Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Hermitian Maass Lift For General Level, An Hoa Vu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For an imaginary quadratic field $K$ of discriminant $-D$, let $\chi = \chi_K$ be the associated quadratic character. We will show that the space of special hermitian Jacobi forms of level $N$ is isomorphic to the space of plus forms of level $DN$ and nebentypus $\chi$ (the hermitian analogue of Kohnen's plus space) for any integer $N$ prime to $D$. This generalizes the results of Krieg from $N = 1$ to arbitrary level. Combining this isomorphism with the recent work of Berger and Klosin and a modification of Ikeda's construction we prove the existence of a lift from the space …

On Different Parametrizations Of Feynman Integrals, Ray Daniel Sameshima

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this doctoral thesis, we discuss and apply advanced techniques for the calculations of scattering amplitudes which, on the one hand, allow us to compute cross sections and differential distributions at high precision and, on the other hand, give us deep mathematical insights on the mathematical structures of Feynman integrals.

We start by presenting phenomenological calculations relevant for the experimental analyses at the Large Hadron Collider. We use the resummation of soft gluon emission corrections to study the associated production of a top pair and a Z boson to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic accuracy, and compute the total cross section and differential …

Modest Automorphisms Of Presburger Arithmetic, Simon Heller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

It is interesting to consider whether a structure can be expanded by an automorphism so that one obtains a nice description of the expanded structure's first-order properties. In this dissertation, we study some such expansions of models of Presburger arithmetic. Building on some of the work of Harnik (1986) and Llewellyn-Jones (2001), in Chapter 2 we use a back-and-forth construction to obtain two automorphisms of sufficiently saturated models of Presburger arithmetic. These constructions are done first in the quotient of the Presburger structure by the integers (which is a divisible ordered abelian group with some added structure), and then lifted …

The Role Of Fluids In Ore Remobilization At The Balmat Zinc Deposit, Ny, Peter D. Matt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shear zone-hosted orebodies at the Balmat, NY, zinc deposit were remobilized at the kilometer scale during amphibolite facies regional metamorphism ca. 1180 Ma. Despite there being little evidence for interaction of hydrous fluids and ores during deformation, such translocation distances are considered unlikely without the assistance of fluids. Two independent research methods, SEM-EDS micro-petrography and zinc isotope geochemical analysis, demonstrate that anatectic sulfide and silicate melts were generated during metamorphism. Micro-petrography of the Fowler ore body reveals low melting-temperature micro-inclusions of sulfosalt and sulfide assemblages which occur predominantly in Qtz-Py and Kfs-Py domains that cross-cut peak metamorphic assemblages. These results …

Oldowan Tool Behaviors Through Time On The Homa Peninsula, Kenya, Emma M. Finestone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The adaptive significance of tool use to genus Homo is a central theme in human origins. However, what we know from the early Oldowan sites suggests that persistent technology may have begun as an opportunistic behavior with minimal investment, rather than a habitual and widespread adaptive revolution. This dissertation seeks to investigate investment in Oldowan tool production on the Homa Peninsula, Kenya, considering raw material selection, transport, and lithic production at two newly discovered Oldowan localities: Nyayanga (ca. 2.6 Ma) and Sare River (ca. 1.7 Ma).

The first section of this dissertation outlines a method that enables the comparison of …

The Distribution, Fractionation, And Application Of The 210po/210pb System: Insights From Three Geotraces Transects, Yi Tang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The sinking flux of particles is an important pathway for the removal of carbon and other elements from the surface ocean via the biological pump. The ²¹⁰Po/²¹⁰Pb disequilibrium method can be used to study particle export at high spatial resolution over the time scale of months. The distribution of ²¹⁰Po and ²¹⁰Pb activity was measured during two GEOTRACES transects of the North Atlantic and one GEOTRACES transect of the eastern tropical South Pacific. This dissertation aimed to advance the knowledge and improve methods of the application of the ²¹⁰Po/²¹⁰Pb pair to quantify …

Minimalistic Peptide-Based Supramolecular Systems Relevant To The Chemical Origin Of Life, Daniela Kroiss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All forms of life are based on biopolymers, which are made up of a selection of simple building blocks, such as amino acids, nucleotides, fatty acids and sugars. Their individual properties govern their interactions, giving rise to complex supramolecular structures with highly specialized functionality, including ligand recognition, catalysis and compartmentalization. In this thesis, we aim to answer the question whether short peptides could have acted as precursors of modern proteins during prebiotic evolution. Using a combination of experimental and computational techniques, we screened a large molecular search space for peptide sequences that are capable of forming supramolecular complexes with adenosine …

