Le besoin d'un capteur de gaz sensible,sélectif, stable et compact s'accentue en raison des préoccupations publiques et militaires. La détection photo-acoustique, variante de la spectroscopie par diode laser accordable est une solution prometteuse. Les dispositifs actuels commercialisés et en voie de développement sont encore encombrants et inadaptés pour être transportés par une personne afin de réaliser des mesures embarqués. Cette thèse a pour objectif d'étudier et de développer un micro-résonateur en silicium à transduction capacitive pour la réalisation d'un capteur de gaz par mesure photo-acoustique. Il s'agit d'une approche originale qui n'a jamais été proposée. Elle offre des perspectives nouvelles et une solution pour disposer d'un capteur de gaz à la fois très compact, sensible, sélectif et stable. Une étude théorique des micro-résonateurs capacitifs est tout d'abord menée pour mettre en place des outils de modélisations et déterminer les paramètres clés à optimiser. Les performances sont étroitement liées aux propriétés mécaniques et à l'amortissement visqueux. Un procédé technologique sur substrat SOI divisé en deux grandes étapes est ensuite développé pour permettre de les fabriquer. Nous démontrons ensuite la faisabilité de mesures stables et reproductibles de méthane et d'éthylène à faible concentration. Nous proposons finalement une nouvelle architecture de micro-résonateur adaptée à la spectroscopie photo-acoustique et qui s'affranchira des limites qu'impose la transduction capacitive. / The need of a sensitive, selective, stable and compact gas sensor is increasing due to public and military issues. Photoacoustic detection variant of tunable diode laser spectroscopy is a promosing solution. Current devices available on the market and developing are still cumbersome and unsuitable for being transported by a person. The goal of this thesis is to study and develop silicon capacitive micro-resonator in order to achieve a gas sensor based on photoacoustic spectroscpy. This original approach has never been proposed. It offers new perspectives and a solution to have very compact, sensitive, selective and stable gas sensor. First, theoretical study of capacitive micro resonators is done in order to set up modeling tools and determine the key optimization parameters. The performances are strictly linked to mechanical properties and viscous damping. A SOI process divided into two main steps is then developed in order to produce capacitive micro-resonator. Then, we demonstrate the approach by stable and reproducible methane and ethylene detection. Finally, we propose new micro-resonator adapted to photoacoustic spectroscopy without the constraints of capacitive transduction.

The main aim and ultimate final goal of the work carried out in this thesis is a drive towards a feasible system for light harvesting, which is in short, using the Sun’s energy to create electricity or a fuel for our energy requirements here on Earth. This work will see an approach using the triple phase boundary afforded by a microdroplet array. Although light harvesting is an ambition which has seen decades of work and uncountable man-hours, approaching it from the angle of utilizing the triple phase boundary between two immiscible liquids and a solid electrode is a new, and novel concept. Before any attempts towards a light harvesting technique can be made, we will need to have characterized and fully understood the mechanisms and nuances, both for dark and light processes, that are observed at the triple phase boundary. This initial process will start by selection of a suitable redox molecule, and exploring its reactivity in microdroplets under dark conditions. Once this has been achieved, an attempt can be made to use this knowledge, and implement it towards light harvesting. This will eventually include an attempt to couple photo-excited states with other molecules, this will be an important step if energy is ever able to be stored from such a system. This early phase will also see the need to employ many other techniques other than electrochemistry in an effort to aid in the understanding and characterization of the triple phase boundary at microdroplets. This will include travelling to other laboratories in search of specialized scientific skills and apparatus, such as electron paramagnetic resonance, or photocurrent spectroscopy. It will also see the need to build new equipment needed to conduct tests such as surface tension visualization, or new electrochemical cells for photocurrent measurement. In summary, this report will see initial characterization of the processes, both light and dark, that occur within the triple phase boundary of a microdroplet for a given redox molecule dissolved within. Early attempts at coupling excited states with other molecules are also explored. Serendipity has always played a part in scientific discovery and the work outlined in this report was no different. The choice of oil used for the organic phase microdroplet deposits yielded some interesting and unexpected results, and has been implicated as one of the key aspects of the photoreactions that have been explored.

