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The essay is a study of The Glassy Sea by the Canadian author Marian Engel. The novel focuses on the main character's self exploration ans her search for identity. A Jungian approach to this novel is particularly appropriate since the author makes use of several achetypes and symbols. Moreover, the novel is presented in an introspective manner that brings to the mind the method of self-examination used in psychoanalysis. The essay studies the development of the main character's identity, Rita. Her quest can be summed up in two questions: Who is she and what does she want to do with her life? We follow Rita through a series of steps that will lead her to maturity and to an independant life. Her development takes place in stages and the essay focuses on four of these. There is a regularity of pattern at each stage; Rita lives in different homes where she is under the influence of a mentor, whose role model she accepts at first, submits to and finally rejects. Among the archetypal images that appear in the novel, we find that the mother archetype is omnipresent and that Rita's growth progress is strongly connected to the mother complex. The author also makes use of the egg, the rose and the sea symbols to underline certain aspects of Rita's development. The essay seeks to connect Rita's developmental phases to the initiation rituals and the individuation process described by Jung.

A system for the analysis of urine bioassay samples for the purpose of inversely investigating an unknown exposure to uranium has been developed. This technique involves the use of a thin flow electrochemical cell in conjunction with an anodized glassy carbon electrode to selectively separate uranium atoms out of solution for later analysis on an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer. A series of uranium urinalysis bioassay sample results can be used to investigate the time frame and type of exposure. This analysis uses an exposure database and regression analysis to best fit urinalysis uranium excretion data to expected profiles using commercially available mathematics software. The least number of data points to determine an acceptable confidence interval is ten bioassay samples taken at least a week apart. The system was benchmarked using a random sampling of urinary excretion samples from a known case at the Y-12 plant in the 1960’s. The electrochemical system was characterized using U.S. Department of Energy synthetic urine quality assurance standards from an inter-laboratory exercise in 2012. The separation apparatus was able to consistently separate uranium from the synthetic urine solutions with a consistent recovery between ten and fifteen percent and up to fifty percent. The method is isotope independent and maintains the enrichment of any excreted material. This allows for the material to be compared to operational logbooks at facilities using multiple enrichments in the nuclear fuel cycle. This methodology is recommended for spot estimation in support of a traditional bioassay program.

This thesis describes the preparation of surface-attached monolayer tethers from electroreduction of aryldiazonium ions using a protection-deprotection strategy. Monolayers of ethynylphenyl, carboxyphenyl, aminophenyl and aminomethylphenyl were prepared. Glassy carbon (GC) and pyrolysed photoresist film (PPF) surfaces were modified electrochemically and characterised by redox probe voltammetry. The monolayer tethers were coupled with electro-active ferrocenyl (Fc) and nitrophenyl (NP) groups for the indirect electrochemical estimation of the surface concentration. Film thickness measurement was carried out using an atomic force microscopy (AFM) depth profiling technique. The surface concentration and film thickness measurement results were consistent with the formation of monolayer films after removal of the protecting groups. Preparation of mixed monolayers was studied using three different modification strategies: i) grafting from a solution containing two different protected aryldiazonium ions, ii) sequential grafting of two different protected aryldiazonium ions, and iii) grafting of protected aryldiazonium ions followed by removal of the protecting group and reaction of an amine or carboxylic acid derivative directly with the GC surface. The composition of the mixed layer prepared using the first method is difficult to control, whereas the possibility of multilayer formation cannot be discounted using the second method. Multilayer formation is unlikely using the third method. The electrocatalysis of oxygen reduction at mixed monolayer films was investigated briefly. The origin of the two reduction peaks frequently observed for electroreduction of aryldiazonium ions at carbon surfaces was studied. Electroreduction was carried out at GC and HOPG surfaces. The reduction peak at the more positive potential is surface sensitive, while the peak at the more negative potential is not. However, both reduction peaks lead to deposition of films and it is tentatively proposed that the more positive peak corresponds to reduction at a ‘clean’ GC electrode, and the more negative peak corresponds to reduction at the already grafted layer.