Wind Flow Dynamics Over Complex Terrain, Eric Kutter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Understanding the exchange of energy, moisture, and trace gases between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere over complex terrain is a fundamental goal in achieving a complete model of global or regional climate. Net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of carbon dioxide is often a crucial input into climate models, and is also used as a means of validating regional model outputs. Calculations obtained from eddy flux tower data provide some of the best quality sources of NEE values; however, the standard formulation of the eddy covariance method is incomplete in terrain that includes common features such as hills, forests, cities, or …

Probing The Gelation Phenomena In Molecular And Seed-Based Gels, Malick Samateh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest in molecular gels has been gaining momentum as evident from being developed for a broad spectrum of applications. This impetus stems from several reasons that include: (i) molecular gels are highly stimuli responsive as they easily respond to thermodynamic changes, disintegrating into well-defined chemicals/building blocks because of the purely physical (in contrast to chemically cross-linked) nature of the interactions holding their 3D networks together; (ii) the sheer abundance of simple small molecules to choose starting materials from and the vast potential of tunability of the low molecular weight gelators (LMWGs) make the LMWGs and the molecular gels highly …

Dynamics Of The Family Lambda Tan Z^2, Santanu Nandi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We prove some topological properties of the dynamical plane ($z$-plane) and a combinatorial structure of the parameter plane of a holomorphic family of meromorphic maps $\lambda \tan z^2$. In the dynamical plane, we prove that there is no Herman ring and the Julia set is a Cantor set for the map when the parameter is in the central capture component. Julia set is connected for the maps when the parameters are in other hyperbolic components. In the parameter plane, I prove that the capture components are simply connected and there are always four hyperbolic shell components attached to a virtual …

Electrochemical Carbon Nanoprobes For Biological And Chemical System Studies, Keke Hu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The progress in the field of nanoelectrochemistry requires preparation and characterization of nanometer scale electrochemical probes. The focus of my Ph.D. research was on development of carbon nanopipette-based electrodes with versatile and controllable geometry and their applications to nanoscale studies of chemical and biological systems. Carbon nanopipette (CNP) electrodes offer important advantages, including high sensitivity and improved analytical selectivity. They can serve as nanoreactors for sampling ultra-small solution volumes and studies of individual nanoparticles. CNPs were prepared by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of carbon into the pre-pulled quartz capillaries. By changing pulling parameters and CVD conditions, we fabricated several types …

Physics And Mathematics Of Graded Quivers, Azeem Hasan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A graded quiver with superpotential is a quiver whose arrows are assigned degrees c ∈ {0, 1, · · · , m}, for some integer m ≥ 0, with relations generated by a superpotential of degree m − 1. For m = 0, 1, 2, 3 they often describe the open string sector of D-brane systems; in particular, they capture the physics of D(5 − 2m)-branes at local Calabi-Yau (CY) (m + 2)- fold singularities in type IIB string theory. We introduce m-dimers, which fully encode the m-graded quivers and their superpotentials, in the case in which the CY (m …

Zeta Functions Of Classical Groups And Class Two Nilpotent Groups, Fikreab Solomon Admasu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is concerned with zeta functions and generating series associated with two families of groups that are intimately connected with each other: classical groups and class two nilpotent groups. Indeed, the zeta functions of classical groups count some special subgroups in class two nilpotent groups.

In the first chapter, we provide new expressions for the zeta functions of symplectic groups and even orthogonal groups in terms of the cotype zeta function of the integer lattice. In his paper on universal $p$-adic zeta functions, J. Igusa computed explicit formulae for the zeta functions of classical algebraic groups. These zeta functions …

Deep Machine Learning Techniques For The Detection And Classification Of Sperm Whale Bioacoustics, Peter C. Bermant, Michael M. Bronstein, Robert J. Wood, Shane Gero, David F. Gruber

Publications and Research

We implemented Machine Learning (ML) techniques to advance the study of sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) bioacoustics. This entailed employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to construct an echolocation click detector designed to classify spectrograms generated from sperm whale acoustic data according to the presence or absence of a click. The click detector achieved 99.5% accuracy in classifying 650 spectrograms. The successful application of CNNs to clicks reveals the potential of future studies to train CNN-based architectures to extract finer-scale details from cetacean spectrograms. Long short-term memory and gated recurrent unit recurrent neural networks were trained to perform classification tasks, including (1) …

Going Big: A Large-Scale Study On What Big Data Developers Ask, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Software developers are increasingly required to write big data code. However, they find big data software development challenging. To help these developers it is necessary to understand big data topics that they are interested in and the difficulty of finding answers for questions in these topics. In this work, we conduct a large-scale study on Stackoverflow to understand the interest and difficulties of big data developers. To conduct the study, we develop a set of big data tags to extract big data posts from Stackoverflow; use topic modeling to group these posts into big data topics; group similar topics into …

Dna Recovery From Handwritten Documents Using A Novel Vacuum Technique, Patrick M. Mclaughlin

