The ionosphere is the primary source for heavy ions which are ubiquitous in the terrestrial magnetosphere. Low-altitude energization in the auroral ionosphere results in bulk heating and transverse acceleration of ions, which begin to upwell and/or...
This thesis presents technologies for the design, fabrication, operation, and control of electrostatic MEMS micro-robots. It describes prototype micro-robots, with dimensions of 60 μm by 250 μm by 10 μm, that are capable of controllable...
Quantum dots. Heterostructures. Metal oxide semiconductors -- Design and construction. Silicon oxide. Electron gas. Ohmic contacts. Microelectronics -- Technological innovations.
Solid-state approaches to quantum computing include quantum dot qubit implementations based on the Loss-DiVincenzo proposal. Prior work in GaAs two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) materials serves as a proving ground for device designs that can be...
Many organisms recognize and respond to categories: predator, prey, rival, or juvenile. Organisms recognize these ecologically-important categories by assessing diverse sensory stimuli. A primary focus of my research has been understanding how...
Si/SiGe quantum dots (QDs) are promising candidates for spin-based quantum bits (qubits) as a result of the reduced spin-orbit coupling as well as the Si isotopes with zero nuclear spin. Meanwhile qubit readout is a challenge related to...
A new type of analytic expansion for use in stability calculations is presented and applied to the question of the stability of laminar solutions of the Navier-Stokes equation. This leads in a natural way to a model of the transition from laminar...
This thesis contains material relating to two separate subjects. The first section determines when the C*-algebra affiliated to a directed graph has continuous trace. We use groupoid methods and the focus is on producing conditions on a graph that...
The focus of this thesis is the study of nuclearity and exactness for groupoid crossed product C*-algebras. In particular, we present generalizations of two well-known facts from group dynamical systems and crossed products to the groupoid setting....
The coordination and coupling of the several steps in mRNA biogenesis helps to ensure proper regulation of gene expression. The DEAD-box helicase Dbp5/Rat8 is an essential mRNA export factor that has also been implicated in other steps of mRNA...
A fundamental question in decision neuroscience is how cognitive processes underlying decision-making give rise to efficient decisions, especially in complex situations with multiple choice options, and each option consisting of multiple attributes...
Red milkweed beetle. Insects -- Flight. Insects -- Dispersal.
Most detailed studies of insect flight and dispersal have used long flying species as subjects. Little is known of the flight ecology of comparatively short flying species. This thesis reports the findings of a 4 year study of the flight behavior...
Partially ordered sets. ; Convex polytopes. ; Representations of groups.
This thesis deals with geometric representations of ordered sets. In a geometric representation, each element of the ordered set is assigned a geometric object, with two elements incomparable in the ordered set if and only if the corresponding...
A double-acceleration stage linear time of flight mass spectrometer (TOF MS) with Nd/YAG laser ablation cluster source was designed and constructed for cluster production, study and deposition. Cumulenic polycarbons SC n S ( n = 2-27) were...
The problem of moving rigid bodies efficiently is of particular interest in robotics because the simplest model of a mobile robot or of a manipulated object is often a rigid body. Path planning, controller design and robot design may all benefit...
Rats -- Behavior. Sexual behavior in animals. Vagina -- Psychophysiology. Cervix uteri -- Psychophysiology.
The present dissertation examined the contributions of vaginal and cervical stimulation to sexual motivation and reward in female rats. New, more complex behavioral methods such as the display of paced mating behavior and the induction of a...
Motivated by quantum mechanics and geometric optics, it is a long-standing problem whether the length spectrum of a compact Riemannian manifold can be recovered from its Laplace spectrum. One route to proving that the length spectrum depends on the...
In this thesis, we study the dynamics of magnetic flows on compact nilmanifolds. Magnetic flows are generalizations of geodesic flows. They model the motion of a particle of unit mass and unit charge in a smooth manifold M in the presence of a...
LP-BM5 murine retroviral infection induces murine AIDS (MAIDS), and is characterized by profound and broad immunosuppression of T- and B-cell responses. Adaptive immune response to LP-BM5 infection, including the pathogenic role of CD4+ T-cells and...
Si-based quantum devices, including Si/SiGe quantum dots (QD), are promising candidates for spin-based quantum bits (quits), which are a potential platform for quantum information processing [1]. Meanwhile, qubit readout remains a challenging task...
Immune response -- Regulation. Tretinoin. T cells. B cells. Plasma cells. Immunity.
Adaptive immunity licenses higher organisms to generate potent immune responses against foreign antigens. Two hallmarks of adaptive immunity are A) the ability of T and B cells to distinguish self from non-self and B) the ability to mount a...
We study motion planning problems, finding trajectories that connect two configurations of a system, from two different perspectives: optimality and survivability. For the problem of finding optimal trajectories, we provide a model in which the...
The main driving force behind the development of computers was the attempt to solve problems that would otherwise require a large amount of time to be solved. Despite the technological development that has made computers ubiquitous in daily lives,...