Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Dango (Doings And Goings On)- Vol. 22 | Issue 3, Haley Stien, Cecily Towell, Rusty Towell, Matthew Kimball, Vicente Rojas, Zhaojia Xi, Caleb Hicks, Reuben Byrd, Joshua Daniel Martinez, Mike Daugherity, Paul Carstens, Donald Isenhower

DANGO: Doings and Goings On: Summer Research Newsletter, Department of Engineering and Physics

Summer Research Newsletter for ACU's Engineering and Physics Department

Maximum Waring Ranks Of Monomials And Sums Of Coprime Monomials, Erik Holmes, Paul Plummer, Jeremy Siegert, Zach Teitler

Mathematics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We show that monomials and sums of pairwise coprime monomials in four or more variables have Waring rank less than the generic rank, with a short list of exceptions. We asymptotically compare their ranks with the generic rank.

Space Telescope And Optical Reverberation Mapping Project. Iv. Anomalous Behavior Of The Broad Ultraviolet Emission Lines In Ngc 5548, M. R. Goad, K. T. Korista, G. De Grosa, G. A. Kriss, R. Edelson, A. J. Barth, Gary J. Ferland, C. S. Kochanek, H. Netzer, B. M. Peterson, M. C. Bentz, S. Bisogni, D. M. Crenshaw, K. D. Denney, J. Ely, M. M. Fausnaugh, C. J. Grier, A. Gupta, K. D. Horne, J. Kaastra, A. Pancoast, L. Pei, R. W. Pogge, A. Skielboe, D. Starkey, M. Vestergaard, Y. Zu, M. D. Anderson, P. Arévalo, C. Bazhaw

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

During an intensive Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) UV monitoring campaign of the Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 5548 performed from 2014 February to July, the normally highly correlated far UV continuum and broad emission line variations decorrelated for ~60–70 days, starting ~75 days after the first HST/COS observation. Following this anomalous state, the flux and variability of the broad emission lines returned to a more normal state. This transient behavior, characterized by significant deficits in flux and equivalent width of the strong broad UV emission lines, is the first of its kind to be unambiguously identified …

Biological Information And Its Origins: The Curious Case Of Rna, Grace E. Andrews

Honors Projects

Information is an important pre-requisite for the onset of life, which means that any study of the origins of life must also address the origin of information. Biological information today is generally conceptualized in terms of the Central Dogma of Biology, with DNA as a digitized code within the cell. However, here I propose that biological information - particularly in prebiotic conditions, where information would have first arisen - is better understood in terms of the three-dimensional structure of a molecule. Evidence for information storage in RNA can be seen in a number of ways. One of these is that, …

A Compilation Of Global Bio-Optical In Situ Data For Ocean-Colour Satellite Applications, André Valente, Shubba Sathyendranath, Vanda Brotas, Steve Groom, Michael Grant, Malcolm Taberner, David Antoine, Robert A. Arnone Prof, William M. Balch, Kathryn Baker, Ray Barlow, Simon Bélanger, Jean-François Berthon, Sükrü Beşiktepe, Vittorio Brando, Elisabetta Canuti, Francisco Chavez, Hervé Claustre, Richard Crout, Robert Frounin, Carlos García-Soto, Stuart W. Gibb, Richard Gould, Stanford Hooker, Mati Kahru, Holger Klein, Susanne Kratzer, Hubert Loisel, David Mckee, Brian G. Mitchell, Tiffany Moisan, Frank Muller-Karger, Leonie O'Dowd, Michael Ondrusek, Alex J. Poulton, Michel Repecaud, Timothy Smythe, Heidi M. Sosik, Michael Twardowski, Kenneth Voss, Jeremy Werdell, Marcel Wernand, Giuseppe Zibordi

