The excitation mechanism of trapped diametral acoustic modes within a rectangular cavity-duct system is investigated both numerically and experimentally. The asymmetry inherent within the rectangular geometry introduces a preferred orientation, ensuring the excited diametral modes remain stationary. Three separate cavities are manufactured and tested. This included two asymmetric rectangular cross-sections and one symmetric square cavity. Experimental results indicate that the aeroacoustic responses of the three cavities are dominated by the strong excitation of trapped diametral modes. Numerical simulations indicate that the resolved radial acoustic particle velocity distributions are non-uniform at the upstream separation edge where the formation of vortical structures is initiated. As the cavity became smaller, and more asymmetric, the trapped nature of the acoustic modes decreased with an accompanied increase in the radiation losses and reduction in pulsation amplitude. Observations of the aeroacoustic measurements show evidence of three unique modal behaviours. The first case is the independent excitation of a single stationary mode where specific circumferential sections of the shear layer were excited and initiating the formation of vortical disturbances. These circumferential sections, and distribution of disturbances, were akin to the excited mode shape. The second case involved simultaneous excitation of two stationary modes. This suggested that the shear layer was exciting two modes simultaneously. Neighbouring circumferential sections, at the initial region of the shear layer, were being excited independently and at different resonant frequencies. Finally, a spinning trapped acoustic mode was observed in the symmetric square cavity. Due to the spinning nature, the excited circumferential portions and formation of vortices were non-uniform and rotated with the spinning acoustic mode. This resulted in the formation of a three-dimensional helical structure. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Polymer and organic electronic memory devices offer the potential for cheap, simple memories that could compete across the whole spectrum of digital memories, from low cost, low performance applications, up to universal memories capable of replacing all current market leading technologies, such as hard disc drives, random access memories and Flash memories. Polymer memory devices (PMDs) are simple, two terminal metal-insulator-metal (MIM) bistable devices that can exist in two distinct conductivity states, with each state being induced by applying different voltages across the device terminals. Currently there are many unknowns and much ambiguity concerning the working mechanisms behind many of these PMDs, which is impeding their development. This research explores some of these many unanswered questions and presents new experimental data concerning their operation. One prevalent theory for the conductivity change is based on charging and charge trapping of nanoparticles and other species contained in the PMD. The work in this research experimentally shows that gold nanoparticle charging is possible in these devices and in certain cases offers an explanation of the working mechanism. However, experimental evidence presented in this research, shows that in many reported devices the switching mechanism is more likely to be related to electrode effects, or a breakdown mechanism in the polymer layer. Gold nanoparticle charging via electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) was demonstrated, using a novel device structure involving depositing gold nanoparticles between lateral electrodes. This allowed the gold nanoparticles themselves to be imaged, rather than the nanoparticle loaded insulating films, which have previously been investigated. This method offers the advantages of being able to see the charging effects of nanoparticles without any influence from the insulating matrix and also allows charging voltages to be applied via the electrodes, permitting EFM images to capture the charging information in near real-time. Device characteristics of gold nanoparticle based PMDs are presented, and assessed for use under different scenarios. Configurations of memory devices based on metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) structures have also been demonstrated. Simple interface circuitry is presented which is capable of performing read, write and erase functions to multiple memory cells on a substrate. Electrical properties of polystyrene thin films in the nanometre thickness range are reported for the first time, with insulator trapped charges found to be present in comparable levels to those in silicon dioxide insulating films. The dielectric breakdown strength of the films was found to be significantly higher than bulk material testing would suggest, with a maximum dielectric strength of 4.7 MV•cm-1 found, compared with the manufacturers bulk value of 0.2 – 0.8 MV•cm-1. Conduction mechanisms in polystyrene were investigated with the dominant conduction mechanism found to be Schottky emission.

