Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-84). / The Magellan Instant Camera (MagIC) is an optical CCD camera that was built at MIT and is currently used at Las Campanas Observatory (LCO) in La Serena, Chile. It is designed to be both simple and efficient with minimal optics between the telescope port and the detector, a high quantum efficiency and throughput detector, a CryoTiger® self-contained, cooling system that cleanly and cost-effectively maintains observing temperatures as low as 70K, and a modular user interface that allows the observer to control all elements of an exposure. The goal of this thesis project is to create a testbed for MagIC at MIT. The testbed consists of identical camera electronics, software, and hardware to MagIC, but it has an engineering-grade CCD. The system will be used to test electronics and software before installation occurs at LCO and to serve as an additional camera at Wallace Astrophysical Observatory for MIT students and other observatory users. This thesis will serve a documentation source for MagIC as well as a manual for setting up and running the MagIC testbed. / by Heather K. McEwen. / S.B.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-81). / by Daniel Dongyuel Lee. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1984. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND SCIENCE. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 225-230. / by David Banks Cope. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-73). / In this thesis, I present new spectroscopic and photometric observations of WASP-3, a transiting extrasolar planetary system. From spectra obtained during two transits, I use the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect in a simplified physical model to determine the projected spin-orbit angle between the planetary orbital axis and the stellar rotation axis, ... degrees. I use the new photometric data to refine the system parameters. Additionally, I present evidence for stellar activity, as the spectra obtained on UT June 19, 2008 reveal an increase in radial velocity to a peak magnitude of 75 m s-1 larger than the expected orbital velocity. Such an anomaly was not observed during a subsequent transit. I find that a good fit to the radial velocity measurements requires omitting the anomalous data and adding a large stellar jitter of 11 m s-1 to the measurement uncertainties. The resulting planetary mass, Mp = ... MJ differs from previously reported measurements which found Mp = 1.76 ... Together, these observations provide evidence for a region of stellar activity on WASP-3, and the observed anomaly suggests that material in this region exhibited a coherent horizontal motion of approximately 10 km s-' across the stellar surface at the limb. / by Anjali Tripathi. / S.B.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-244). / This thesis is concerned with the extension of Maxwell's equations to situations far removed from standard electromagnetism, in order to discover novel phenomena. We discuss our contributions to the efforts to describe quantum fluctuations, known as Casimir forces, in terms of classical electromagnetism. We prove that chirality in metamaterials can have no appreciable effect on the Casimir force, and design an alternative metamaterial in which the structure can have a strong effect on the Casimir force. We present a geometry that exhibits a repulsive Casimir force between metallic objects in vacuum, and describe our efforts to enhance this repulsive force using the numerical techniques that we and others developed. We then show how our techniques can be extended to study the physics of near-field radiative heat transfer, computing for the first time the exact heat transfer and power flux profiles between a plate and non-spherical objects. We find in particular that the heat flux profile is non-monotonic in separation from the cone tip. Finally, we demonstrate how techniques to compute photonic bandstructures in periodic systems can be extended to certain types of quasi-periodic structures, termed photonic-quasicrystals (PQCs). / by Alexander P. McCauley. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2013. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / The neutrino experiment MicroBooNE is currently under construction. To expedite the physics output of MicroBooNE, a smaller version of its optical detection system has been implemented. To demonstrate full operability of this prototype, two physics measurements were performed. The first examines the number of scintillation light components, for although theory explains two components, other groups have seen evidence for a third. The second measures late light quenching as a function of nitrogen gas impurity concentration in the liquid argon. We nd marginal evidence for a third component and further steps are identified to improve upon this study. Our late light quenching measurement also agrees with previously published results in the literature. These two measurements are useful not only from a detector development standpoint, but also for detector simulations. / by Christie Shinglei Chiu. / S.B.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 50). / The dynamics of polystyrene latex spheres [650 A radius] suspended in glycerol have been studied using the techniques of dynamic light scattering in the single scattering limit and diffusing wave spectroscopy in the multiple scattering regime using a charge coupled device [CCD] camera as our detector. Our experiments, which investigated suspensions of various concentrations [0.001</=0</=0.075], extended over length scales ranging from q = 0.00015 A to q = 0.00071 A and spanned three orders of magnitude in the time domain [0.1 s to 100 s]. Our measurements of the temporal fluctuations of the scattered intensity indicate that the dynamic behavior of our samples can be well characterized with intensity autocorrelation functions both in the single scattering limit and the multiple scattering regime. / by Bradley R. Plaster. / S.B.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-232). / The fundamental properties of light derive from its constituent particles, photons, which are massless and do no interact with each other. The realization of interactions between photons could enable a wide variety of scientific and engineering applications. In particular, coherent interactions would open the path for the simulation of quantum systems with light. Photon-photon interactions can be mediated by matter, in our case cold atomic ensembles, which provide a nonlinear medium. In conventional nonlinear media, the nonlinearities are negligibly weak at intensities corresponding to single photons and nonlinear optics at the few-photon level is a long-standing goal of optical and quantum science. In this thesis, we report on two different experimental approaches to create optical media with giant nonlinearities. Both approaches rely on Electromagnetically Induced Transparency, in which photons traveling in the medium are best described as part-matter part-light quantum particles, called polaritons. In our first approach, we achieve low-light nonlinearities by loading ensembles of cold atoms in a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber to enhance the polariton-photon interactions. In our second approach, the photons are coupled to strongly interacting Rydberg atoms, which mediate large interactions between single quanta of light. Moreover, the intrinsic nature of these interactions can be tailored to take on a coherent dispersive form. / by Thibault Peyronel. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-96). / by Taras Ivanenko. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (page 49). / The DarkLight experiment is searching for a dark force carrier, the A' boson, and hopes to measure its mass with a resolution of approximately 1 MeV/c 2 . This mass calculation requires precise reconstruction to turn data, in the form of hits within the detector, into a particle track with known initial momentum. This thesis investigates the appropriateness of the Billoir optimal fit to reconstruct helical, low-energy lepton tracks while accounting for multiple scattering, using two separate track parameterizations. The first method approximates the track as a piecewise concatenation of parabolas in three-dimensions, and (wrongly) assumes that the y and z components of the track are independent. When tested using simulated data, this returns a track which geometrically fits the data. However, the momentum extracted from this geometrical representation is an order of magnitude higher than the true momentum of the track. The second method approximates the track as a piecewise concatenation of helical segments. This returns a track which geometrically fits the data even better than the parabolic parameterization, but which returns a momentum which depends on the seeds to the algorithm. Some further work must be done to modify this fitting method so that it will reliably reconstruct tracks. / by Purnima Parvathy Balakrishnan. / S.B.