A feasibility study into the use of UHF-EM transillumination measurements in geophysics is presented. The electrical properties and absorption rates of common crustal materials are examined with the goal of identifying specific conditions under which sufficient material penetration at UHF frequencies is available. / A prototype 445 MHz continuous-wave transillumination instrument designed for underground use is described. Test surveys, with this instrument, were conducted at the Big Nickel Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, to obtain a number of through-rock absorption rates. Estimated effective resistivities of between 500 and 1500 ohm-metres are determined from the survey data. / Effective conductivities and permittivities from AC and DC electrical property measurements on geological samples from the mine site corroborate these transillumination survey results. / The results of the field surveys indicate that the UHF-EM transillumination technique is a feasible and useful geophysical method.

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This thesis reports on research undertaken in the area of microwave tomography (MWT) where the goal is to find the dielectric profile of an object of interest using microwave measurements collected outside the object. The main focus of this research is on the development of inversion algorithms which solve the electromagnetic inverse scattering problem associated with MWT. Various regularization techniques for the Gauss-Newton inversion algorithm are studied and classified. It is shown that these regularization techniques can be viewed from within a single consistent framework after applying some modifications. Within the framework of the two-dimensional MWT problem, the inversion of transverse magnetic and transverse electric data sets are considered and compared in terms of computational complexity, image quality and convergence rate. A new solution to the contrast source inversion formulation of the microwave tomography problem for the case where the MWT chamber consists of a circular conductive enclosure is introduced. This solution is based on expressing the unknowns of the problem as truncated eigenfunction expansions corresponding to the Helmholtz operator for a homogeneous background medium with appropriate boundary conditions imposed at the chamber walls. The MWT problem is also formulated for MWT chambers made of conducting cylinders of arbitrary shapes. It is shown that collecting microwave scattered-field data inside MWT setups with different boundary conditions can provide a robust set of useful information for the reconstruction of the dielectric profile. This leads to a novel MWT setup wherein a rotatable conductive triangular enclosure is used to generate scattered-field data. Antenna arrays, with as few as only four elements, that are fixed with respect to the object of interest can provide sufficient data to give good reconstructions, if the triangular enclosure is rotated a sufficient number of times. Preliminary results of using the algorithms presented herein on data collected using two different MWT prototypes currently under development at the University of Manitoba are reported. Using the open-region MWT prototype, a resolution study using the Gauss-Newton inversion method was performed using various cylindrical targets.

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CD and DVD became the major portable and backup data storage devices because their reliability and economical cost when mass produced. As the computer technology grew, higher data storage density on CD/DVD disc was demanded. Using a shorter wavelength light source was the common technique to achieve this goal from both research and industry. However, the limit of wavelength had almost reached for applying it to optical storage. The nano-scale metallic wire polariser that was designed in this thesis provided a possible solution. This thesis introduces the method of using the nano-scale metallic wires to form a grating polariser as the data pit on CD/DVD disc. The polariser is a type of scattering polariser and could transmit one linear polarisation of the light and reject its orthogonal counter part. The designed pattern was tested by using XFDTD, an electromagnetic simulation program based on the finite difference time domain method. As the wave source was a red laser with a wavelength of 650nm, the simulation cell size was set to be 10nm. The dispersive materials were simulated by the Debye model. The electric field results were measured on X, Y, and Z components. The results were analysed by a pre-written Matlab program to find the transmission and crosstalk coefficients. The single polariser simulations showed that there are great potentials in this design. However, inter-cell crosstalk became the major problem in the polariser array simulations. The groove pattern and titanium material were used to optimise the polarisation effect. The simulation showed that a standard-sized disc with a titanium polariser array could have 5.5GB storage capacity and a 15 to 20dB inter-cell extinction ratio for an optical pickup with a red laser (650nm) and a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.6. Although the improvement is only marginal over existing optical data storage technology, there are many further researches possible to carry on such as the fabrication of the polariser arrays.

Graduate