Ubiquitin (Ub) is a small, 76 amino acid, and post-translational modification (PTM) protein in eukaryotes. Modification of a substrate protein via the covalent attachment of the C-terminal glycine of Ub to the ε-amino group of lysine residues in a substrate is termed ubiquitination. Unlike, other PTM proteins, Ub can form polyUb chains at one or more of its seven lysine residues. (K6, K11, K27, K29, K33, K48, and K68). The consequence of these different polymerization sites is altered biological response with different polyUb linkages conferring different fates to target proteins. Unfortunately, the study of these chains have been limited by the inability to generate homogeneous polyUbs chains linked at known lysine residues. Furthermore, a three step enzymatic cascade consisting of activating-enzymes (E1s), conjugating enzymes (E2s), and ligase enzymes (E3s) tightly controls this modification. In response, our laboratory has developed a system that creates polyUb chains through bacterial expression and "synthetic" building blocks. Now, the main questions are what do these chains interact with in the cell and how do these interactions mediate biological responses? In an attempt to answer these questions, this dissertation looks at different molecular techniques created to capture the transient interactions of monoUb and diUb probes with Ub substrates, such as, ubiquitin binding domains (UBDs) and conjugating E2 enzymes. One molecular technique focuses on the use of incorporating a genetically encoded, photo-crosslinker, p-Benzoyl-L-phenylalanine (pBpa) into diUb probes to capture their interaction with UBDs. This sets the foundation for understanding Ub’s cellular signaling recognition of UBDs. Another technique is creating diUb probes that contain lysine derivatives, Nε-L-Thiaprolyl-L-lysine (ThzK) or Nε-L-Cysteinyl-L-lysine (CysK), and can form a disulfide bonds with E2 enzymes to capture their complex, opening an opportunity to understand mechanistically the role E2 enzymes have with polyUb chain formation. Herein, these techniques are established to help unravel the complexity of Ub signaling.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / Digital photography has not only changed the nature of photography and the photographic process, but also the manner in which we share photographs and tell stories about them. Some traditional methods, such as the family photo album or passing around piles of recently developed snapshots, are lost to us without requiring the digital photos to be printed. The current, purely digital, methods of sharing do not provide the same experience as printed photographs, and they do not provide effective face-to-face social interaction around photographs, as experienced during storytelling. Research has found that people are often dissatisfied with sharing photographs in digital form. The recent emergence of the tabletop interface as a viable multi-user direct-touch interactive large horizontal display has provided the hardware that has the potential to improve our collocated activities such as digital photograph sharing. However, while some software to communicate with various tabletop hardware technologies exists, software aspects of tabletop user interfaces are still at an early stage and require careful consideration in order to provide an effective, multi-user immersive interface that arbitrates the social interaction between users, without the necessary computer-human interaction interfering with the social dialogue. This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing -- both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) -- and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop. To provide the necessary software to realise an interface such as PhoTable, this thesis explored the development of Cruiser: an efficient, extensible and reusable software framework for developing tabletop applications. Cruiser contributes a set of programming libraries and the necessary application framework to facilitate the rapid and highly flexible development of new tabletop applications. It uses a plugin architecture that encourages code reuse, stability and easy experimentation, and leverages the dedicated computer graphics hardware and multi-core processors of modern consumer-level systems to provide a responsive and immersive interactive tabletop user interface that is agnostic to the tabletop hardware and operating platform, using efficient, native cross-platform code. Cruiser's flexibility has allowed a variety of novel interactive tabletop applications to be explored by other researchers using the framework, in addition to PhoTable. To evaluate Cruiser and PhoTable, this thesis follows recommended practices for systems evaluation. The design rationale is framed within the above scenario and vision which we explore further, and the resulting design is critically analysed based on user studies, heuristic evaluation and a reflection on how it evolved over time. The effectiveness of Cruiser was evaluated in terms of its ability to realise PhoTable, use of it by others to explore many new tabletop applications, and an analysis of performance and resource usage. Usability, learnability and effectiveness of PhoTable was assessed on three levels: careful usability evaluations of elements of the interface; informal observations of usability when Cruiser was available to the public in several exhibitions and demonstrations; and a final evaluation of PhoTable in use for storytelling, where this had the side effect of creating a digital photo album, consisting of the photographs users interacted with on the table and associated audio annotations which PhoTable automatically extracted from the interaction. We conclude that our approach to design has resulted in an effective framework for creating new tabletop interfaces. The parallel goal of exploring the potential for tabletop interaction as a new way to share digital photographs was realised in PhoTable. It is able to support the envisaged goal of an effective interface for telling stories about one's photos. As a serendipitous side-effect, PhoTable was effective in the automatic capture of the stories about individual photographs for future reminiscence and sharing. This work provides foundations for future work in creating new ways to interact at a tabletop and to the ways to capture personal stories around digital photographs for sharing and long-term preservation.

