Physics Commons^™

Photoelectric Characterization Of Bacteriorhodopsin Reconstituted In Lipid Bilayer Membrane, Joel Kamwa

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this work was to conduct basic research in biologically inspired energy conversion solutions. A photosynthetic protein (Bacteriorhodopsin) was reconstituted in a bi-layer membrane. Then, when a laser beam was shined on the membrane, the photon energy was used by the protein to pump protons across the membrane. The translocation of protons across the membrane was measured as photocurrent. For this purpose, a system was built to characterize the lipid bilayer membranes and to measure the photocurrent. The lipid bilayer membrane was characterized by its capacitance and resistance. A picoampere photocurrent was observed when Bacteriorhodopsin protein was present …

Properties Of Multiferroic Bifeo3 From First Principles, Dovran Rahmedov

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, a first-principle-based approach is developed to study magnetoelectric effect in multiferoic materials. Such approach has a significant predictive power and might serve as a guide to new experimental works. As we will discuss in the course of this work, it also gives an important insight to the underlying physics behind the experimentally observed phenomena.

We start by applying our method to investigate properties of a generic multiferroic material. We observe how magnetic susceptibility of such materials evolves with temperature and compare this evolution with the characteristic behavior of magnetic susceptibility for pure magnetic systems. Then we focus …