Faculty Publications

A compiled set of in situ data is important to evaluate the quality of ocean-colour satellite-data records. Here we describe the data compiled for the validation of the ocean-colour products from the ESA Ocean Colour Climate Change Initiative (OC-CCI). The data were acquired from several sources (MOBY, BOUSSOLE, AERONET-OC, SeaBASS, NOMAD, MERMAID, AMT, ICES, HOT, GeP&CO), span between 1997 and 2012, and have a global distribution. Observations of the following variables were compiled: spectral remote-sensing reflectances, concentrations of chlorophyll a, spectral inherent optical properties and spectral diffuse attenuation coefficients. The data were from multi-project archives acquired via the open internet …

Photooxidation Chemistry And Photodynamic Therapy: Pointsource Delivery Of Singlet Oxygen, Sensitizer And Nitrosamine Drugs, Ashwini Anil Ghogare

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eradication of residual tumor cells that are directly adjacent to vital tissue is a daunting challenge to surgeons. Because the field needs advances in intraoperative settings and a means for high-precision delivery of singlet oxygen for photodynamic therapy (PDT) of cancers, this dissertation outlines the development and application of a “pointsource” fiber optic device. The device offers highly localized and simultaneous delivery of sensitizer drug, light, and oxygen (components necessary for PDT) for cancer cell eradication in-vitro and in-vivo. The following chapters describe (a) the photokilling activity and precision of pointsource PDT in monolayer ovarian and brain cancer cells …

Classical Transport In Disordered Systems, Antonios Papaioannou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis reports on the manifestation of structural disorder on molecular transport and it consists of two parts. Part I discusses the relations between classical transport and the underlying structural complexity of the system. Both types of molecular diffusion, namely Gaussian and non-Gaussian are presented and the relevant time regimes are discussed. In addition the concept of structural universality is introduced and connected with the diffusion metrics. One of the most robust techniques for measuring molecular mean square displacements is magnetic resonance. This method requires encoding and subsequently reading out after an experimentally controlled time, a phase ϕ to the …

Vector Beams For Fundamental Physics And Applications, Giovanni Milione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lights salient degrees of freedom are the independent parameters that completely de- scribe an electromagnetic wave (in the paraxial approximation) and include polarization, wavelength, and time. Most recently, lights space degree of freedom has received sig- nificant attention via the sub-discipline of optics that can be referred to as complex light or structured light. The study of complex light is a veritable renaissance of optics; us- ing lights space degree of freedom many classical optics phenomena have been revisited with novel results. In this thesis, a novel form of structured light referred to as vector beams will be investigated. It …

Cohomology Of Certain Polyhedral Product Spaces, Elizabeth A. Vidaurre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study of torus actions led to the discovery of moment-angle complexes and their generalization, polyhedral product spaces. Polyhedral products are constructed from a simplicial complex. This thesis focuses on computing the cohomology of polyhedral products given by two different classes of simplicial complexes: polyhedral joins (composed simplicial complexes) and $n$-gons. A homological decomposition of a polyhedral product developed by Bahri, Bendersky, Cohen and Gitler is used to derive a formula for the case of polyhedral joins. Moreover, methods from and results by Cai will be used to give a full description of the non-trivial cup products in a real …

Interaction Of Spliceosomal U2 Snrnp Protein P14 With Its Branch Site Rna Target, William Perea Vargas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Newly transcribed precursor messenger RNA (pre-mRNA) molecules contain coding sequences (exons) interspersed with non-coding intervening sequences (introns). These introns must be removed in order to generate a continuous coding sequence prior to translation of the message into protein. The mechanism through which these introns are removed is known as pre-mRNA splicing, a two-step reaction catalyzed be a large macromolecular machine, the spliceosome, located in the nucleus of eukaryotic cells. The spliceosome is a protein-directed ribozyme composed of small nuclear RNAs (snRNA) and hundreds of proteins that assemble in a very dynamic process. One of these snRNAs, the U2 snRNA, is …

Cayley Graphs Of Semigroups And Applications To Hashing, Bianca Sosnovski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1994, Tillich and Zemor proposed a scheme for a family of hash functions that uses products of matrices in groups of the form $SL_2(F_{2^n})$. In 2009, Grassl et al. developed an attack to obtain collisions for palindromic bit strings by exploring a connection between the Tillich-Zemor functions and maximal length chains in the Euclidean algorithm for polynomials over $F_2$.