Durante a década de 90 diversos trabalhos surgiram com o objetivo de investigar a localização de estados quânticos. No contexto da eletrodinâmica quântica de cavidades é possível localizar estados não clássicos de um dado campo externo aplicado ao sistema, uma cavidade preenchida com um material não linear inicialmente preparada no estado de vácuo. Baseado em tal cenário, propomos uma técnica de localização de estados vibracionais de um íon armadilhado. Para isso, considera-se um íon armadilhado em um potencial confinante cujos graus de liberdade vibracionais e os níveis eletrônicos do íon são acoplados por meio de um laser. Uma vez gerada a interação, faz-se uso da técnica de engenharia de reservatórios a fim de obtermos uma equação mestra na qual haja uma dinâmica emissiva e absortiva, ambas artificiais, promovidas por liouvillianos engenheirados, obtidos utilizando o sistema auxiliar (níveis internos do íon). Decorre-se disso uma dinâmica efetiva, já que a emissão espontânea é sempre presente. Sob um certo regime de parâmetros, a competição entre os liouvillianos leva o sistema de interesse para um estado vibracional estacionário caracterizando a localização. A técnica apresentada é mais geral pois mesmo partindo-se de um estado de máxima mistura, a localização é atingida com alta fidelidade em relação ao estado vibracional almejado. O papel exercido pela engenharia de interações para o sucesso da localização é o principal fator motivador deste trabalho. / In the 90s several works arose in order to investigate the localization of quantum states. In the context of quantum electrodynamics of cavities, it is possible to find non-classical states of a given external field applied to the system employing, for instance, a cavity (initially prepared in the vacuum states) filled with a non-linear material. In such scenario, we propose a trapped ion vibrational state localization technique. Consider a trapped ion confined in a potential whose vibrational and electronic degrees of freedom are coupled through two laser fields. Once such interaction is generated, we make use of the reservoir engineering technique in order to obtain a master equation in which there is an artificial dynamics of emission and absorption promoted by engineerined liouvillians obtained by using an auxiliary system (internal ion levels) within an effective dynamics, since the spontaneous emission is always present. Under a certain set of parameters, competition among liouvillians takes the system of interest to a vibrational steady-state featuring localization. The presented technique is interesting because the steady-state is achieved with high fidelity with respect to the desired vibrational state even when starting with highly mixed states. The role presented by the engineered interactions is fundamental for a successful localization and it is the primary motivation of this work.

Comparisons between measurements of the ground-state hyperfine structure and gravitational acceleration of hydrogen and antihydrogen could provide a test of fundamental physical theories such as CPT (charge conjugation, parity, time-reversal) and gravitational symmetries. Currently, antihydrogen traps are based on Malmberg-Penning traps. The number of antiprotons in Malmberg-Penning traps with sufficiently low energy to be suitable for trappable antihydrogen production may be reduced by the electrostatic space charge of the positrons and/or collisions among antiprotons. Alternative trap designs may be needed for future antihydrogen experiments. A computational tool is developed to simulate charged particle motion in customizable magnetic fields generated by combinations of current loops and current lines. The tool is used to examine charged particle confinement in two systems consisting of dual, levitated current loops. The loops are coaxial and arranged to produce a magnetic null curve. Conditions leading to confinement in the system are quantified and confinement modes near the null curve and encircling one or both loops are identified. Furthermore, the tool is used to examine and quantify charged particle motion parallel to the null curve in the large radius limit of the dual, levitated current loops. An alternative to new trap designs is to identify the effects of the positron space in existing traps and to find modes of operation where the space charge is beneficial. Techniques are developed to apply the Boltzmann density relation along curved magnetic field lines. Equilibrium electrostatic potential profiles for a positron plasma are computed by solving Poisson's equation using a finite-difference method. Equilibria are computed in a model Penning trap with an axially varying magnetic field. Also, equilibria are computed for a positron plasma in a model of the ALPHA trap. Electric potential wells are found to form self-consistently. The technique is expanded to compute equilibria for a two-species plasma with an antiproton plasma confined by the positron space charge. The two-species equilibria are used to estimate timescales associated with three-body recombination, losses due to collisions between antiprotons, and temperature equilibration. An equilibrium where the three-body recombination rate is the smallest is identified.

