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Full-Text Articles in Physics

Approaches To Studying Bacterial Biofilms In The Bioeconomy With Nanofabrication Techniques And Engineered Platforms., Michelle Caroline Halsted Dec 2020

Approaches To Studying Bacterial Biofilms In The Bioeconomy With Nanofabrication Techniques And Engineered Platforms., Michelle Caroline Halsted

Doctoral Dissertations

Studies that estimate more than 90% of bacteria subsist in a biofilm state to survive environmental stressors. These biofilms persist on man-made and natural surfaces, and examples of the rich biofilm diversity extends from the roots of bioenergy crops to electroactive biofilms in bioelectrochemical reactors. Efforts to optimize microbial systems in the bioeconomy will benefit from an improved fundamental understanding of bacterial biofilms. An understanding of these microbial systems shows promise to increase crop yields with precision agriculture (e.g. biosynthetic fertilizer, microbial pesticides, and soil remediation) and increase commodity production yields in bioreactors. Yet conventional laboratory methods investigate these micron-scale …


Nano- And Micro-Structured Temperature-Sensitive Hydrogels For Rapidly Responsive Devices, Qi Lu Jul 2020

Nano- And Micro-Structured Temperature-Sensitive Hydrogels For Rapidly Responsive Devices, Qi Lu

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis aims to extend the understanding and explore the application of temperature-responsive hydrogel systems by integrating microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Stimuli-responsive hydrogel systems are immensely investigated and applied in numerous fields, and interfacing with micro- and nano-fabrication techniques will open up more possibilities. In Chapter 2, the first biologically relevant, in vitro cell stretching device based on hydrogel surface instability was developed. This dynamic platform is constructed by embedding micro-heater devices under temperature-responsive surface-attached hydrogels. The fast and regional temperature change actuates the stretching and relaxation of the seeded human artery smooth muscle cell (HASMC) via controllable surface creasing instability. …


Modification Of The Optical Response Of Alpha Quartz Via The Deposition Of Gold Nanoparticles In Etched Ion Tracks, Maria C. Garcia Toro Jan 2020

Modification Of The Optical Response Of Alpha Quartz Via The Deposition Of Gold Nanoparticles In Etched Ion Tracks, Maria C. Garcia Toro

Doctoral Dissertations

”This study addresses the experimental methods used to develop and characterize plasmonic devices capable of modifying the optical response of alpha quartz via the deposition of gold nanoparticles in etched ion tracks. In the first part of the research, the microstructural characterization of latent and etched ion tracks produced in alpha quartz (α-SiO2) is presented. Single crystals of α-SiO2 were irradiated with two highly energetic ions to different nominal fluences. As expected, the morphology of the resulting ion tracks depends on the energy of the incident ion and their stopping powers within the target material. Subsequent chemical …


Extreme Dynamics Of Nanomaterials Under High-Rate Mechanical Stimuli, Wanting Xie Oct 2019

Extreme Dynamics Of Nanomaterials Under High-Rate Mechanical Stimuli, Wanting Xie

Doctoral Dissertations

Nanomaterials demonstrate novel mechanical properties attributed to the extremely large interfacial area. At quasi-static rates, the interfacial interactions are crucial in mechanical behaviors, however, materials under extreme mechanical stimuli are rarely studied at nanoscale. With an advanced laser-induced projectile impact test, we perform supersonic impact of micro-projectiles on polymer films, multilayer graphene, carbon- based nanocomposites membranes as well as individual micro-fibers, to study the interface interactions in the high-rate regime, and develop a simplified model to characterize the ballistic performance of materials.


Modeling And Simulation Of Driven Nanopatterning Of Bulk-Material And Thin-Film Surfaces, Ashish Kumar Oct 2019

Modeling And Simulation Of Driven Nanopatterning Of Bulk-Material And Thin-Film Surfaces, Ashish Kumar

Doctoral Dissertations

Material nanostructures such as nanowires, quantum dots, and nanorings have a wide variety of applications in electronic and photonic devices among numerous others. Assembling uniformly arranged and consistently sized nanostructure patterns on solid material surfaces is a major challenge for nanotechnology. This dissertation focuses on developing predictive models capable of simulation and analysis of such nanopattern formation on bulk material and strained thin film surfaces. Single-layer atomic clusters (islands) of sizes larger than a critical size on crystalline conducting substrates undergo morphological instabilities when driven by an externally applied electric field or thermal gradient. We have conducted a systematic and …


Function And Dissipation In Finite State Automata - From Computing To Intelligence And Back, Natesh Ganesh Oct 2019

Function And Dissipation In Finite State Automata - From Computing To Intelligence And Back, Natesh Ganesh

Doctoral Dissertations

Society has benefited from the technological revolution and the tremendous growth in computing powered by Moore's law. However, we are fast approaching the ultimate physical limits in terms of both device sizes and the associated energy dissipation. It is important to characterize these limits in a physically grounded and implementation-agnostic manner, in order to capture the fundamental energy dissipation costs associated with performing computing operations with classical information in nano-scale quantum systems. It is also necessary to identify and understand the effect of quantum in-distinguishability, noise, and device variability on these dissipation limits. Identifying these parameters is crucial to designing …