In this work, we present a new proposal for hash functions based on Cayley graphs of semigroups. In our proposed hash function, the noncommutative semigroup of linear functions under composition is considered as platform for the scheme. We will also …

New Classical Solutions In Supergravity, Zhibai Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this Ph.D. thesis we construct three classes of new solutions to supergravity theories in various dimensions and study their properties. The first class is reduction ansatz of 10D and 11D supergravity on Ricci-flat and noncompact manifolds. These reductions are from a scaling limit of the famous spherical reductions, and can be solely supported by warp factors. The second class contains a large number of String/M theory solutions that have Lifshitz or Schrodinger scaling symmetry, obtained from marginally deforming the geometry of internal dimensions of previous solutions. We propose that these new solutions are dual to marginal deformations of certain …

Stochastic Processes And Their Applications To Change Point Detection Problems, Heng Yang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation addresses the change point detection problem when either the post-change distribution has uncertainty or the post-change distribution is time inhomogeneous. In the case of post-change distribution uncertainty, attention is drawn to the construction of a family of composite stopping times. It is shown that the proposed composite stopping time has third order optimality in the detection problem with Wiener observations and also provides information to distinguish the different values of post-change drift. In the case of post-change distribution uncertainty, a computationally efficient decision rule with low-complexity based on Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) algorithm is also introduced. In the time …

P-Adic L-Functions And The Geometry Of Hida Families, Joseph Kramer-Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A major theme in the theory of $p$-adic deformations of automorphic forms is how $p$-adic $L$-functions over eigenvarieties relate to the geometry of these eigenvarieties. In this talk we explain results in this vein for the ordinary part of the eigencurve (i.e. Hida families). We address how Taylor expansions of one variable $p$-adic $L$-functions varying over families can detect geometric phenomena: crossing components of a certain intersection multiplicity and ramification over the weight space. Our methods involve proving a converse to a result of Vatsal relating congruences between eigenforms to their algebraic special $L$-values and then $p$-adically interpolating congruences using …

Theoretical Analysis Of Single Molecule Spectroscopy Lineshapes Of Conjugated Polymers, Murali Devi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Conjugated Polymers(CPs) exhibit a wide range of highly tunable optical properties. Quantitative and detailed understanding of the nature of excitons responsible for such a rich optical behavior has significant implications for better utilization of CPs for more efficient plastic solar cells and other novel optoelectronic devices. In general, samples of CPs are plagued with substantial inhomogeneous broadening due to various sources of disorder. Single molecule emission spectroscopy (SMES) offers a unique opportunity to investigate the energetics and dynamics of excitons and their interactions with phonon modes. The major subject of the present thesis is to analyze and understand room temperature …

Quaternion Algebras And Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds, Joseph Quinn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I use a classical idea of Macfarlane to obtain a complex quaternion model for hyperbolic 3-space and its group of orientation-preserving isometries, analogous to Hamilton’s famous result on Euclidean rotations. I generalize this to quaternion models over number fields for the action of Kleinian groups on hyperbolic 3-space, using arithmetic invariants of the corresponding hyperbolic 3-manifolds. The class of manifolds to which this technique applies includes all cusped arithmetic manifolds and infinitely many commensurability classes of cusped non-arithmetic, compact arithmetic, and compact non-arithmetic manifolds. I obtain analogous results for actions of Fuchsian groups on the hyperbolic plane. I develop new …

The Remedy That's Killing: Cuny, Laguardia, And The Fight For Better Math Policy, Rachel A. Oppenheimer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nationwide, there is a crisis in math learning and math achievement at all levels of education. Upwards of 80% of students who enter the City University of New York’s community colleges from New York City’s Department of Education high schools fail to meet college level math proficiencies and as a result, are funneled into the system’s remedial math system. Once placed into pre-college remedial arithmetic, pre-algebra, and elementary algebra courses, students fail at alarming rates and research indicates that students’ failure in remedial math has negative ripple effects on their persistence and degree completion. CUNY is not alone in facing …

