This dissertation argues that silence played a fundamental role in the Victorian novel and in Victorian novel writing, operating as a productive force in service of sympathetic exchange and creative labor. It examines Charles Lamb's and Thomas Carlyle’s foundational roles in detaching silence from its traditional Romantic associations with solitude,...
Nucleic acids such as DNA or RNA of various lengths and structures have a wide scope of functions as therapeutic entities compared to conventional drugs. For instance, native and modified forms of nucleic acids can be used for gene silencing, genome editing, gene replacement, immune system modulation, and theranostics. While...
This dissertation proposes a theory that views beats as probabilistic domains that I term “pockets,” taking a vernacular term commonly used by jazz, funk, and popular music performers to describe the state of being in a good groove and making it concrete through empirical methods. Pockets have three key properties:...
A framework is developed that models point defect diffusion and interaction with pre-existing microstructures during irradiation, including defect-defect interactions and defect sinks. This framework uses a modified diffusion potential that includes not only defect concentration, but also intrinsic stresses from the pre-existing microstructure. Various microstructures are studied in {Fe} by...
The ubiquitous role of water in biochemical, electrochemical, and geochemical systems has driven scientific interest in studying the fundamental hydrogen-bonding interactions that water molecules exhibit in the presence of different materials.Specifically, we focus on the interactions characterizing water at the interface between two bulk media, as these are essential to...
The highly flexible nature of 2D materials has led to them becoming fundamental building blocks for achieving novel device physics and potential breakthroughs in practical technologies. 2D layers can be interfaced in a wide array of methods with themselves, other 2D layered materials, or materials of entirely different type or...
Metal halide perovskites have recently emerged as one of the most promising active layers in solar cells for their high power conversion efficiency (>25%) and ease of synthesis and deposition. Spatial heterogeneity is inevitable with current fabrication methods for both monocrystalline and polycrystalline perovskite thin films and crystals. The morphology-dependent...
Molybdenum oxides and sulfides are earth-abundant materials known to catalyze a wide array of reactions, including dehydrogenation, hydrotreating, and higher alcohols synthesis. In particular, alkane and alcohol dehydrogenation are of interest given recent shifts in the energy landscape away from traditional petroleum feedstocks and towards natural gas and renewable energy...
In this thesis, we study the homological mirror symmetry for the Gross-Siebert program of local mirror symmetry. We construct a pair of mirror objects by lifting a tropical curve in the integral tropical manifold of the Gross-Siebert program. Furthermore, we evaluate the central charges of the mirror objects and show...
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...