Optics Commons^™

Energy From Active Galactic Nuclei And The Effects On Host Spiral Galaxies, Amanda Schilling

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I have investigated the energy output of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in order to understand how these objects evolve and the impact they may have on host galaxies. First, I looked at a sample of 96 AGN at redshifts $z \sim 2, 3,$ and $4$ which have imaging and thus luminosity measurements in the $griz$ and $JHK$ observed wavebands. For these galaxies, I have co-epochal data across those bands which accounted for variability in AGN luminosity. I used the luminosity measurements in the five bands to construct spectral energy distributions (SED) in the emitted optical-UV bands for each AGN. I …

Quantum Foundations With Astronomical Photons, Calvin Leung

HMC Senior Theses

Bell's inequalities impose an upper limit on correlations between measurements of two-photon states under the assumption that the photons play by a set of local rules rather than by quantum mechanics. Quantum theory and decades of experiments both violate this limit.

Recent theoretical work in quantum foundations has demonstrated that a local realist model can explain the non-local correlations observed in experimental tests of Bell's inequality if the underlying probability distribution of the local hidden variable depends on the choice of measurement basis, or ``setting choice''. By using setting choices determined by astrophysical events in the distant past, it is …