An Averaging Method For Advection-Diffusion Equations, Nicholas Spizzirri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many models for physical systems have dynamics that happen over various different time scales. For example, contrast the everyday waves in the ocean with the larger, slowly moving global currents. The method of multiple scales is an approach for approximating the solutions of differential equations by separating out the dynamics at slower and faster time scales. In this work, we apply the method of multiple scales to generic advection-diffusion equations (both linear and non-linear, and in arbitrary spatial dimensions) and develop a method for 'averaging out' the faster scale phenomena, giving us an 'effective' solution for the slower scale dynamics. …

Data-Driven Synthesis And Evaluation Of Syntactic Facial Expressions In American Sign Language Animation, Hernisa Kacorri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology to automatically synthesize linguistically accurate and natural-looking animations of American Sign Language (ASL) would make it easier to add ASL content to websites and media, thereby increasing information accessibility for many people who are deaf and have low English literacy skills. State-of-art sign language animation tools focus mostly on accuracy of manual signs rather than on the facial expressions. We are investigating the synthesis of syntactic ASL facial expressions, which are grammatically required and essential to the meaning of sentences. In this thesis, we propose to: (1) explore the methodological aspects of evaluating sign language animations with facial expressions, …

Suppression Of High Transverse Momentum Charged Hadrons In Au+Au Collisions At 200 Gev Nucleon-Nucleon Center Of Mass Energy, Jason B. Bryslawskyj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dynamical properties of quark gluon plasma are studied in heavy ion collisions. Gold ions are accelerated with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and collided at energies up to 200 GeV per nucleon. Collision products and their properties are detected and measured with the PHENIX detector. At these energies the colliding ions may form a thermalized distribution of quarks and gluons called the Quark-Gluon Plasma. The suppression of single hadrons still provides one of the strongest constraints on energy loss mechanisms in the Quark-Gluon Plasma. Presently, neutral pions provide the best measurement at RHIC of …

Model For The Electrolysis Of Water And Its Use For Optimization, Roger Lascorz, Javier E. Hasbun Dr

Georgia Journal of Science

The goal of this research was to study the optimization of the electrolysis of water both theoretically and experimentally. For accuracy, 3 hr experiments were made with measurements recorded every 15 min. The results show that a better model than the classical one is needed for water electrolysis. A new model that fits experimental data better is proposed. The results of this new model not only predict hydrogen production in electrolysis of water better, but show a way to predict gas production of any liquid as well as what voltage to use to optimize it.

Dendrochronological Analysis Of The Bixler House

Historic Structures

Dating historical structures using dendrochronology. The Historical Structures collection consists of reports that are the result of dendochronological analysis of timbers from structures in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Contributors: AlBashaireh, Amineh; Jimerson, Cole; Luna, Eduardo; Wiesenberg, Nicholas; Wiles, Greg

Method Of Lines Transpose: High Order L-Stable {O}(N) Schemes For Parabolic Equations Using Successive Convolution, Matthew F. Causley, Hana Cho, Andrew J. Christlieb, David C. Seal

Mathematics Publications

We present a new solver for nonlinear parabolic problems that is L-stable and achieves high order accuracy in space and time. The solver is built by first constructing a one-dimensional heat equation solver that uses fast $\mathcal O(N)$ convolution. This fundamental solver has arbitrary order of accuracy in space and is based on the use of the Green's function to invert a modified Helmholtz equation. Higher orders of accuracy in time are then constructed through a novel technique known as successive convolution (or resolvent expansions). These resolvent expansions facilitate our proofs of stability and convergence, and permit us to construct …

Aqueous Photochemistry Of Glyoxylic Acid, Alexis J. Eugene, Sha-Sha Xia, Marcelo I. Guzman

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Aerosols affect climate change, the energy balance of the atmosphere, and public health due to their variable chemical composition, size, and shape. While the formation of secondary organic aerosols (SOA) from gas phase precursors is relatively well understood, studying aqueous chemical reactions contributing to the total SOA budget is the current focus of major attention. Field measurements have revealed that mono-, di-, and oxo-carboxylic acids are abundant species present in SOA and atmospheric waters. This work explores the fate of one of these 2-oxocarboxylic acids, glyoxylic acid, which can photogenerate reactive species under solar irradiation. Additionally, the dark thermal aging …

