As fourth-generation synchrotron x-ray sources start to come online, they bring with them the promise of increased imaging speed and resolution for current imaging modalities, while enabling entirely new ones. Employing the increased brightness at hard x-ray energies begins with having efficient focusing optics in place. Zone plates are popular...
Engineering heat transport in materials is essential for thermal management in a wide range of technologies, from batteries to thermoelectrics. Materials host a wide spectrum of heat-carrying phonons, which vary in their frequency, spatial extent, and degree of plane-wave character. This diversity in phonon properties leads to complex behavior, especially...
Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) methods are techniques that image a sample by illuminating it with a coherent beam and recording the intensity diffraction pattern produced by the wavefront outgoing from the sample. These are lensless methods that are not limited in resolution by the physical characteristics of an objective lens,...
Superconducting qubits are among the leading competitors in the race towards building the first full-fledged quantum computer. Using this platform, researchers have for the first time demonstrated computational capability that is beyond the reach of the current classical machines. (This achievement is nicknamed "Quantum Supremacy".) Up to date, however, the...
The nature of dark matter (DM) remains one of the largest open questions in modern physics despite the many searches for particle dark matter around the world. The search for dark matter particles with masses above 5 GeV/$c^2$ is led by the dual-phase xenon time-projection chamber (LXe-TPC) detector technology which...
The BV Laplacian Δ, first introduced by Batalin and Vilkovisky, is a second-order differential operator that appears in the quantum master equation for quantizing gauge theories. The geometric framework for the BV formalism was later recognized by Schwarz as the setting of odd symplectic geometry and Khudaverdian showed that Δ...
The leptonic and inclusive hadronic decay branching fractions of the W boson are studied using 35.9 $fb^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data collected at $\sqrt{s}=13~TeV$ during the 2016 run of the CMS experiment. Events characterized by the production of pairs of W bosons from \ttbar and \tW processes are selected. Multiple...
Metallic conductivity and broken inversion symmetry were long thought to be contraindicated properties, under the assumption that long-range Coulombic interactions (screened by free charge carriers) were necessary for coordinated polar displacements. Within the past decade, the discovery of polar metals has prompted a rethinking of the relationship between metallicity and...
This thesis describes the synthesis and photophysical characterization of low-dimensionalmaterials—including thin-film semiconductors, colloidal quantum dots, and molecules—with the
broader motivation of integrating them into mixed-dimensional heterostructures with novel
responses to external stimuli. Due to their high surface area to volume ratio and incomplete
dielectric screening, mixed-dimensional heterostructures have high sensitivity...
This dissertation explores the fundamental science of flexoelectricity and its implications using a combined experimental and theoretical approach. I begin by introducing the flexoelectric effect and formalizing the basics of strain gradients, polarization, and flexoelectric coefficients. Next, I describe the development of a flexoelectric characterization system based upon three-point bending...