Renewable energy technology, more so than ever before, is critical to the survival of humanity. For decades, concentrated efforts into designing and developing such novel devices resulted in the innovation of solar-driven photovoltaics that were competitive with nonrenewable alternatives. This thesis explores the dynamic behavior of alternative material candidates that...
This thesis focuses on exploring the explanatory and discovery potential of the four-neutrino and enhanced neutrino magnetic and electric dipole moments hypotheses when
applied to the NOvA/T2K discrepancy and the XENON1T anomaly, respectively. Firstly,
we study the effect of a very light (sub eV) sterile neutrino on the NOvA/T2K anom-...
A fundamental materials science question is “why and how will this material form?” The experimental,computation, and time resources necessary to answer this question consume significant resources due to the
predominantly trial-and-error based approaches common in materials research. This dissertation reintroduces
a number of fundamental thermodynamics-based tools for the study of...
Superconducting-circuit based platforms are strong contenders in the race to build a quantum computer.While the transmon has had extraordinary success as the leading superconducting qubit modality, there are reasons to believe that other types of qubits could possess relative benefits in terms of noise immunity, anharmonicity, or extensibility. In this...
Since the dawn of mankind, humans have used materials and tools to dominate the world. As our understanding of the fields physics, chemistry and engineering is growing, we are able to artificially create advanced materials with engineered responses. Next step would be to create ‘ smart’ or intelligent materials capable...
The field of time-domain astronomy has seen significant advancements in the latest years as increasingly sensitive, deep and wide-field surveys of the sky at all wavelengths are being carried out more and more frequently. Furthermore, the addition of gravitational wave detectors around the world has opened an entirely new window...
Engineering responses of soft materials at hierarchical time and length scales is of great interest to both fundamental science and technological applications. In recent years, the hybridization between emerging soft condense matters and conventional hard condense matters keeps enriching the materials library of humankind and opens another largely-uncharted venue for...
Since its discovery in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), efforts have beenmade to measure and characterize the properties of the Higgs boson. Among these efforts
have been searches for rare decays of the Higgs predicted by the standard model (SM) of
particle physics. One such decay is the...
The nature of dark matter (DM) remains one of the largest open questions in modern physics despite the many searches for particle dark matter around the world. The search for dark matter particles with masses above 5 GeV/$c^2$ is led by the dual-phase xenon time-projection chamber (LXe-TPC) detector technology which...
The leptonic and inclusive hadronic decay branching fractions of the W boson are studied using 35.9 $fb^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data collected at $\sqrt{s}=13~TeV$ during the 2016 run of the CMS experiment. Events characterized by the production of pairs of W bosons from \ttbar and \tW processes are selected. Multiple...