Large Length Scale Capillary Fluidics: From Jumping Bubbles To Drinking In Space, Andrew Paul Wollman

Dissertations and Theses

In orbit, finding the "bottom" of your coffee cup is a non-trivial task. Subtle forces often masked by gravity influence the containment and transport of fluids aboard spacecraft, often in surprising non-intuitive ways. Terrestrial experience with capillary forces is typically relegated to the micro-scale, but engineering community exposure to large length scale capillary fluidics critical to spacecraft fluid management design is low indeed. Low-cost drop towers and fast-to-flight International Space Station (ISS) experiments are increasing designer exposure to this fresh field of study. This work first provides a wide variety of drop tower tests that demonstrate fundamental and applied capillary …

Investigating The Potential Of Land Use Modifications To Mitigate The Respiratory Health Impacts Of No2: A Case Study In The Portland-Vancouver Metropolitan Area, Meenakshi Rao

Dissertations and Theses

The health impacts of urban air pollution are a growing concern in our rapidly urbanizing world. Urban air pollutants show high intra-urban spatial variability linked to urban land use and land cover (LULC). This correlation of air pollutants with LULC is widely recognized; LULC data is an integral input into a wide range of models, especially land use regression models developed by epidemiologists to study the impact of air pollution on human health. Given the demonstrated links between LULC and urban air pollution, and between urban air pollution and health, an interesting question arises: what is the potential of LULC …

The Terroir Of Pinot Noir Wine In The Willamette Valley, Oregon : A Broad Analysis Of Vineyard Soils, Grape Juice And Wine Chemistry, Kathryn Nora Barnard

Dissertations and Theses

Terroir is determined by a combination of factors in the vineyard including the grape varietal, geology and soil, soil hydrology, physiography, and climate. Although most studies have examined regional differences in wine flavors and associated provenance of wine based on chemistry, few have examined the chemistry of the soil and the ability to trace that chemistry to grape juice and, finally, to the wine. This dissertation examines what soil physical and chemical differences specific to this region might influence grape juice chemistry and wine chemistry.

Wine-grapes in the Willamette Valley, Oregon, are grown on three major soil parent materials: volcanic, …

Photoemission Electron Microscopy For Analysis Of Dielectric Structures And The Goos-Hänchen Shift, Theodore Axel Stenmark

Dissertations and Theses

Photoemission Electron Microscopy (PEEM) is a versatile tool that relies on the photoelectric effect to produce high-resolution electron images. Ultrafast pulse lasers allow for multi-photon PEEM where multiple visible or IR photons excite a single electron in a nonlinear process. The photoelectron yield in both cases is related to the near-field region of electromagnetic fields at the surface of the sample. We use this ability here to analyze wave propagation in a linear dielectric waveguide with wavelengths of 410 nm and 780 nm. The propagation constant of the waveguide can be extracted from interference patterns created by light propagating in …

Statistical Modeling Of Carbon Dioxide And Cluster Analysis Of Time Dependent Information: Lag Target Time Series Clustering, Multi-Factor Time Series Clustering, And Multi-Level Time Series Clustering, Doo Young Kim

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The current study consists of three major parts. Statistical modeling, the connection between statistical modeling and cluster analysis, and proposing new methods to cluster time dependent information.

First, we perform a statistical modeling of the Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) emission in South Korea in order to identify the attributable variables including interaction effects. One of the hot issues in the earth in 21st century is Global warming which is caused by the marriage between atmospheric temperature and CO₂ in the atmosphere. When we confront this global problem, we first need to verify what causes the problem then we …

Chaotic Advection-Driven Mixing In Unsteady Three-Dimensional Mhd Flows In Microfluidic Devices, Fangping Yuan, Kakkattukuzhy M. Isaac

Collaborative Research: Actively Controllable Microfluidics with Film-Confined Redox-Magnetohydrodynamics -- Video and Data

No abstract provided.