Student Theses

Investigations of many crimes such as robberies, kidnappings, and terrorism are often associated with the recovery of a paper document which has been written by the perpetrator. Paper can provide a variety of forensic evidence such as DNA, latent fingermarks, and indented writing. The focus of this study was the collection of probative DNA profiles from the text region of a handwritten note through a vacuum suction device without altering or destroying the document. Collection of DNA evidence was carried out in two separate groups. The first group involved 11 volunteers providing a handwritten note sample with unwashed hands. The …

Yields Of Weakly Bound Light Nuclei As A Probe Of The Statistical Hadronization Model, Yiming Cai, Thomas D. Cohen, Boris A. Gelman, Yukari Yamauchi

Publications and Research

The statistical hadronization model successfully describes the yields of hadrons and light nuclei from central heavy-ion collisions over a wide range of energies. It is a simple and efficient phenomenological framework in which the relative yields for very high energy collisions are essentially determined by a single model parameter—the chemical freeze-out temperature. Recent measurements of yields of hadrons and light nuclei covering over nine orders of magnitudes from the ALICE collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider were described by the model with remarkable accuracy with a chemical freeze-out temperature of 156.5 ± 1.5 MeV. A key physical question is whether …

An Exploration Of Protein And Dna Components In Fingerprint Residue, Ashley Borrego

Student Theses

The main focus of this project was to investigate the protein and DNA components in both sebaceous and eccrine fingerprints. This study investigated the relative content of DNA and proteins in eccrine fingerprints to sebaceous fingerprints. All volunteers were instructed to wash and dry their hands prior to depositing parallel thumbprints. Twenty volunteers were instructed to touch their face to produce sebaceous prints, and 5 volunteers were instructed to wear gloves over a heat source to produce sweaty or eccrine prints. Microscopy was used to score the cellular debris of the right fingerprint on a scale of 1-4 based on …

Hidden Bias In The Dud-E Dataset Leads To Misleading Performance Of Deep Learning In Structure-Based Virtual Screening, Lieyang Chen, Anthony Cruz, Steven Ramsey, Callum J. Dickson, Jose S. Duca, Viktor Hornak, David R. Koes, Tom Kurtzman

Publications and Research

Recently much effort has been invested in using convolutional neural network (CNN) models trained on 3D structural images of protein-ligand complexes to distinguish binding from non-binding ligands for virtual screening. However, the dearth of reliable protein-ligand x-ray structures and binding affinity data has required the use of constructed datasets for the training and evaluation of CNN molecular recognition models. Here, we outline various sources of bias in one such widely-used dataset, the Directory of Useful Decoys: Enhanced (DUDE). We have constructed and performed tests to investigate whether CNN models developed using DUD-E are properly learning the underlying physics of molecular …

Hidden Bias In The Dud-E Dataset Leads To Misleading Performance Of Deep Learning In Structure-Based Virtual Screening, Lieyang Chen, Anthony Cruz, Steven Ramsey, Callum J. Dickson, Jose S. Duca, Viktor Hornak, David R. Koes, Tom Kurtzman

Publications and Research

Recently much effort has been invested in using convolutional neural network (CNN) models trained on 3D structural images of protein-ligand complexes to distinguish binding from non-binding ligands for virtual screening. However, the dearth of reliable protein-ligand x-ray structures and binding affinity data has required the use of constructed datasets for the training and evaluation of CNN molecular recognition models. Here, we outline various sources of bias in one such widely-used dataset, the Directory of Useful Decoys: Enhanced (DUDE). We have constructed and performed tests to investigate whether CNN models developed using DUD-E are properly learning the underlying physics of molecular …

A Note On Distance-Based Entropy Of Dendrimers, Modjtaba Ghorbani, Matthias Dehmer, Samaneh Zangi, Abbe Mowshowitz, Frank Emmert-Streib

Publications and Research

This paper introduces a variant of entropy measures based on vertex eccentricity and applies it to all graphs representing the isomers of octane. Taking into account the vertex degree as well (degree-ecc-entropy), we find a good correlation with the acentric factor of octane isomers. In particular, we compute the degree-ecc-entropy for three classes of dendrimer graphs.

Writing For Sciences, Michael Coppola

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Master Integrals For The Two-Loop, Non-Planar Qcd Corrections To Top-Quark Pair Production In The Quark-Annihilation Channel, Matteo Becchetti, Roberto Bonciani, Valerio Casconi, Andrea Ferroglia, Simone Lavacca, Andreas Von Manteuffel

Publications and Research

We present the analytic calculation of the Master Integrals for the two-loop, non-planar topologies that enter the calculation of the amplitude for top-quark pair hadroproduction in the quark-annihilation channel. Using the method of differential equations, we expand the integrals in powers of the dimensional regulator ε and determine the expansion coefficients in terms of generalized harmonic polylogarithms of two dimensionless variables through to weight four.