A Multicarrier Technique For Monte Carlo Simulation Of Electrothermal Transport In Nanoelectronics, Tyler J. Spence Oct 2019

A Multicarrier Technique For Monte Carlo Simulation Of Electrothermal Transport In Nanoelectronics, Tyler J. Spence

Doctoral Dissertations

The field of microelectronics plays an important role in many areas of engineering and science, being ubiquitous in aerospace, industrial manufacturing, biotechnology, and many other fields. Today, many micro- and nanoscale electronic devices are integrated into one package. e capacity to simulate new devices accurately is critical to the engineering design process, as device engineers use simulations to predict performance characteristics and identify potential issues before fabrication. A problem of particular interest is the simulation of devices which exhibit exotic behaviors due to non-equilibrium thermodynamics and thermal effects such as self-heating. Frequently, it is desirable to predict the level of …


Increasing The Functionality Of Additive Manufacturing Through Atmospheric Microplasma And Nanotechnology, Alexander Jon Ulrich Aug 2019

Increasing The Functionality Of Additive Manufacturing Through Atmospheric Microplasma And Nanotechnology, Alexander Jon Ulrich

Doctoral Dissertations

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has been changing the manufacturing landscape for the last 20 years. As the interest and demand for both polymer and metal-based 3D printing has grown, the materials and machines used have increased in capabilities. Despite the growth and advancement, there are still a large number of improvements that can be made to add functionality to 3D printers. Metal AM, a subcategory of 3D printing, has garnered much attention among industrial applications with large companies such as General Electric trying to implement the technology to increase innovative designs for motors. Some of the limitations on AM have to …


Probing Quantized Excitations And Many-Body Correlations In Transition Metal Dichalcogenides With Optical Spectroscopy, Shao-Yu Chen Mar 2019

Probing Quantized Excitations And Many-Body Correlations In Transition Metal Dichalcogenides With Optical Spectroscopy, Shao-Yu Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

Layered transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have attracted great interests in recent years due to their physical properties manifested in different polytypes: Hexagonal(H)-TMDC,which is semiconducting, exhibits strong Coulomb interaction and intriguing valleytronic properties; distorted octahedral(T’)-TMDC,which is semi-metallic, is predicted to exhibit rich nontrivial topological physics. In this dissertation,we employ the polarization-resolved micron-Raman/PL spectroscopy to investigate the optical properties of the atomic layer of several polytypes of TMDC. In the first part for polarization-resolved Raman spectroscopy, we study the lattice vibration of both H and T’-TMDC, providing a thorough understanding of the polymorphism of TMDCs. We demonstrate that Raman spectroscopy is a …


Parallel Algorithms For Time Dependent Density Functional Theory In Real-Space And Real-Time, James Kestyn Oct 2018

Parallel Algorithms For Time Dependent Density Functional Theory In Real-Space And Real-Time, James Kestyn

Doctoral Dissertations

Density functional theory (DFT) and time dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) have had great success solving for ground state and excited states properties of molecules, solids and nanostructures. However, these problems are particularly hard to scale. Both the size of the discrete system and the number of needed eigenstates increase with the number of electrons. A complete parallel framework for DFT and TDDFT calculations applied to molecules and nanostructures is presented in this dissertation. This includes the development of custom numerical algorithms for eigenvalue problems and linear systems. New functionality in the FEAST eigenvalue solver presents an additional level of …


Transport Of Water And Ions Through Single-Walled Armchair Carbon Nanotubes: A Molecular Dynamics Study, Michelle Patricia Aranha Dec 2017

Transport Of Water And Ions Through Single-Walled Armchair Carbon Nanotubes: A Molecular Dynamics Study, Michelle Patricia Aranha

Doctoral Dissertations

The narrow hydrophobic interior of a carbon nanotube (CNT) poses a barrier to the transport of water and ions, and yet, unexpectedly, numerous experimental and simulation studies have confirmed fast water transport rates comparable to those seen in biological aquaporin channels. These outstanding features of high water permeability and high solute rejection of even dissolved ions that would typically require a lot of energy for separation in commercial processes makes carbon nanotubes an exciting candidate for desalination membranes. Extending ion exclusion beyond simple mechanical sieving by the inclusion of electrostatics via added functionality to the nanotube bears promise to not …


Kinetics And Dynamics Of Electrophoretic Translocation Of Polyelectrolytes Through Nanopores, Harshwardhan Katkar Nov 2016

Kinetics And Dynamics Of Electrophoretic Translocation Of Polyelectrolytes Through Nanopores, Harshwardhan Katkar