An ability to manipulate the activity of a specific protein inside living cells offers exciting prospects for the study of protein function in vivo. Azobenzene derivatives introduced as intramolecular bridges have been demonstrated to reversibly photoregulate secondary structures and functions of peptides and proteins in vitro. My overall goal is to create a generally-applicable process for the reversible photocontrol of protein-protein interactions within the complex environment of a living cell. Results of studies toward this aim are presented. A blue-green absorbing (~480 nm) azobenzene derivative cross-linker was designed that reversibly controlled the helical content of attached peptides with a half-life of the cis state of ~50 ms. This rapid photoswitch may prove useful as a tool for probing dynamic processes in biochemical systems using light. The effect of cross-linker position (N-terminus, middle, C-terminus) on a photo-switchable 32-residue helical peptide was studied. Although the activation energies for thermal cis – trans relaxations were not the same, linker position did not affect the change in helix content. This work provides useful information for the effective photoregulation of much longer helices such as occur in coiled-coils. Fluorescently labeled, cross-linked, modified Fos/Jun peptides with and without cell-penetrating peptide (CPP) tags were prepared for the purpose of photocontrolling peptide-peptide interactions in vivo. One of the peptides showed a degree of photocontrol of helicity. Cell uptake of CPP-tagged peptides was demonstrated. However, overall peptide behavior was dominated by undesired aggregation. A simple reporter, a cross-linked peptide bearing an environmentally sensitive fluorophore at a key site, was designed for detecting photoswitching in vivo. Photoisomerization of the cross-linker caused changes in the local chemical environment and changes in fluorescence intensity of the environmentally sensitive dyes in vitro. However, no change in fluorescence was observed in the living systems we investigated. Conclusions and suggestions for further work aimed at achieving the overall goal stated above are discussed.

An ability to manipulate the activity of a specific protein inside living cells offers exciting prospects for the study of protein function in vivo. Azobenzene derivatives introduced as intramolecular bridges have been demonstrated to reversibly photoregulate secondary structures and functions of peptides and proteins in vitro. My overall goal is to create a generally-applicable process for the reversible photocontrol of protein-protein interactions within the complex environment of a living cell. Results of studies toward this aim are presented. A blue-green absorbing (~480 nm) azobenzene derivative cross-linker was designed that reversibly controlled the helical content of attached peptides with a half-life of the cis state of ~50 ms. This rapid photoswitch may prove useful as a tool for probing dynamic processes in biochemical systems using light. The effect of cross-linker position (N-terminus, middle, C-terminus) on a photo-switchable 32-residue helical peptide was studied. Although the activation energies for thermal cis – trans relaxations were not the same, linker position did not affect the change in helix content. This work provides useful information for the effective photoregulation of much longer helices such as occur in coiled-coils. Fluorescently labeled, cross-linked, modified Fos/Jun peptides with and without cell-penetrating peptide (CPP) tags were prepared for the purpose of photocontrolling peptide-peptide interactions in vivo. One of the peptides showed a degree of photocontrol of helicity. Cell uptake of CPP-tagged peptides was demonstrated. However, overall peptide behavior was dominated by undesired aggregation. A simple reporter, a cross-linked peptide bearing an environmentally sensitive fluorophore at a key site, was designed for detecting photoswitching in vivo. Photoisomerization of the cross-linker caused changes in the local chemical environment and changes in fluorescence intensity of the environmentally sensitive dyes in vitro. However, no change in fluorescence was observed in the living systems we investigated. Conclusions and suggestions for further work aimed at achieving the overall goal stated above are discussed.

It is the moment for another extraordinary improvement of photography technology. With the great development of digital technology, some characteristics which are the main reason why photography is photography confront challenges. I question this situation and try to trace back the ¡§genie¡¨ of photography. Therefore, this thesis start the discussion of core elements of photography in phenomenology way, and try to realize the most important characteristics that make photography to be photography from these basic elements. Then the discussions expand out to several phenomenon between people and photo apparatus, including contradictions inside the apparatus and different situations of photographers and models. These topics last from the age of traditional photography to digital photography. At last, this thesis try to analyzes the appearance of digital world, and combine these analyses with the photography characteristics which are just discussed above, makes several classification for the works of digital photography. Above all, this thesis realizes that the most important influence of digitalization to photography is ¡§after¡¨ it. That is, most of the changes is happening in the phase of post-production but the process of photoing. Digitalization increase the way of photography, however, it¡¦s not mean that traditional photography is fading away. In addition, photos can be exist in ¡§pixel¡¨ way by digitalization technology. It also riches the usage and quantity of photo images. In this situation, it seems that these two different symbol systems, images and words, are about to meet each other in digital age.