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In this thesis, I describe research results on three topics : (i) a phase transition in the area-law regime of quantum circuits driven by projection measurements; (ii) ultra slow dynamics in two dimensional spin circuits; and (iii) tensor network methods applied to boolean satisfiability problems. (i) Nonuniversal entanglement level statistics in projection-driven quantum circuits; Non-thermalized closed quantum many-body systems have drawn considerable attention, due to their relevance to experimentally controllable quantum systems. In the first part of the thesis, we study the level-spacing statistics in the entanglement spectrum of output states of random universal quantum circuits where, at each time step, qubits are subject to a finite probability of projection onto states of the computational basis. We encounter two phase transitions with increasing projection rate: The first is the volume-to-area law transition observed in quantum circuits with projective measurements; The second separates the pure Poisson level statistics phase at large projective measurement rates from a regime of residual level repulsion in the entanglement spectrum within the area-law phase, characterized by non-universal level spacing statistics that interpolates between the Wigner-Dyson and Poisson distributions. The same behavior is observed in both circuits of random two-qubit unitaries and circuits of universal gates, including the set implemented by Google in its Sycamore circuits. (ii) Ultra-slow dynamics in a translationally invariant spin model for multiplication and factorization; Slow relaxation of glassy systems in the absence of disorder remains one of the most intriguing problems in condensed matter physics. In the second part of the thesis we investigate slow relaxation in a classical model of short-range interacting Ising spins on a translationally invariant two-dimensional lattice that mimics a reversible circuit that, depending on the choice of boundary conditions, either multiplies or factorizes integers. We prove that, for open boundary conditions, the model exhibits no finite-temperature phase transition. Yet we find that it displays glassy dynamics with astronomically slow relaxation times, numerically consistent with a double exponential dependence on the inverse temperature. The slowness of the dynamics arises due to errors that occur during thermal annealing that cost little energy but flip an extensive number of spins. We argue that the energy barrier that needs to be overcome in order to heal such defects scales linearly with the correlation length, which diverges exponentially with inverse temperature, thus yielding the double exponential behavior of the relaxation time. (iii) Reversible circuit embedding on tensor networks for Boolean satisfiability; Finally, in the third part of the thesis we present an embedding of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problems on a two-dimensional tensor network. The embedding uses reversible circuits encoded into the tensor network whose trace counts the number of solutions of the satisfiability problem. We specifically present the formulation of #2SAT, #3SAT, and #3XORSAT formulas into planar tensor networks. We use a compression-decimation algorithm introduced by us to propagate constraints in the network before coarse-graining the boundary tensors. Iterations of these two steps gradually collapse the network while slowing down the growth of bond dimensions. For the case of #3XORSAT, we show numerically that this procedure recognizes, at least partially, the simplicity of XOR constraints for which it achieves subexponential time to solution. For a #P-complete subset of #2SAT we find that our algorithm scales with size in the same way as state-of-the-art #SAT counters, albeit with a larger prefactor. We find that the compression step performs less efficiently for #3SAT than for #2SAT.

