A new potential energy function modeling the interaction among water molecules is presented. The dominant attractive interaction among the molecules, the electrostatic interaction, is represented with a multipolar expansion around the center of mass. The dipoles and quadrupoles are polarizable while the octopoles and hexadecapoles ...

Recent attempts at unifying the descriptions of gravity and quantum mechanics predict that Newton's Gravitational Inverse-Square Law will fail below some distance scale, possibly as large as 1 mm. Recent measurements of the Dark Energy content of the universe could also imply short-range modifications to gravity.Our previous ...

I present an initial investigation into a new planet detection technique that uses the transit timing of a known, transiting planet. The transits of a solitary planet orbiting a star occur at equally spaced intervals in time. If a second planet is present; dynamical interactions within the system will cause the time interval ...

Chiral perturbation theory (chiPT), the low-energy effective theory of QCD, can be used to describe QCD observables in the low-energy region in a model-independent way. At any given order in the chiral expansion, chiPT introduces a finite number of parameters that encode the short-distance physics and that must be determined ...

This thesis describes the development and implementation of a new scheme for observing RF transitions between spin states in a single, trapped Ba + ion. We use optical pumping to place the ion in a selected magnetic sublevel of either the 6S1/2 ground state or the 5D3/2 metastable state. The ion is exposed to an RF field, and ...

Single Indium ions have been confined in a RF Paul-Straubel trap, positioned within an ultra high vacuum environment. Indium is a group IIIA atom and, in its singly ionized state, has a J = 0 $-$ J = 0 "clock" transition that is highly immune to shifts from ambient fields and field gradients. The immunity to field induced ...

A single, trapped barium ion presents an excellent opportunity to make a precise atomic parity nonconservation measurement. The relatively perturbation-free single-ion trapping environment and high efficiency shelving techniques can in principle be used to achieve an experimental precision at the 0.3% level or better. This ...

We completed the first measurement of the parity non-conserving neutron spin-rotation in helium, $\varphi\sb{\rm PNC}.$ The PNC spin-rotation is sensitive to the isovector pion exchange amplitude, $f\sb{\pi},$ in the meson exchange model that describes the weak NN interaction. The strength of the pion coupling is of particular ...

We study the micro- and macrophase behavior of symmetric AB-diblock copolymers in binary and ternary blends with corresponding homopolymers in mean field theory and for weak to intermediate segregation. We employ the standard Gaussian chain model and numerically solve the mean field equation in Fourier space. Besides homogeneous ...

The measurement of a nonzero permanent electric dipole moment (EDM) on an atom or particle would reveal a new source of CP violation beyond the Standard Model. The first measurement of the 199Hg EDM using a UV laser to optically pump and probe a stack of two 199 Hg vapor cells has been completed yielding the result, d( 199Hg) ...