Physics and Astronomy
This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Physics and Astronomy .
Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).
Waterloo faculty, students, and staff can contact us or visit the UWSpace guide to learn more about depositing their research.
Recent deposits
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Probing the Unruh and Hawking effects using Unruh-DeWitt detectors
(University of Waterloo, 2017-10-18)Quantum field theory is so far the best description of the fundamental laws of Nature, yet it does not fully incorporates gravitation. The first attempt toward unifying the quantum field theory and gravity is a semi-classical ... -
Ultrafast Imaging of Molecular Processes in Small Molecules Using Coulomb Explosion Imaging
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-27)Molecular structure and dynamics of three molecules (carbonyl sulfide, acetylene, and ethylene) are examined using various implementations of the Coulomb Explosion Imaging technique. Soft x-rays from the Canadian Light ... -
Confined Quantum Molecular Degrees of Freedom
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-22)Motivated by recent experimental measurements of the degeneracy lifting of the rotational ground state of molecular ortho-H2 con ned inside the fullerene cage C60 and, more generally, motivated by the physics of con ned ... -
Experimental prospects for detecting the quantum nature of spacetime
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-21)This thesis is concerned with advancing the confrontation between relativistic quantum information (RQI) and experiment. We investigate the lessons that some present-day experiments can teach us about the relationship ... -
Cosmological Tests of Causal Set Phenomenology
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-20)Causal Set Theory is an approach to Quantum Gravity that postulates that the fundamental structure of a spacetime manifold is a Lorentz Invariant discrete structure endowed with a causal order from which the geometry and ... -
Towards Analog Quantum Simulations of Dynamical Gauge Theories
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-20)A system which can implement an analog quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories has been proposed. In particular, the Schwinger model is formulated in terms of a lattice and superconducting qubit implementation is ... -
New Views on the Cosmological Big Bang
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-20)This dissertation is a collection of four different proposals to describe the early universe. Each will draw from insights of different areas of physics to suggest a description which differs from the standard inflationary ... -
A Classification of (2+1)D Topological Phases with Symmetries
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-18)This thesis aims at concluding the classification results for topological phases with symmetry. First, we know that “trivial” (i.e., not topological) phases with symmetry can be classified by Landau symmetry breaking ... -
The electrostatic potential in a finite ionic crystal
(University of Waterloo, 1972-11-01)This thesis is written in two parts. In Part One, we develop a new method for evaluating three dimensional lattice summations and apply it to the evaluation of the electrostatic potential of a finite ionic crystal. We then ... -
Exploration of Higher-Order Quantum Interference Landscapes
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-31)Earth, Moon and Sun unite when they star together in the three-body problem, whose intricate plot still baffles us today. For some reason, the factorization of the two-body problem into two one-body problems does not, in ... -
Evaluation and Correlation of Morphological, Blood Flow and Physiological Retinal Changes in a Rat Model of Glaucoma with a Combined Optical Coherence Tomography and Electroretinography System
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-29)Glaucoma is a chronic disease associated with progressive dysfunction of the retinal ganglion cells (RGC), reduction of the retinal blood flow, thinning of the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) and deformation of the optical ... -
Entanglement Harvesting and Divergences in Unruh-DeWitt Detector Pairs
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-28)We analyze correlations between pairs of detectors quadratically coupled to real and complex scalar bosonic fields in 3+1 dimensions. This is a first step toward studying the entanglement structure of the fermionic ... -
Galaxy Morphology In Cluster Environments
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-25)It is a well known fact that cluster environments favour early-type galaxies over late- type. However, the physical origin of the correlation remains uncertain. We focus specifically on the external environmental mechanisms ... -
Cosmological beam plasma instabilities
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-24)Blazars are the main source of extragalactic very high energy gamma-rays. These gamma rays annihilate on the extragalactic background light, producing electron-positron pair beams with TeV energies. The pair beams are very ... -
Free Space Quantum Key Distribution to Moving Platforms
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-24)The quantum space age has officially begun and many important milestones and achievements have recently been demonstrated, such as the exciting launch and results of the first quantum demonstration satellite, Micius. ... -
Molecular movies and geometry reconstruction using Coulomb explosion imaging
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-24)Coulomb explosion imaging is a technique of imaging the structure of small molecules in the gas phase and their ultrafast dynamics by inducing the rapid ionization and dissociation of the molecule into its constituent ... -
Entanglement Entropy of Scalar Fields in Causal Set Theory
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-15)Entanglement entropy is now widely accepted as having deep connections with quantum gravity. It is therefore desirable to understand it in the context of causal sets, especially since they provide the UV cutoff needed to ... -
Amplitudes in the Spin Foam Approach to Quantum Gravity
(University of Waterloo, 2017-07-31)In this thesis, we study a Spin Foam model for 4D Riemannian quantum gravity, and propose a new way of imposing the simplicity constraints that uses the recently developed holomorphic representation. Rather than imposing ... -
Towards vertex renormalization in 4d Spin Foams
(University of Waterloo, 2017-07-24)A long-standing open problem in 4-dimensional Spin Foam models of Quantum Gravity has been the behavior of the amplitudes under coarse graining. In this thesis, we attempt to study this question by using the recent ... -
Explorations in the Conformal Bootstrap
(University of Waterloo, 2017-07-19)We investigate properties of various conformally invariant quantum systems, especially from the point of view of the conformal bootstrap. First, we study twist line defects in three-dimensional conformal field theories. ...
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