The predictions are found to be in good agreement with experiment, and an interpretation of solitons...

In order to develop some insight into dynamical symmetry breaking in four dimensional nonabelian theories, a toy model is examined that exhibits some of the features of the more realistic...

The field of accelerator neutrino experiments is entering an era of precision oscillation measurements where the remaining unknown neutrino measurements will be determined. The upcoming...

The formalism of the Interacting Boson-Fermion Model permits the calculation of the properties of the low-lying collective states in odd-mass nuclei. Transitional nuclei, which are...

Dark matter dominates the matter content of the Universe, but its composition remains a mystery. Here, we investigate a strongly interacting SU(4) gauge theory called stealth dark matter,...

The primary motive for this thesis is the highly uncertain nature of dark matter, presumably the dominant substance in our universe. From an astronomical perspective, perhaps the perfect...

An experiment (E851) dedicated to study of the rare decay $K\sp+ \to \pi\sp{+}e\sp{+}e\sp{-}$, $K\sb{\pi ee}$, was performed in the spring of 1989 at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s...

...

In recent years the study of topological phases of matter has moved to the forefront of theoretical condensed matter physics. This has been fueled in part by the theorized existence of...

The revolutionary advances in nanotechnology have facilitated the precise control and manipulation of mesoscopic systems where quantum effects are pronounced. Typical experimental settings...

Since the the idea of laser cooling on thallium fluoride’s (TlF) |X¹∑> → |B³∏> optical transition, there has been renewed interest TlF beams for both laser...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the leading non-invasive imaging technique of soft tissues on anatomical and millimeter scales. In conventional MRI, hydrogen-1 in water and liquid fats...

For more than thirty years, the structure of nuclei has been understood within the frameworks of two superficially quite different models. The independent particle shell model is...

I present the design, development, and application of new technology for the conformal bootstrap in the context of the study of three-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) with...

Well-known problems with standard big-bang cosmology motivate the inflationary scenario. A large class of inflationary models...

Great interest exists in the study of the scattering of electrons by hydrogen atoms; such scattering is the most fundamental atomic collision process. Furthermore, measurements of electron...

The atmospheric state is describable by spatial point values or by harmonic coefficients. Spatially localized structures have slowly-decaying; harmonic coefficients; coefficients define...

Since its invention in 1973, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an invaluable tool for clinical medicine, fundamental biomedical research, the physical sciences, and...

Realizing a practical quantum computer with superconducting qubits requires substantially higher gate fidelities, which necessitates further improvements in the coherence of superconducting...

Over the past 50 years, our ability to design and fabricate materials and devices with ever-smaller components has improved...

A semiclassical theory of single and multimode lasing, the Steady-state Ab Initio Laser Theory (SALT), is presented in this...

...

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...

In recent years, advances in theoretical treatments have made molecular hydrogen attractive for studies of fundamental physics in molecules. The relativistic and radiative corrections to...

The projection method is a constructive proof of complete integrability of classical many body systems. Roughly, this method consists of establishing a correspondence between a system of n...

The Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) represents one of the most advanced experimental technologies for physics at the Intensity Frontier due to its full 3D-imaging, excellent...

Accurately predicting the abundance and structural evolution of dark matter subhaloes is crucial for understanding galaxy formation, large-scale structure, and constraining the nature of...

This thesis presents the results of a search for pair-produced scalar charm quarks with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The search uses 20.3 fb^-1 of data collected during the sqrt(s) = 8...

Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment (MicroBooNE) is a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) operating in the Booster Neutrino Beamline at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory....

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...

Quantum computers are expected to revolutionize the world of computing, but major challenges remain to be addressed before this potential can be realized. One such challenge is the so-...

The sensitivity of physical amplitudes to the observed isospin symmetry breaking in the fermion mass matrix is analyzed in the standard model of electroweak interactions and in theories...

The polarization of neutrons elastically scattered from ¹⁶0 at nine angles ranging from 20° to 160° has been measured as a continuous function of energy between 1 and 4 MeV using...

Berry phases are known to occur for a spin 1/2 in a slowly varying magnetic field in quantum mechanics, and for the polarization of light in a gently twisted optical fiber in classical...

The absolute differential polarization of neutrons elastically scattered from a spin-zero nucleus has been measured, for the first time, as a continuous function of energy using a double-...

...

The Hamiltonian formulations of classical general relativity are used as the starting point for investigating specific questions associated with the quantization of gravity. (i) The ADM...

On July 4, 2012, the discovery of the Higgs boson was simultaneously announced by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. Since then, evidence for its decay to tau leptons has been claimed. As of...

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...

The Palomar-QUEST Variability Survey has been completed. This thesis has analyzed the data set with the goal of determining...

Observation of a non-zero electron electric dipole moment (EDM) will be explicit evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. There is significant interest in developing experiments that...

Nonreciprocity in various branches of physics has been studied for more than a century, e.g., from classical to quantum mechanics, and from particle to condensed matter. It is particularly...

