Metallic glasses (MGs), also called amorphous metals, are metals or metallic alloys trapped in a disordered glassy state. Their amorphous nature and absence of features such as crystal lattices and defects (dislocations, grain boundaries etc.) endows them with a host of properties that far surpass those of common crystalline materials....
TiO2 is a versatile wide bandgap transparent semiconducting oxide with three well known polymorphs: Anatase, Rutile and Brookite. These crystal structures are desired for many industrial applications mainly for their photocatalytic activity, oftentimes in thin-film form. Thin-film crystalline polymorphs of TiO2 are often made by physical vapor deposition on a...
Understanding the impact of inter-molecular orientation on the optical proper-ties of organic semiconductors is important for designing next-generation organic (opto)electronic and photonic devices. However, fundamental aspects of how various features of molecular packing in crystalline systems determine the nature and dynamics of excitons have been a subject of debate. Toward...
In the past decades, femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopy (FSRS) has been gaining tremendous popularity in fundamental sciences stemming from chemistry to biology. It is capable of capturing both equilibrium and non-equilibrium structural information across a broad range of timescales with simultaneously high temporal and spectral resolutions. Femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy...
Low carbon steels (LCS) due to their high strength-to-cost ratio are one of the most ubiquitous materials used for a wide range of applications, including but not limited to automotive, construction, and transportation. However, the low corrosion resistance of LCS in neutral, acidic, or saline environments limits its utilization and...
This work introduces the novel flat-histogram Monte Carlo (MC) method stochastic approximation with a dynamic update factor (SAD) and explores the convergence properties of a variety of related weight-based MC methods. The new method is applied to a number of physical `test’ systems including the 2D Ising model, a square-well...
IoT networks can be viewed as collections of Internet-enabled physical devices and objects, embedded with sensor, actuator, computation, storage and communication components, that are capable of connecting and exchanging data to one another. In recent years, organizations have allowed more and more IoT devices to be connected to their networks,...
Successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters are popular for medium accuracy, medium speed and low power applications, such as in biomedical applications. They have low latency and simple architecture compared with ΔΣ ADCs. This is because of SAR ADCs’ binary searching scheme. Furthermore, SAR ADCs can apply oversampling and noise shaping schemes...
Mandelalide A has attracted considerable interest from the synthetic community due to its intriguing structure and important cytotoxic activity. Madeirolide A, a structurally related macrolide, shows promising antifungal activity but no appreciable anticancer activity. This dissertation describes synthetic studies toward mandelalide A, madeirolide A and their hybrid structures.
Part I...
This dissertation focuses on indoor free-space optical communications systems for use in short range wireless networks. We propose that current radio frequency wireless links be augmented or replaced with optical frequency links due to overcrowding in the radio frequency spectrum. Optical frequencies contain hundreds of terahertz of unregulated bandwidth and...