Garch Modeling Of Value At Risk And Expected Shortfall Using Bayesian Model Averaging, Ismail Kheir

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis conducts Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) estimation using GARCH modeling and Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). BMA considers multiple models weighted by some information criterion. Through BMA, this thesis finds that VaR and ES estimates can be improved through enhanced modeling of the data generation process.

Synthesis And Evaluations Of “1,4-Triazolyl Combretacoumarins” And Desmethoxy Analogs, Tashrique A. Khandaker, Jessica D. Hess, Renato Aguilera, Graciela Andrei, Robert Snoeck, Dominique Schols, Padmanava Pradhan, Mahesh K. Lakshman

Publications and Research

1,4-Triazolyl combretacoumarins have been prepared by linking the trimethoxyarene unit of combretastatin A4 with coumarins, via a 1,2,3-triazole. For this, 4-azidocoumarins were accessed by a sequential two-step, one-pot reaction of 4-hydroxycoumarins with (benzotriazol-1-yloxy)tris(dimethylamino)phosphonium hexafluorophosphate (BOP), followed by reaction with NaN₃. In the reaction with BOP, a coumarin-derived phosphonium ion intermediate seems to form, leading to an O⁴-(benzotriazolyl)coumarin derivative. For the CuAAC reaction of azidocoumarins with 5-ethynyl-1,2,3-trimethoxybenzene, catalytic [(MeCN)₄Cu]PF₆ in CH₂Cl₂/MeOH with 2,6-lutidine, at 50 ^oC, was suitable. The 4-azidocoumarins were less reactive as compared to PhN₃ and …

Top-Quark Pair Hadroproduction In Association With A Heavy Boson At Nlo+Nnll Including Ew Corrections, Alessandro Broggio, Andrea Ferroglia, Rikkert Frederix, Davide Pagani, Benjamin D. Pecjak, Ioannis Tsinikos

Publications and Research

This work studies the associated production of a top-quark pair with a W, Z, or Higgs boson at the LHC. Predictions for the total cross sections as well as for several differential distributions of the massive particles in the final state are provided. These predictions, valid for the LHC operating at 13 TeV, include without any approximation all the NLO electroweak and QCD contributions of O (α^sα^j+1) with i + j = 2, 3. In addition, the predictions presented here improve upon the NLO QCD results by adding the effects of soft gluon emission corrections resummed …

Development Of A Screening Method For Drugs Of Abuse By Direct Analysis Of Dried Urine Spots Coupled To Mass Spectrometry, Melanie Goldstein

Student Theses

Fast and easy screening procedures are essential in any forensic toxicology laboratory to differentiate negative samples from presumptive positive cases. Immunoassay techniques, such as enzyme multiplied immunoassay technique (EMIT), are routinely employed as screening procedures. However, these techniques lack specificity (only differentiate group of drugs and not individual compounds) and it is difficult to add new compounds to the panel. Direct analysis of dried urine spots (DUS) by mass spectrometry (MS) offers a novel strategy to overcome these issues. DUS offer an improved storage alternative for biological samples, reducing costs and space requirements. In this work, an original method to …

Scavenger Hunt Reflection Lab Report, Angela Padilla

Open Educational Resources

A. Scavenger Hunt Description

❏ This Scavenger Hunt Assignment is designed for the First Year Seminar for Natural Sciences (NSF 101) and the First Year Seminar for Liberal Arts: Math and Science (LMF 101) (STEM majors).

❏ The main objective of this assignment is to familiarize students with their campus and its resources, to encourage students to collaborate with each other, and to be aware that the scientific method is applied to solve any problem, not just scientific issues. It is meant to address the Integrative Learning Core Competency.

❏ Students are given the entire class time (at least two …

An Optimized Encoding Algorithm For Systematic Polar Codes, Xiumin Wang, Zhihong Zhang, Jun Li, Yu Wang, Haiyan Cao, Zhengquan Li, Liang Shan

Publications and Research

Many different encoding algorithms for systematic polar codes (SPC) have been introduced since SPC was proposed in 2011. However, the number of the computing units of exclusive OR (XOR) has not been optimized yet. According to an iterative property of the generator matrix and particular lower triangular structure of the matrix, we propose an optimized encoding algorithm (OEA) of SPC that can reduce the number of XOR computing units compared with existing non-recursive algorithms. We also prove that this property of the generator matrix could extend to different code lengths and rates of the polar codes. Through the matrix segmentation …

Rocketry And Observability Predictions For Cubesat, Juliano A. Everett

Publications and Research

Estimating the visibility of Sunlight reflected by the holographic retro-reflector of Cubesat Alpha, and to convert this to star apparent magnitude to learn more about the visibility of these sails through reflected sunlight, to in turn determine if glints of these holograms are visible by terrestrial observers.