VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
One-Dimensional p-Wave Contact

A proposed method to stabilize p-wave interacting gases and protect from three-body loss is to confine atoms to quasi-one-dimensional (q1D) geometries. A stable p-wave gas in 1D is predicted to have odd-wave scattering and two-body correlations. Loss measurements in lithium have been reported and show strong three-body loss, but such measurements in fermionic potassium have not been reported. In this thesis, we investigate these predictions by studying p-wave interacting fermionic potassium in both 3D and 1D. First, we present a precise characterization of 3D p-wave scattering in $^{40}$K including the role of a low energy shape resonance on scattering. We observe clear nonlinearity of the p-wave binding energy near threshold due to the shape resonance. We study the breakdown of effective range approximation for scattering using coupled-channels calculations. We extract a new 3D parameterization that allows us to precisely calculate quasi-one-dimensional scattering parameters. Then, switching to 1D, we show theoretically how p-wave scattering in quasi-one-dimensional geometries breaks into the expected odd-wave scattering sector for ground band atoms and a newly predicted even-wave sector for interband scattering. For this even-wave scattering, an orbital singlet means that the two-body wavefunction is still antisymmetric, as required by quantum statistics. Next, we present experimental measurements of the two-body contact via rf spectroscopy for both cases. For odd-wave scattering, we find that two-body correlations remain weak outside of the loss-dominated regime making the study of equilibrium odd-wave gases unlikely with our experimental conditions. Loss is similar in magnitude to that in $^6$Li.Even-wave correlations between identical fermions, however, are strong and comparable to the unitary even-wave contact. We compare to theory and note that we have revealed a new paradigm for interactions between identical fermions. Lastly, we conclude with discussion of new possibilities for future research.

Keywords: atomic
p-wave
scattering
Advisor: Thywissen, Joseph H
Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation of Dental Structures using Multispectral Photothermal Diagnostic Techniques

Enhanced Truncated-Correlation Photothermal Coherence Tomography (eTC-PCT) is a dynamic frequency-domain imaging modality for non-invasive imaging of samples. The original embodiment of eTC-PCT uses an 808-nm diode laser to generate 3D photothermal images of samples. In order to obtain molecular specificity in biological samples based on their absorption and scattering properties, in this thesis, the eTC-PCT has been improved and multispectral TC-PCT imaging technique has been developed which employs an Nd:YAG pulsed laser that pumps an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) for wavelength tunability. Multispectral TC-PCT is then used for 3D photothermal imaging of natural and artificial early dental caries. Results have shown that near-surface and deep subsurface defects within the tooth can be imaged as a function of wavelength. These results hold importance as other active thermography methods such as eTC-PCT have not achieved similar outcomes. This makes multispectral TC-PCT a promising approach for expanding its applications in imaging both hard and soft tissues, provided the appropriate wavelength is selected.To complement the experimental work in relation to the photothermal signal detected during multispectral TC-PCT imaging, a theoretical model of pulsed photothermal radiometry based on conduction-radiation theory is developed for two-layered samples followed by a controlled experimental approach. After validating the developed theory for two-layered samples through a controlled experiment, biological samples such as teeth are used. Teeth contain both absorption and scattering coefficients which allow for the quantitative examination of how the optical and thermal properties of healthy and carious enamel vary depending on the excitation wavelength. Through the utilization of both the theoretical framework and experimental findings, the optical and thermal parameters of healthy and carious teeth across the various wavelengths are measured leading to the determination of the degree of reliability of each of the fitted parameters. For the first time, pixel-by-pixel images depicting the essential optical and thermophysical parameters of dental structures are shown. This enables the creation of a precise calibration chart, empowering the identification and extent of caries in a tooth. This innovative method has the potential to improve how dental health is understood and diagnosed in a more concrete and measurable way.

Keywords: Active Thermography
Laser Engineering
Non-destructive Testing
Photonics
Advisor: Mandelis, Andreas
Mediation and the Action-Oriented Approach in Language Education: The Learner Experience