Doctoral Dissertations

The idea of sequencing a DNA based on single-file translocation of the DNA through nanopores under the action of an electric field has received much attention over the past two decades due to the societal need for low cost and high-throughput sequencing. However, due to the high speed of translocation, interrogating individual bases with an acceptable signal to noise ratio as they traverse the pore has been a major problem. Experimental facts on this phenomenon are rich and the associated phenomenology is yet to be fully understood. This thesis focuses on understanding the underlying principles of polymer translocation, with an …


Morphological And Material Effects In Van Der Waals Interactions, Jaime C. Hopkins Jul 2016

Morphological And Material Effects In Van Der Waals Interactions, Jaime C. Hopkins

Doctoral Dissertations

Van der Waals (vdW) interactions influence a variety of mesoscale phenomena, such as surface adhesion, friction, and colloid stability, and play increasingly important roles as science seeks to design systems on increasingly smaller length scales. Using the full Lifshitz continuum formulation, this thesis investigates the effects of system materials, shapes, and configurations and presents open-source software to accurately calculate vdW interactions. In the Lifshitz formulation, the microscopic composition of a material is represented by its bulk dielectric response. Small changes in a dielectric response can result in substantial variations in the strength of vdW interactions. However, the relationship between these …


Symbiotic Plasmonic Nanomaterials: Synthesis And Properties, Abhinav Malasi May 2016

Symbiotic Plasmonic Nanomaterials: Synthesis And Properties, Abhinav Malasi

Doctoral Dissertations

Metal particles of the dimensions of the order of 1 to 100's of nanometers show unique properties that are not clearly evident in their bulk state. These nanoparticles are highly reactive and sensitive to the changes in the vicinity of the particle surface and hence find applications in the field of sensing of chemical and biological agents, catalysis, energy harvesting, data storage and many more. By synthesizing bimetallic nanoparticles, a single nanoparticle can show multifunctional characteristics. The focus of this thesis is to detail the synthesis and understand the properties of bimetallic nanomaterial systems that show interesting optical, chemical, and …


Tunable Controlled Release Of Molecular Species From Halloysite Nanotubes, Divya Narayan Elumalai Apr 2016

Tunable Controlled Release Of Molecular Species From Halloysite Nanotubes, Divya Narayan Elumalai

Doctoral Dissertations

Encouraged by potential applications in rust coatings, self-healing composites, selective delivery of drugs, and catalysis, the transport of molecular species through Halloysite nanotubes (HNTs), specifically the storage and controlled release of these molecules, has attracted strong interest in recent years. HNTs are a naturally occurring biocompatible nanomaterial that are abundantly and readily available. They are alumosilicate based tubular clay nanotubes with an inner lumen of 15 nm and a length of 600-900 nm. The size of the inner lumen of HNTs may be adjusted by etching. The lumen can be loaded with functional agents like antioxidants, anticorrosion agents, flame-retardant agents, …


Quantum Tuning Of Plasmons In Ultrathin Metal Films, Ao Teng Aug 2014

Quantum Tuning Of Plasmons In Ultrathin Metal Films, Ao Teng

Doctoral Dissertations

The surface plasmon is a coherent charge density oscillation localized at a metal surface. It can couple with light and the resulting plasmon-polariton hybrid mode is confined to volumes that are much smaller than the classical diffraction limit of light. Nano-plasmonics is a rapidly evolving field where light manipulation at the nanoscale may lead to novel applications. However, as the size of plasmonic devices approaches the quantum-size regime, the macroscopic picture of plasmon may no longer be valid. To elucidate the influence of the discretization of the single particle spectrum on the collective plasmon response, we performed a systematic study …


Novel Bimetallic Plasmonic Nanomaterials, Ritesh Sachan May 2013

Novel Bimetallic Plasmonic Nanomaterials, Ritesh Sachan

Doctoral Dissertations

Plasmonic nanomaterials have attracted a lot of attention recently due to their application in various fields such as chemical and biological sensing, catalysis, energy harvesting and optical devices. However, there is a need to address several outstanding issues with these materials, including cost-effective synthesis, tunability in plasmonic characteristics, and long term stability. In this thesis, we have focused on bimetallic nanoparticles (NPs) of Ag and Co due to their immiscibility as well as their individual properties. First, a pulsed laser induced dewetting route was used to synthesize Ag-Co bimetallic plasmonic NPs. An synthesis parameter space was derived to show the …


Femtosecond Laser Patterned Templates And Imprinted Polymer Structures, Deepak Rajput May 2013

Femtosecond Laser Patterned Templates And Imprinted Polymer Structures, Deepak Rajput

Doctoral Dissertations

Femtosecond laser machining is a direct-write lithography technique by which user-defined patterns are efficiently and rapidly generated at the surface or within the bulk of transparent materials. When femtosecond laser machining is performed with tightly focused amplified pulses in single-pulse mode, transparent substrates like fused silica can be surface patterned with high aspect ratio (>10:1) and deep (>10 μm) nanoholes. The main objective behind this dissertation is to develop single-pulse amplified femtosecond laser machining into a novel technique for the production of fused silica templates with user-defined patterns made of high aspect ratio nanoholes. The size of the …