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...
Two subjects are the focus of this dissertation: Au/TiO2 catalyst used for oxidation of CO at low temperature and siloxane nanocages, a novel material (~2nm) recently developed in our group
While bulk gold is chemically inert, gold supported as nanoparticles is remarkably active for the oxidation of carbon monoxide at...
An efficient unified incremental high-level and physical-level synthesis algorithm was presented in Chapter 2, which enable the tight integration between high-level and physical-level design. Chapter 3 presented a temperature-aware high-level synthesis algorithm built upon the framework of Chapter 2. Temperature variations and hot spots account for reliability issue and require...
In this thesis, I argue that life and soul as analyzed in De Anima are examples of what Aristotle calls a "pros hen legomena" structure, a structure in which various things are said to be living in relation to one thing, which is the central meaning of life. The various...
Since its emergence, the Ginzburg-Landau theory has had a tremendous success in describing thermodynamic properties of superconductivity. In the case of superfluid 3He, not all five fourth-order parameters in the theory are known. Only four combinations of the five parameters have been experimentally established and theoretical attempts to calculate the...
I/O performance has perpetually lagged well behind that of processors. This gap is made even more pronounced in the field of high-performance computing. While simply adding more network bandwidth and increasing the number of storage units is a simple way to increase theoretical peak I/O bandwidth, the software libraries for...
The work described in this dissertation focuses on the optical characterization of micron-sized structures with mesoscale (100-1000 nm) features to investigate of the optical analog to the quantum corral. Lithographically patterned arrays of metallic rings and ellipses were used to study how light can be manipulated and confined within these...