The teaching of an additional language in a communicative educational context in Canada is traditionally approached through the development of four linguistic skills: listening, speaking reading, writing (Fox, Cheng, & Zumbo, 2014). The seminal Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001) for language learning and teaching initiated a significant action-oriented paradigm shift from skills to modes of communication, namely: reception, interaction, production, and mediation. Since its initial timid yet pivotal presence in the CEFR 2001, mediation in particular has been attracting the interest of researchers, as this mode was further conceptualized to reveal it complex and rich nature (Coste & Cavalli, 2015; North & Piccardo, 2016; Zarate, 2003), and this led to the development of illustrative descriptors for it (North & Piccardo, 2016; North & Panthier, 2016), which informed the new updated version of the CEFR, the so-called CEFR Companion Volume (CEFRCV) (Council of Europe, 2020). Despite the growing interest in the subject, there are very few studies that focus on the implication and the learners’ experience on mediation-based tasks within an Action-oriented Approach in the language classroom. My research recruited a group of 12 adults (aged 19-45) intermediate level learners (CEFR B1) enrolled in an English for Academic Preparation program in an Ontario post-secondary institution. The participants completed 5 researcher-designed mediation-based, Action-Oriented tasks in small groups, and within the different learning scenarios they were required to collaborate and mediate text, concepts, communication, as well as to use mediation strategies, to explain new ideas, to adapt a text, and to create a final artifact for each task. These activities took place online via the ZOOM platform, and qualitative data were collected via transcription of video recordings of task completion, all 12 participants’ individual interviews, participants’ self assessments as well as researcher and peer-researchers’ task observations. These data were analyzed using theme identification, synthesis, and pattern identification via primarily inductive but also deductive coding. Findings reinforce that mediation and the Action-oriented Approach motivate learners, and also uncovers an increase in social agency with strong promise for language teaching and learning.

Keywords: Action-oriented Approach
Agency
Language Education
Language Learning
Mediation
Tasks
Advisor: Piccardo, Enrica
Cholecystokinin Inputs into the Lateral Periaqueductal Gray Drive Socially Enhanced Pain in Mice

Nocebo hyperalgesia, or the experience of enhanced pain due to expectation of pain or injury, can arise from environmental cues such as surroundings or behaviors of other individuals. Cues from the environment can signal danger or indicate the potential for pain. Observing others in pain or being informed that a treatment will cause pain leads to increased ratings of pain in human participants. Similarly, when rodents interact with a cagemate in pain, it amplifies pain-related behavior. However, the neurochemical basis underlying socially enhanced pain remain unknown. Environmental conditions that signal threat to safety such as the presence of an aggressor can trigger cholecystokinin (CCK) release from neurons. Further, application of CCK to distinct brain regions enhances pain behavior in rodents. In this thesis, I interrogated the role of CCK at the circuit level in socially enhanced pain in mice. First, I developed a one-in-pain interaction mouse model where an observer exhibits enhanced pain after interacting with a cagemate displaying signs of pain. Through this model, I showed that systemic proglumide, a CCK receptor antagonist, blocks socially enhanced pain in the observer. Next, I showed that increased density of activated neurons occurs in the periaqueductal gray (PAG) in the intermedial portion of the lateral columns (lPAG) in observers of pain demonstrators compared to observers of no-pain control demonstrators. I then showed that application of proglumide to the lPAG prevented socially enhanced pain. Likewise, application of CCK to the lPAG facilitated pain. I then demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain region important for pain perception, sends long-range axons expressing CCK into the lPAG. Silencing ACC neurons and long-range ACC-lPAG CCK projections blocked socially enhanced pain. Together, these data indicate that CCK receptors in the lPAG, which receive CCK inputs from the ACC, are involved in socially enhanced pain when mice observe cagemates in pain. These findings build a more neuroanatomically precise understanding of pain enhancement due to social context and the neural mechanisms underlying environmental and social-communicative enhancement of pain.

Keywords: anterior cingulate cortex
cholecystokinin
nocebo
pain
periaqueductal gray
social
Advisor: Martin, Loren J
Design, Engineering, and Discovery of Transcription Factor-Based Biosensors for Applications in Value-Added Chemical Production

The rapid development of technology and techniques in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering has enabled the bio-based economy to develop microbial cell factories for the biological production of chemicals from renewable sources. As biological techniques and tools have developed and become cheaper, the ability to create strains and mutants has become essentially limitless. Traditional methods for screening and selecting viable mutants are low-throughput compared to the ability to build mutants, causing a bottleneck within the design-build-test-learn engineering cycle. To address the testing bottleneck, biosensors such as transcription factor-based biosensors have emerged as powerful biological tools that can be applied for the screening and control of microbial cell factories. Such biosensors can also be used in other applications for point-of-care diagnostics and environmental pollutant monitoring. While this technology has demonstrated its potential in the literature, the widespread development and deployment of biosensors is still limited by the availability of transcription factors for detecting target chemicals and the inconsistent design methods of biosensors. This project seeks to overcome current bottlenecks using multiple strategies to elucidate fundamental principles of transcription factor biosensor specificity and circuit engineering that can be harnessed to develop future biosensors. This was accomplished by establishing strategies for the design and construction of biosensors to guide biosensor development, developing structure-guided computational approaches for transcription factor specificity engineering to expand the breadth of potential biosensor applications, and creating chimeric transcription factors to expedite biosensor discovery and overcome the currently high levels of characterization typically required to develop biosensors. The accomplishment of these tasks improves the ability to design, engineer, and discover biosensors for molecules of interest, accelerating biosensor development and the implementation of biosensors towards harnessing biology for various applications.