In recently yesrs,Thin-film transistors (TFTs) including an active layer of amorphous silicon or polycrystalline silicon have been widely employed as the pixel-driving elements of a liquid crystal display (LCD). Particularly, a-Si:H TFT is advantageous to the production of large screen displays and facilitates mass-production. a-Si:H has high photoconductivity which results in high off-state leakage currents of a-Si:H TFT under light illumination . Particularly, the off-state leakage current under light illumination is a serious problem in the projection and/or video displays which require high intensity backlight illumination.As the resolutions is higher , the TFT¡¦s performance must be higher to achieve the short charge time each line can charge. The performance includes mobility ,on current, off current, photo leakage current, threshold voltage ,and subthrehold swing. Furthermore, the to improve the mobility of thin-film transistors (TFT) to enable total integration of peripheral electronics in flat panel displays and imagers has led to recrystallized polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) as the material of choice. However, laser recrystallized polycrystalline silicon suffers from high cost , complex processing, and significant nonuniformity over a large area. Indeed, the direct deposition of good-quality low-temperature poly films is highly desirable and constitutes a promising alternative. In this thesis, we use HDPCVD to fabricate direct deposition poly-TFT successfully.Through plasma passivation, we improve the characteristic of device. The photo-Leakage current have been reduced obviously to our device under light illumination, and is benefit to higher intensity light of large screen display. And our TFT device exhibits stable characteristics with voltage and current stress , and it¡¦s also confirmed that the device is reliable. On the characteristic of device, the direct-deposited poly TFT device exhibits higher effective carrier mobility than that of conventional one. For that reason, the high performance provides the potential of the direct-deposited poly TFT to apply for AMLCD and AMOLED technology.

The hydrogenated amorphous silicon thin-film transistors (a-Si:H TFTs) have been widely used as switching device for large-area electronics such as active matrix liquid crystal displays (AM-LCDs). a-Si TFT is particularly advantageous to the production of large screen displays and facilitates mass production. When employing an a-Si:H layer, the main objectives are to enhance the field effect mobility and to reduce the off-state current under light illumination. The increase of field effect mobility results in wide application of a-Si:H TFTs in high resolution LCDs. On the other hand, a-Si:H has high photoconductivity which results in high off-state current of a-Si:H TFT under light illumination. The off-state leakage current under light illumination is, in particular, a serious problem in the projection and/or multimedia displays that require high intensity backlight illumination. Minimizing the off-current increase by a-Si photosensitivity is an important design consideration for achieving highimage-quality LCDs. TFT off-current increase by photoillumination of a-Si decreases the charge stored on the pixel during the TFT off-time, and results in gray-scale shading, flicker, crosstalk and other display nonuniformity in the LCD. The fluorine incorporated amorphous silicon [a-Si:H(:F)] and amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) were illuminated with backlight to investigate electrical characteristics. The effect of different [SiF4] / [ SiH4] ratio on the performance of a-Si:H(:F) TFTs was also studied. We found the density of states in the gap of a-Si:H(:F) will be modified by the introduction of F into a-Si:H and resulting the shift of the Fermi level toward the valence band edge. The density-of-states increasing cause more recombination centers for electrons and holes to increase the carrier recombination rate. The shift in the Fermi level leads to a reduction of the photoconductivity of a-Si:H(:F). Due to these two important factor, the photo leakage current decreases.

The off-state leakage current under back light illumination is, in particular, a serious problem in the multimedia displays that require high intensity backlight illumination. The photo leakage current characteristic of flexible a-Si:H TFTs has been measured in this study . The device activation energy (Ea) of a-Si:H TFTs extracted from various temperature measurements are different from those of typical a-Si:H TFTs, because the Fermi level of a-Si:H TFTs are modulate by the density of states (DOS) in the a-Si:H band gap. The information on DOS is important for understanding the physical mechanisms responsible for the device behavior. It¡¦s related to the threshold voltage,iii subthreshold slope, field effect mobility and the stability of the TFTs. Experimental results show the photo leakage currents of a-Si:H TFTs under tensile stress are less than that of flattened a-Si:H TFTs stemmed the weak light intensity. In addition, the small shifts of threshold voltage and subthreshold swing are resulted from the smaller Ea in a-Si:H channel material.