Physics Commons^™

Robust Interventions In Network Epidemiology, Erik Weis

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Which individual should we vaccinate to minimize the spread of a disease? Designing optimal interventions of this kind can be formalized as an optimization problem on networks, in which we have to select a budgeted number of dynamically important nodes to receive treatment that optimizes a dynamical outcome. Describing this optimization problem requires specifying the network, a model of the dynamics, and an objective for the outcome of the dynamics. In real-world contexts, these inputs are vulnerable to misspecification---the network and dynamics must be inferred from data, and the decision-maker must operationalize some (potentially abstract) goal into a mathematical objective …

Measuring And Modeling Information Flow On Social Networks, Tyson Charles Pond

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

With the rise of social media, researchers have become increasingly interested in understanding how individuals inform, influence, and interact with others in their social network and how the network mediates the flow of information. Previous research on information flow has primarily used models of contagion to study the adoption of a technology, propagation of purchase recommendations, or virality of online activity. Social (or "complex") contagions spread differently than biological ("simple") contagions. A limitation when researchers validate contagion models is that they neglect much of the massive amounts of data now available through online social networks. Here we model a recently …

Quantum Entanglement Of One-Dimensional Spinless Fermions, Emanuel Casiano-Diaz

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The constituents of a quantum many-body system can be inextricably linked, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. Entanglement can be used as a resource for quantum computing, quantum communication and detecting phase transitions, among others. The amount of entanglement can be quantified via the von Neumann and Rényi entropies, which have their origins in information theory.

In this work, the quantum entanglement between subsystems of a one dimen- sional lattice model of fermions is quantified. The von Neumann and Rényi entropies were calculated for two types of subsystems. In the first study, the subsystems were treated as two subsets of …