Keywords: Biosensor
Molecular Biology
Protein
Protein Engineering
Synthetic Biology
Transcription Factor
Advisor: Mahadevan, Radhakrishnan
Savchenko, Alexei
Disjunctive Dreams: An Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre's Influence on the Modern Imagination Model of Dreaming and Why Modern Disjunctivism Would Improve the Case

There is a debate as to whether dreamed experience is similar or different in kind from perceptual experience. Proponents of the latter view, imagination model theorists like McGinn and Ichikawa, draw their arguments from Jean-Paul Sartre who argues that perception and imagination are sui generis mental activities. However, these proponents accept Sartre’s arguments without subjecting them to critical analysis. As such, they reproduce what I argue is a methodological problem that makes Sartre’s and his proponents’ argument vulnerable to critique. Sartre seeks to add aspects of relationalism to his phenomenological account of perception and imagination. He argues that perception is distinguished from imagination because only the former involves an encounter with a present and existing object. However, in making this case, he adheres to the phenomenological epoché which precludes an appeal to mind-independent reality and requires that he make his case solely upon subjective experience. As a result, his theory struggles to explain the phenomenology of presence in dreams, a point opponents of the Sartre-inspired imagination model use against it. Rather sticking with the phenomenological epoché, I propose that imagination model proponents fine-tune Sartre’s account of dreaming to include modern disjunctivist arguments. Disjunctivism distinguishes between two kinds of experiences, ones where the subject perceives her environment, and ones where she is imagining (hallucinating, dreaming, etc). It grants that an imaginative experience can be subjectively indistinguishable from perceptual experience while maintaining that perception and imagination are sui generis, something Sartre and his proponents struggle to account for. However, disjunctivism requires an appeal to mind-independent reality to make its case and is thus incompatible with the phenomenological epoché. Sartre offers a robust account of dreamed experience in contrast to perceptual experience. However, his attempt to combine a relationalist theory of perception with the phenomenological epoché presents serious challenges to his account of dreamed experience. While Sartre himself would be loath to abandon the epoché, I argue that modern imagination model proponents need not be. Adopting disjunctivism gives the view’s proponents a more solid foundation from which to defend the Sartrean claim that dreamed experience is different in kind from perception.

Keywords: Disjunctivism
Dreaming
Imagination
Perception
Phenomenology
Sartre
Advisor: Sedivy, Sonia
The Supernatural and the Modern Nation State in Japanese and Former Yugoslavian Fiction

This dissertation examines the supernatural in modern Japanese and former Yugoslavian literature in relation to the birth and continuous process of dissolution and renewal of modern nation-building projects during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The monstrous and the supernatural in these selected works expose the foundational violence, instability, and contradictions of modern nation-building projects, irrespective of their imagined position in a hegemonic geopolitical order. Violence constitutes an excess to the narrative of the modern nation-state’s alleged civility, just as the supernatural constitutes an excess to the narrative of scientific rationalism. Thus, this dissertation attends to distinct literary imaginations from Japan and former Yugoslavia that sought to create alternative understandings to conventionally accepted historical narratives about their modern nation-states. The chapters of this dissertation home in on three key moments in Japan and former Yugoslavia’s national histories: first, the inception of the nation-state, which I examine through the works of folklorists and ethnographers Yanagita Kunio and Vuk Karadžić; second, the seminal years following the nation-state’s inception, which I examine through the works of novelist and playwright Izumi Kyōka and the novelist, literary critic, and translator Milovan Glišić; and finally, the violent dissolution of post-imperial Japanese and post-Yugoslavian national consciousness, which I examine through the works of Sakaguchi Ango and Svetlana Velmar-Janković. The works of each of these writers constituted a reaction to the rapid and often violent transformations of these key moments, which shaped the national consciousness of their respective locations. I show how, in their invocation of the monstrous and supernatural, these works negotiate, grapple with, or expose the violence, instability, and contradictions at the heart of all nation-building, rendered invisible by state apparatuses. Finally, I argue that the examined literatures complicate or unsettle the stories that nation-states use to construct a coherent national narrative, which in turn is intended to construct a coherent national identity. The fiction examined in this dissertation should thus be understood as a creative engagement that seeks to propose an alternate logic and history to the nation-state—one that emphasizes multiplicity over singularity, messiness over coherence, and truth over fact.