Ultracold polar molecules, with their long-range dipolar interactions and rich internal structure, have emerged as a powerful platform for quantum information science, quantum simulation,...

The production of positrons in heavy ion collisions has been of great interest during the past decade. The unexpected discovery of correlated sharp positron-electron peaks in the energy...

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...

The study of the large-scale cosmological structure seeks to understand the makings and the evolution of the universe. In this...

The field of optomechanics studies the interaction between electromagnetic and mechanical degrees of freedom via radiation pressure. This interaction is usually enhanced when both...

The $\rm(2\sp2 S\sb{1/2}$-$\rm 2\sp2 P\sb{3/2})$ fine structure transition in muonium has been observed for the first time. The measured value is 9895$\sbsp{-30}{+35}$ MHz. This measurement...

The interaction between light and mechanical motion has been harnessed for a variety of scientific and technological applications ranging from studies of decoherence to precision metrology...

“Universal” Conductance Fluctuations (UCF) are studied by measuring electron magnetoconductance in micron-size wires fabricated from GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures. These aperiodic...

We use the method of conformal bootstrap to systematically study the space of allowed conformal field theories (CFT) in three spacetime dimensions. We consider the crossing symmetry...

The total neutron cross-section of (‘209)Bi has been measured with high resolution in the vicinity of the prominent resonance at 800 eV. An improved limit on the possible value of the...

There is an on-going effort to engineer a one-dimensional topological superconductor. Such a superconductor is expected to host...

A wealth of astrophysical research supports the existence of dark matter in the universe, yet the exact nature of this unknown particle remains elusive. The Large Underground Xenon (LUX)...

The impact of atomic-scale structural distortions on the transport properties of epitaxial thin film oxides and their interfaces is investigated through high resolution surface x-ray...

Although the Standard Model of Particle Physics has been generally successful in modeling fundamental particles and their interactions, it does not incorporate many observed physical...

Characterizing the spatiotemporal patterns of neural dynamics is crucial to understanding many brain functions and psychiatric disorders. A commonly observed dynamic pattern is bistability...

The Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment (MicroBooNE) is a leading large-scale Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) experiment, designed for precision neutrino physics. The main...

We analyze the phase variations of the microwave field in a TE011 microwave cavity and how these variations affect the frequency of an atomic clock. We analytically solve for the microwave...

Charged current single pion production (CCπ^...

Part 1: A new method for optical measurement of proton polarization. A new method has been developed to measure the polarization of low energy (10 keV to 100 keV) protons. The basic...

Nano-confined interfaces have received growing attention in recent years, with a wide range of applications including artificial ion channels, water desalination, osmotic energy conversion...

In the first project, I studied the onset of structural arrest and glass formation in a suspension of silica nanoparticles in a...

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...

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...

...

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...

In this dissertation we study some low temperature phenomena in disordered conductors.

First we investigate the effects of spin precession on weak-localization. It is argued that the...

In this dissertation, the theory of Brownian applied in the form developed by Professor Lars Onsager in 1934, to the calculation of rates of capture and release of negative ions by...

In this thesis we explore analytical methods to study conformal field theories (CFTs) in a general number of spacetime dimensions. We first use the lightcone bootstrap to systematically...

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...

Droplets of deconfined quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma, are produced experimentally in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions. Studying this deconfined matter may allow...

Strong recurrent interactions in cortical circuits are capable of generating at-tractor dynamics, which may underlie core computational components of cognition, such as working memory and...

QCD predicts a phase transition in nuclear matter at high energy densities. This matter, called a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), should have very different properties from normal nuclear matter...

Jet quenching is one of the main signals used to investigate the properties of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Besides energy loss, jet quenching can also manifest in the modification of jet...

Quantum computation and communication are important branches of quantum information science. However, noise in realistic quantum devices fundamentally limits the utility of these quantum...

Laser cooling in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) is the workhorse technique for atomic physics in the ultracold regime, serving as the starting point in applications from optical clocks to...

...

In Ultra-Relativistic Heavy Ion collisions, such as those done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the high energy densities create an exotic...

This thesis demonstrate the efficacy of designing and developing machine learning algorithms to selected use cases that encompass many of the outstanding challenges in the field of...

Liquid xenon has been used with great success in recent attempts to directly detect dark matter particles. The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment recently concluded nearly four years...

The field of quantum computation faces a central challenge that has thus far impeded the full-scale realization of quantum computing machines: decoherence.  Remarkably, however, protocols...

Following the discovery of a Higgs boson-like particle in the summer of 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the...

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...

...

Motivated by the BCJ double copy in quantum field theory, we demonstrate a correspondence between perturbative solutions of classical scalar, gauge and gravity theories.

First, we...

To improve the understanding of the evolution of nuclear structure near the shell closures at N = 126, recoil-decay tagging, which provides a very high channel selectivity, is a very...

The specific heat of the linear chain magnetic compound CsNiF(,3) has been measured at temperatures between 4.2 and 20 K and in magnetic fields up to 1.0 T applied perpendicularly to the...

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...

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...