The objective of this research is to design, fabricate, and demonstrate a microfabricated monolithic ion trap for applications in quantum computation and quantum simulation. Most current microfabricated ion trap designs are based on planar-segmented surface electrodes. Although promising scalability to trap arrays containing ten to one hundred ions, these planar designs suffer from the challenges of shallow trap depths, radial asymmetry of the confining potential, and electrode charging resulting from laser interactions with dielectric surfaces. In this research, the design, fabrication, and testing of a monolithic and symmetric two-level ion trap is presented. This ion trap overcomes the challenges of surface-electrode ion traps. Numerical electrostatic simulations show that this symmetric trap produces a deep (1 eV for 171Yb+ ion), radially symmetric RF confinement potential. The trap has an angled through-chip slot that allows back-side ion loading and generous through laser access, while avoiding surface-light scattering and dielectric charging that can corrupt the design control electrode compensating potentials. The geometry of the trap and its dimensions are optimized for trapping long and linear ion chains with equal spacing for use with quantum simulation problems and quantum computation architectures.

Laser-cooled atomic ions have led to an unprecedented amount of control over the quantum states of matter. The Coulombic interaction allows for information to be transferred between neighboring ions, and this interaction can be used to entangle qubits for logic operations in quantum information processors. The same procedure for logic operations can be used for high resolution atomic spectroscopy, and is the basis for the most accurate atomic optical clocks to date. This thesis describes how laser-cooled atomic ions can impact physical chemistry through the development of molecular ion spectroscopy techniques and the simulation of magnetic systems by ion trap quantum computers. A new technique developed for spectroscopy, Sympathetic Heating Spectroscopy (SHS), takes advantage of the Coulombic interaction between two trapped ions: the control ion and a spectroscopy ion. SHS uses the back action of the interrogating laser to map spectroscopy ion information onto the Doppler shift of the control ion for measurement. SHS only requires Doppler cooling of the ions and fluorescence measurement and represents a simplification of quantum logic spectroscopy. This technique is demonstrated on two individual isotopes of calcium: Ca-40(+) for cooling and Ca-44(+) as the spectroscopy ion. Having demonstrated SHS with atomic ions, the next step was to extend the technique by loading and characterizing molecular ions. The identification of an unknown molecular ion is necessary and can be achieved by monitoring the change in motion of the two ion crystal, which is dependent on the molecular ion mass. The motion of two trapped ions is described by their normal modes, which can be accurately measured by performing resolved sideband spectroscopy of the S(1/2)-D(5/2) transition of calcium. The resolved sidebands can be used to identify unknown ions (atomic and molecular) by calculating the mass based on the observed value in axial normal mode frequencies. Again, the trapped molecular ion is sympathetically cooled via the Coulombic interaction between the Ca-40(+) and the unknown molecular ion. The sensitivity of SHS could be improved by implementing sympathetic sideband cooling and determining the heating by measuring single quanta of motion. The ultimate limit of control would be the development of an ion trap quantum computer. Many theoretical quantum computing researchers have made bold claims of the exponential improvement a quantum computer would have over a classical computer for the simulation of physical systems such as molecules. These claims are true in principle for ideal systems, but given non-ideal components it is necessary to consider the scaling due to error correction. An estimate of the resource requirements, the total number of physical qubits and computational time, required to compute the ground state energy of a 1-D quantum Transverse Ising Model (TIM) of N spin-1/2 particles, as a function of the system size and the numerical precision, is presented. This estimate is based on analyzing the impact of fault-tolerant quantum error correction in the context of the quantum logic array architecture. The results show that a significant amount of error correction is required to implement the TIM problem due to the exponential scaling of the computational time with the desired precision of the energy. Comparison of this result to the resource requirements for a fault-tolerant implementation of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm reveals that the required logical qubit reliability is similar for both the TIM problem and the factoring problem.

