Since Frenkel-Brunswick (1948, 1949) introduced the concept of Intolerance of Ambiguity, many investigators have tried to establish both its validity and generality as a personality variable, and its relationship to other personality variables, especially anxiety. The results have been mixed and contradictory. This study further explores the relationship between Intolerance of Ambiguity and anxiety, taking into account certain methodological difficulties in previous work.

Acoustic experiments were conducted in an anechoic chamber with a 1/14th scale model of a supersonic aircraft engine inlet using Trailing Edge Blowing (TEB) to reduce the engine fan noise from a turbofan propulsion simulator (TPS). The TPS is 4.1 in. (10.4 cm) in diameter and is powered by compressed air. The supersonic inlet is connected to the TPS and is geometrically and acoustically scaled from a working design. The supersonic inlet is operated in a takeoff or landing operating condition where the inlet core flow is subsonic. TEB is the process of ejecting high pressure air to re-energize the wakes of upstream fan disturbances such as struts or inlet guide vanes (IGV). The elimination of the wakes will provide a uniform flow field at the engine fan face and reduce noise at the blade passing frequency. The TEB was implemented on six non-uniformly spaced support struts in the inlet. Acoustic tests were then performed at 40%, 60% and 88% of the fan design speed (PNC) to measure the reduction in the blade passing tone (BPT) due to TEB from the struts with and without the presence of IGV. The noise reductions without IGV at 40 PNC show the best results with the blade passing tone (BPT) being reduced by an average of 3.1 dB. The first harmonic of the BPT and the overall Sound Pressure Level (SPL) were also reduced by 1 dB. The addition of the IGV in the inlet reduced the effectiveness of the TEB. The addition of IGV changed the reduction in BPT at 40 PNC by 0.5 dB and the overall SPL was unchanged. At 60 PNC the addition of IGV reduced the reduction due to TEB in the BPT from an average of 2 dB to an average of 1 dB. The tests performed at 88 PNC showed negligible effects due to TEB. Aerodynamic experiments performed on the inlet that showed that the wakes of the IGV have a larger velocity defect than the struts, thus making the IGV a greater noise source. / Master of Science

Lateral semiconductor quantum dot structures have been proposed as an effective quantum bit (qubit) for quantum computation. A single excess electron with the freedom to move between two capacitively coupled quantum dots creates a `pseudo'-spin system with the same qubit behavior as the more natural two level system of a single electron spin. The excess electron in the double dot system is restricted to one of the two dots, thereby creating two separate and distinct states (usually referred to as |L> and |R>). The benefit of these charge qubits lie in the relative ease with which they can be manipulated and created. Experiments have been performed in this area and have shown controllable coherent oscillations and thus efficient single-qubit operations. However, the decoherence rates observed in the experiments is still quite high, making double dot charge qubits not very appealing for large-scale implementations. The following work describes the effect of the electromagnetic (EM) environment of the double quantum dot system on the decoherence of the charge state. Sources of decoherence in similar systems have been extensively investigated before and this paper follows a close theoretical framework to previous work done in the area. The effect of the EM environment can been seen in the calculations discussed below, although it is clear that the decoherence seen in experiments cannot be fully explained by the voltage fluctuations as they are investigated here. The limitations of the calculations are discussed and improvements are suggested.

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