Keywords: area studies
comparative historiography
former Yugoslavian literature
Japanese literature
nation-building
supernatural
Advisor: Poole, Janey
Keirstead, Thomas
Universal Minimum DeviationController

The main focus of this thesis is the reduction of the size of the switch mode power supplies (SMPS), in low power applications. The SMPS (dominantly made of switching converters) size is dominated by their passive components, where the output capacitor is the largest contributor to the area consumed by the SMPS. Output capacitor size reduction leads to higher power density, and subsequently increase in the power processing efficiency, while maintaining a low cost of the system. These factors are relevant in design of low-power electronic devices. Therefore, the work in this thesis presents one of the possible solutions that will reduce the size of the output capacitor of a converter. These goals are achieved by implementing a fast transient controller for the SMPS. The introduced controller is applicable to multiple conventional switching stages (e.g., buck, boost, buck-boost, etc.) that are most dominantly used in the low- power, low-voltage applications. Additionally, it is shown that the controller is applicable to emerging topologies (e.g. Multi-Level Flying Capacitor (ML-FC) converters), that allow further miniaturization of the SMPS, thus presenting an interesting alternative to conventional converters. This controller utilizes same hardware for all the switching stages, and has simple tuning procedure. It is developed as a combination of analog components and synthesizable Verilog code, thus making the controller suitable for integrated circuit (IC) implementation. The effectiveness of the control method has been experimentally verified with a low-power conventional and a ML-FC converter, processing power up to 100W.

Advisor: Prodic, Aleksandar AP
Analysis and Control of Interconnected Infinite-dimensional Linear Systems

This thesis presents a theoretical framework for the analysis and control of networks of infinite-dimensional linear systems. Three main problems are addressed: synchronization analysis, feedback stabilization by finite-dimensional controllers, and distributed synchronization control by finite-dimensional controllers. In the context of synchronization analysis, sufficient and necessary conditions that guarantee synchronization are provided. These conditions are framed in a general setting and are verified for a large class of infinite-dimensional systems. In the context of feedback stabilization, by employing spectral analysis and a modified small-gain theorem, sufficient and necessary conditions for feedback stabilizability using finite-dimensional controllers are derived. Finally, leveraging on these results, distributed controllers that ensure synchronization under mild assumptions on the coupling graph are designed. In order to provide a cohesive and rigorous framework across the thesis, systems are represented as input-state-output relations. This representation has several benefits, including being closed under compositions.

Keywords: Control theory
Infinite-dimensional systems
Linear systems
Network analysis
Stabilization
Synchronization
Advisor: Scardovi, Luca
Optimizing Irregular Computations on Parallel Processors

Parallel processors, such as multi-core processors, many-core processors, and multi-node systems, are widely employed in scientific computing and machine learning applications to meet their ever growing computing demands. However, the underlying computations in these applications have irregularities in both their memory access and their control flow. Irregular computations make performance optimization challenging on parallel processors due to their data-dependent memory accesses, e.g. the indirect memory accesses (e.g., A[B[i]]) in sparse computations. Additionally, control flow dependencies that arise in irregular computations poses limitations to parallelization. Therefore, while currently parallel processors are used to efficiently optimize the performance of applications with regular computation patterns and predictable control flow, novel algorithms and software systems have to be developed to tackle the optimization of applications with irregular patterns. The first focus of this thesis is the optimization of irregular computations caused by indirect memory accesses. Specifically, the indirect memory accesses that frequently appear in sparse computation. Such indirection is caused by the specialized sparse data structures used in these computations and that only store the non-zeros. This thesis presents a set of parallel algorithms and code transformations for sparse computations to overcome the challenges arising from indirect memory accesses on numerous parallel processors, including multi-core CPU, GPU, and Cloud-based distributed platforms. We optimize sparse tensor computations and achieve up to 3.7× and 6.9×speedup compared to the state-of-the-art implementations on GPU and Cloud-based distributed platforms, respectively. We also developed a framework for data-sparse computations called MatRox, MatRox-generated code achieves up to 6.0× speedup over existing library implementations. This thesis also focuses on the irregular computations caused by dynamic control flow. Dynamic control flow, such as if-statements, is common and can lead to irregular computations in real applications. For example, Partial Differential Equation (PDE) solvers process elements guarded with boundary check conditions which are unpredictable and data-dependent. We present a set of compiler optimization techniques to handle dynamic control flows. Our compiler optimization techniques are implemented is a tool called VecRC, which achieves geometric mean speedups of 1.20×, 1.19× and 1.06× over GCC, Clang and ICC on real benchmark code.

Advisor: Dehnavi, Maryam M