Ion traps are an incredibly versatile tool which have many applications throughout the physical sciences, including such diverse topics as mass spectrometry, precision frequency metrology, tests of fundamental physics, and quantum computing. In this thesis, experiments are presented which involve trapping and measuring properties of Th³⁺. Th³⁺ ions are of unique interest in part because they are a promising platform for studying an unusually low-lying nuclear transition in the 229Th nucleus which could eventually be used as an exceptional optical clock. Here, experiments to measure electronic lifetimes of Th³⁺ are described. A second experimental topic explores the production of sympathetically cooled molecular ions. The study of cold molecular ions has a number of applications, some of which include spectroscopy to aid the study of astrophysical objects, precision tests of quantum electrodynamics predictions, and the study of chemical reactions in the quantum regime. The experiments presented here involve the production of barium monohalide ions, BaX⁺ (X = F, Cl, Br). This type of molecular ion proves to be particularly promising for cooling to the rovibrational ground state. The method used for producing BaX⁺ ions involves reactions between cold, trapped Ba⁺ ions and neutral gas phase reactants at room temperature. The Ba⁺ ion reaction experiments presented in this thesis characterize these reactions for producing Coulomb crystals composed of laser cooled Ba⁺ ions and sympathetically cooled BaX⁺ ions.

The equatorial atmosphere harbours a large spectrum of waves that are trapped near and travel along the equator. These equatorially trapped waves interact nonlinearly with each other, with the extra-tropics and with the planetary-barotropic waves. Here, we consider advected shallow water equations that represent interactions of these equatorial waves, associated with the first baroclinic mode, with prescribed meridional-barotropic shears. We present three well-known numerical schemes for handling this system and discuss the risk of applying them crudely to equatorial waves. We study the properties of these waves, such as their phase speed and their trapping around the equator, using two approaches: linear analysis and the time evolutions of the system derived by meridional projection of the barotropic-first baroclinic system. We show that in the sheared environment the symmetric (anti-symmetric) equatorial waves excite other symmetric (anti-symmetric) equatorial waves of the same wavenumber and of different strengths.

Durante a década de 90 diversos trabalhos surgiram com o objetivo de investigar a localização de estados quânticos. No contexto da eletrodinâmica quântica de cavidades é possível localizar estados não clássicos de um dado campo externo aplicado ao sistema, uma cavidade preenchida com um material não linear inicialmente preparada no estado de vácuo. Baseado em tal cenário, propomos uma técnica de localização de estados vibracionais de um íon armadilhado. Para isso, considera-se um íon armadilhado em um potencial confinante cujos graus de liberdade vibracionais e os níveis eletrônicos do íon são acoplados por meio de um laser. Uma vez gerada a interação, faz-se uso da técnica de engenharia de reservatórios a fim de obtermos uma equação mestra na qual haja uma dinâmica emissiva e absortiva, ambas artificiais, promovidas por liouvillianos engenheirados, obtidos utilizando o sistema auxiliar (níveis internos do íon). Decorre-se disso uma dinâmica efetiva, já que a emissão espontânea é sempre presente. Sob um certo regime de parâmetros, a competição entre os liouvillianos leva o sistema de interesse para um estado vibracional estacionário caracterizando a localização. A técnica apresentada é mais geral pois mesmo partindo-se de um estado de máxima mistura, a localização é atingida com alta fidelidade em relação ao estado vibracional almejado. O papel exercido pela engenharia de interações para o sucesso da localização é o principal fator motivador deste trabalho. / In the 90s several works arose in order to investigate the localization of quantum states. In the context of quantum electrodynamics of cavities, it is possible to find non-classical states of a given external field applied to the system employing, for instance, a cavity (initially prepared in the vacuum states) filled with a non-linear material. In such scenario, we propose a trapped ion vibrational state localization technique. Consider a trapped ion confined in a potential whose vibrational and electronic degrees of freedom are coupled through two laser fields. Once such interaction is generated, we make use of the reservoir engineering technique in order to obtain a master equation in which there is an artificial dynamics of emission and absorption promoted by engineerined liouvillians obtained by using an auxiliary system (internal ion levels) within an effective dynamics, since the spontaneous emission is always present. Under a certain set of parameters, competition among liouvillians takes the system of interest to a vibrational steady-state featuring localization. The presented technique is interesting because the steady-state is achieved with high fidelity with respect to the desired vibrational state even when starting with highly mixed states. The role presented by the engineered interactions is fundamental for a successful localization and it is the primary motivation of this work.

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Fernando Luis da Silva Semião / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal do ABC, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Física, 2018.