We have studied the interaction of cold atoms with ferromagnetic surfaces. The atomic source is a magneto-optic trap (MOT) that captures Rb atoms from a dilute vapor and cools them to 30 $\...

This thesis describes two distinct research endeavors linked by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments. One is related to the nascent study of discrete time crystals (DTCs) in driven...

The attraction of an atom to metallic surfaces has been common knowledge for more than 150 years. In the framework of quantum electrodynamics, and to a first approximation, this interaction...

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) survey experiment located in the Atacama Desert in Chile, at an elevation of 5200 m. It is made up of one 6 m...

Neutral current neutral pion interactions are a fundamental process in neutrino interactions, and their study in the MicroBooNE Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) is crucial in...

We study the effect of electron-electron interactions on transport and thermodynamic properties of small, chaotic metallic...

Circuit quantum electrodynamics (Circuit QED) is the extremely successful framework for studying quantum devices developed along with the transmon, a superconducting charge qubit with...

One striking phenomenon of mesoscopic ...

As newly emerging optical devices and metamaterials inundate the photonics community, there is a growing need to understand the limits to device performance. Are current state-of-the-art...

Since its first demonstration in 1966, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) technique has been used extensively to advance electronics technology and answer important questions in condensed matter...

Animals are often tasked with determining how far away salient objects are in order to successfully navigate and survive in their environment. Here, we design a novel high-throughput assay...

The spontaneous breakdown of symmetry in gauge theories is analyzed in detail for three particular choices of gauge group and Higgs representation content: the spinor and the adjoint...

The quantum back-action of the measurement apparatus arising from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is both a fascinating phenomenon and a powerful manipulation tool. Unfortunately,...

Controllable quantum systems that are shielded at a Hamiltonian level from the random fluctuations of their environments could provide a valuable resource for quantum information science....

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....

In recent years, there has been growing interest in methods for producing gases of ultracold polar molecules, driven by proposals to employ ultracold molecules in applications in ultracold...

Heavy ion collisions at the LHC and RHIC produce a quark gluon plasma (QGP), in which quarks and gluons are deconfined into an extended medium. This “fourth phase” of matter is also...

Future surveys will provide a deeper understanding of dark energy, dark matter, and early universe physics through the measurements of large scale structure. In particular, the baryon...

Fermilab experiment E769, which took data in the fixed target run of 1987, collected approximately 370 $\times$ 10$\sp6$ events using a 250 GeV mixed hadron beam impinging on a multifoil...

Any useful quantum computer is expected to require quantum error correction. This means a quantum algorithm can still reliably give the correct answer despite individual qubits suffering...

...

For decades, it remains an open question of how active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are triggered and fueled. As continuous emission at enormous rate across a wide spectrum requires an efficient...

Tunneling measurements have been performed on tantalum surface layers on niobium. The thickness of the tantalum layer ranges from 10 to 100 A. The critical current, bound-state energy,...

Measuring the cosmic distribution of neutral hydrogen across a wide redshift range is the long term goal of 21 cm intensity mapping experiments. Removing systematics adequately enough to...

The observation of heavy elements such as Ne, Mg, Al, Si in various novae ejecta, a large isotopic abundance ratio of $\sp{22}$Ne/$\sp{20}$Ne compared to solar ratios in some meteorites,...

I perform computational studies of quasistatically jammed packings of frictionless particles of a variety of shapes. Each of the four studies presented in this dissertation focuses...

This thesis presents results for measurements of the Standard Model Higgs boson properties and production as measured in the diphoton decay channel using 36.1/fb of proton–proton collision...

A two-dimensional topological insulator has a gap for bulk excitations, but conducts on its boundaries via gapless edge modes. Time-reversal symmetry prohibits elastic backscattering of...

Coherent quantum effects are the hallmark of atomic systems. The field of circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) also allows for the control of coherent quantum systems. However, these...

This thesis is concerned with the conception, design and construction of an experiment to search for the permanent electric dipole moment of the electron (de) with improved sensitivity....

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...

In this thesis, a calculation of all nucleon electromagnetic form factors is reported. The calculation is done in a two-...

The development of controllable quantum machines is largely motivated by a desire to simulate quantum systems beyond the capabilities of classical computers. For investigating intrinsically...

I will discuss the various experimental techniques to achieve BEC of bosonic ⁷Li. The emphasis is...

In 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments both reported the discovery of a new particle in the remnants of high-energy proton-proton collisions. The particles properties were consistent with...

This thesis divides naturally into three parts. The first deals with the use of gravitational lensing as a probe of cosmology: an analysis of the limits on the cosmological constant that...

The question answered in this thesis is whether it is possible to construct a rigorous and efficient perturbation method to obtain the effective static Hamiltonian of a nonlinear oscillator...

Chromatin organization is inextricably linked to its dynamics. The loop extrusion factor (LEF) model provides a framework for how topologically associating domains (TADs) arise: cohesin or...

Bulk acoustic resonators support robust, long-lived mechanical modes, capable of coupling to various quantum systems. In separate works, such devices have achieved strong coupling to both...