Two experimental methods have been developed to induce flexural waves in concrete piles for which a portion of the shaft is accessible, and the test results were compared to theoretical solutions of flexural guided wave propagation. The pile response is measured and the results are analyzed to compute the group...
The important application for the infrared photodetectors is mainly thermal imaging by focal plane arrays (FPAs) for military and commercial purposes. So far, most mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR) and long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) FPAs are based either on HgCdTe (MCT) or quantum well infrared photodetectors (QWIPs). Even though those technologies are well...
Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is a well-developed technique for growing thin films of a wide variety of materials, which relies on the development of new and better performing metal-organic precursors. To this end, three studies have been conducted into the compatibility of sulfur and phosphine containing ligands with low- and...
This thesis summarizes our research efforts on the application of the nano-structured anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) membrane in heterogeneous catalysis. Procedures for growing the AAO membrane in the center of an aluminum disc have been developed by appropriately masking the disk's perimeter during the anodization and etching steps. The remaining...
Metallic nanostructures are able to confine and manipulate electromagnetic fields because light can couple to free electron oscillations called surface plasmons (SPs). These plasmons exist on metal surfaces as localized (short-range) or as propagating (long-range) modes depending upon the size and geometry of the nanostructure. This dichotomy is primarily an...
This thesis investigates singlet exciton fission, a physical process that converts one singlet exciton to a pair of triplet excitons. Singlet fission was discovered nearly forty years ago, but the mechanism for this process is still not well understood. Recent work has suggested that singlet fission may be capable of...
In this research, the optical and electrical properties of graphene-based materials are investigated. In particular, "graphene oxide", which is an individual layer of graphite oxide, and its chemically reduced form, is probed in terms of its properties, and the properties of graphene oxide and chemically modified graphene oxide are compared...
This thesis attempts a combined theoretical/experimental investigation of two fundamental scaling laws in charge transfer reactions: how the rate of those reactions varies as a function of distance between an electron donor and an electron acceptor and how the rate varies as a function of the number of distinct pathways...
The Satake category is the category of perverse sheaves on the affine Grassmannian of a complex reductive group G. The global cohomology functor induces a tensor equivalence between the Satake category and the category of finite-dimensional representations of the split form of the Langlands dual group of G. We give...
The task of designing porous materials for use in specific applications requires a detailed understanding of the adsorption process and how adsorption is affected by material properties. Applications of interest include maximizing gravimetric or volumetric adsorption capacity for hydrogen and carbon dioxide and increasing the selectivity for carbon dioxide in...