This dissertation describes research on student understanding of quantum mechanics across multiple levels of instruction. The primary focus has been to identify patterns in student reasoning related to key concepts in quantum mechanics. The specific topics include quantum measurements, time dependence, vector spaces, and ...

(AlxGa1-x)2O3 alloys have attracted renewed interest due to their potential for use in deep-ultraviolet optical devices and high-powered transistors, but realization of these technologies depends on the ability to tune the band gap and crystal phase of alloy films for specific applications. In this work, fundamental relationships ...

In physical and life sciences, employing computational approaches to understand the nature of studied materials and subjects and to analyze immense amount of data is increasingly becoming more popular. Using existing methods and techniques is surprisingly easy, however these are not always well-suited for the problem at hand. ...

A search is presented for the decay of the Standard Model Higgs boson or another scalar boson to a pair of weakly-interacting, long-lived particles in 20.3 fb$^{-1}$ of proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV recorded in 2012 by the ATLAS detector. The strategy requires that one of the long-lived particles decay inside ...

Epoch of Reionization observations have the potential to be transformative in the field of cosmology, but this is impossible without unprecedented levels of precision in calibration. We enhance EoR upper limits from the Murchison Widefield Array through the improvement of instrumental calibration with in situ simulations. The ...

This work establishes a new benchmark for momentum separation in a matter wave interferometer with stable, visible fringes. With a path separation of 112 photon recoil momenta, our signal visibility of 30% and phase stability of 0.6rad exceed the performance of earlier free space interferometers. Contributing to this success ...

Single trapped ion qubits are excellent candidates for quantum computation and information, and they also possess the ability to coherently couple to single photons. Efficient fluorescence collection is the most challenging part in remotely entangled ion qubit state generation. To address this issue, I developed an ion trap ...

The Axion is a well motivated hypothetical elementary particle that must exist in nature if the strong CP problem of QCD is explained by the spontaneous breaking of a Peccei-Quinn symmetry. Not only would the discovery of the axion solve deep issues in QCD, an axion with a mass of $\mu$eV - meV could account for most or all ...

Because of the stochastic nature and significant cell-to-cell variation of many biological processes, it is essential to analyze a significant number of cells to understand such processes at the single cell level. Such quantitative biological questions require fast yet reliable automated computational algorithms to analyze ...

This thesis presents the results of two searches for long-lived, weakly-interacting neutral particles. These searches are performed with 22.1/fb of proton-proton collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The first search is for events with a single displaced muon spectrometer (MS) vertex ...