Soon the largest fusion project in the world, ITER, will attempt to produce more fusion power than required to sustain the fusion reaction, this is known as ignition. The tokamak (a toroidal fusion device) being built in France will be running at such high temperatures that heat distribution is a...
Understanding how particles behave in detectors is a critical part of analyzing data from neutrino experiments. There are methods in place to track charged particles in scintillator material, but neutral particles such as neutrons are more difficult to characterize. The purpose of this project was to assess and calibrate methods...
Fast neutron detection is important to the detection of illicit nuclear materials and can help prevent those materials from being used or transported without discovery. Previous research has shown that Heavy Oxide Inorganic Scintillator crystals can be used to detect fast neutrons by capitalizing on their high inelastic scattering cross...
One of the biggest open questions in physics is the prevalence of matter over anti-matter in the present universe. One of possible answers lies in the violation of charge and parity symmetry in the lepton sector that would favor matter over anti-matter so that the universe becomes dominated by matter...
By studying gravitational waves, we can gain new insights into the merging events between massive objects such as black holes as well as neutron stars. Moreover, studying low-frequency waves allows us to observe merging events between supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, which in turn allows us to...
Several topics are presented in this dissertation, each of which has applications to solar cells and photodetectors. First, we discuss the growth of Cu10Te4S13, copper tellurium tetrahedrite. This material has interesting optical properties; it has a large joint density of states at the conduction band maximum and valence band minimum,...
Multi-relation aggregation queries process the join operator before computing the aggregation function. This join is arguably the most costly operation since traditional join algorithms spend majority of their time trying to join the parts of the relations that do not generate any output tuples. This causes slow response times with...
We present double-differential measurements of antineutrino charged-current quasielastic scattering in the MINERvA detector. This study improves on a previous single-differential measurement by using updated reconstruction algorithms and interaction models and provides a complete description of observed muon kinematics in the form of a double-differential cross section with respect to muon...
The phases of transition alumina are scientifically interesting due to their high specific surface area, favorable acid/ base characteristics, and chemical and hydrothermal stability which make this metallic oxide a prime candidate for use as a support for metallic nanoparticles (NPs) in heterocatalysis. Interactions at alumina/Pt interfaces are important for...