Fluoropolymers are employed in countless end-user applications across several industries. One such fluoropolymer is polytetrafluoroethylene. This research is concerned with studying and understanding the thermal behavior of polytetrafluoroethylene. Such understanding is critical to predict its behavior in diverse service environments as the polymer ages and for allowing bottom up design of improved polymers for specific applications. While a plethora of experiments have investigated the thermal properties of polytetrafluoroethylene, examining these properties using molecular dynamics simulations remains in its infancy. In particular, the current body of molecular dynamics research on polytetrafluoroethylene has primarily focused on studying polytetrafluoroethylene phases, its physical nature, and its helical conformational structure. The present study is the first molecular dynamics simulations research to study polytetrafluoroethylene behavior near the glassy transition temperature. Specifically, the current research utilizes molecular dynamics simulations to achieve the following objectives: (a) model and predict polytetrafluoroethylene glassy transition temperature at different molecular weights, (b) examine the impact of glassy transition temperature on the volume-temperature and thermal properties, (c) study the influence of molecular weight on polytetrafluoroethylene melt and glassy state, and (d) determine the governing forces at the molecular level that control polytetrafluoroethylene glassy transition temperature. Achieving the aforementioned objectives requires performing four major tasks. Motivated by the scarcity of polytetrafluoroethylene force fields research, the first task aims to generate and test polytetrafluoroethylene force fields. The parameters were produced based on the Optimized Potentials for Liquid Simulations All Atom model. The intramolecular parameters were generated using the automated frequency matching method while the torsional terms were fitted using the nonlinear least squares algorithm. The intermolecular partial atomic charges were obtained using Northwest Computational Chemistry software and fitted using the restrained electrostatic potential at (MP2/6-31G*) level of theory. The final set of parameter was tested by calculating polytetrafluoroethylene density using molecular dynamics simulations. The second task involves building polytetrafluoroethylene amorphous structure using molecular dynamics at periodic boundary conditions for polytetrafluoroethylene cell at different molecular weights. We use the amorphous structure in the molecular dynamics simulations in consistence with research evidence which reveals that polymer properties such as the specific volume will differ as the polymer passes the glassy transition when it is in the amorphous phase structure whereas no variation occurs when the polymer passes the glassy transition while it is in the crystalline structure. The third task includes testing polytetrafluoroethylene melt phase properties: density, specific heat, boiling point, and enthalpy of vaporization. In the fourth and final task, we performed molecular dynamics simulations using NAnoscale Molecular Dynamics program. This task involves the polymer relaxation process to predict polytetrafluoroethylene mechanical behavior around the glassy transition temperature. Properties that are affected by this transition such as density, heat capacity, volumetric thermal expansion, the specific volume, and the bulk modulus were examined and the simulated results were in good agreement with experimental findings.

This research project investigated the physical aging of glassy polymers in confined environments. Many recent studies of aging in glassy polymers have observed that aging behavior is often strongly affected by confinement. Understanding aging in confined environments (e.g., thin polymer films and nanocomposites) is vital for predicting long-term performance in applications that use confined glassy polymers, such as gas separation membranes and advanced nanocomposite materials. Aging in bulk and layered films produced via layer-multiplying co-extrusion was studied using gas permeability measurement and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The layered films consisted of polysulfone (PSF) and a rubbery co-layering material, with PSF layers ranging in thickness from ~185 nm to ~400 nm. Gas permeation aging studies at 35 °C revealed that the PSF layers in layered films aged in a manner that was similar to bulk PSF and independent of layer thickness. This finding differs from what was observed previously in freestanding PSF films, in which aging depended strongly on thickness and was accelerated relative to bulk. Isothermal aging studies at 170 °C and cooling rate studies were performed on both bulk and layered samples using DSC. The aging of the PSF layers was similar to aging in bulk PSF for films having PSF layer thicknesses of ~640 nm and ~260 nm, while the film with 185 nm PSF layers showed a slightly higher aging rate than that of bulk PSF. The results of the DSC studies generally support the conclusions of our gas permeation aging studies. The absence of strong thickness dependence in aging studies of layered films tends to support the idea that the effect of film thickness on physical aging stems from interfacial characteristics and not merely thickness per se. The physical aging of thin polystyrene (PS) films at 35 °C was also investigated using gas permeation techniques. PS films of 400 nm and 800 nm did not exhibit aging behavior that was highly accelerated relative to bulk or strongly dependent on film thickness. At the thicknesses and aging temperature considered, the aging of PS shows much weaker thickness dependence than that seen in polymers like PSF and Matrimid. / text