At the start of this honors thesis project, a new telescope called the deca-degree optical transient imager (DDOTI) needed assistance to help it gather photometric data about Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs). Contributions to help DDOTI produce scientifically ready reductions will be discussed.
First, performance assessment tests were run in order to prevent data backlog and optimize the way in which DDOTI reduces the data it collects. The results of these tests yielded a general framework regarding how DDOTI should reduce collected images depending on how many computer cores can be used. These tests also indicated that DDOTI’s alignment portion of the reduction code (ddoti_align) should be completed after every image is collected, while the other parts of the reduction software (ddoti_stack, ddoti_phot, ddoti_summary) should be run after every four images are collected.
Second, reductions created by DDOTI were inspected to determine if the telescope’s reduction software was working properly. Reductions were observed and indicated that two reduction related problems needed to be corrected by the research team before DDOTI would be ready for future scientific work. The first identified problem was that DDOTI’s reduction code was not properly correcting optical distortions for one of DDOTI’s two functional cameras. The second problem was that the reduction code was not correcting for atmospheric refraction. As a result, below zenith distances of approximately sixty degrees, ddoti_align was unable to align detected sources to their catalogue equivalents due to their distorted positions.
Third, code manuals were produced in both English and Spanish so that English and Spanish-speaking researchers working on DDOTI could understand how its reductions software reduces images. Functional flow chart diagrams were also produced only in English to graphically describe the flow of information through DDOTI’s reduction software.
These three contributions helped DDOTI to more accurately be able to observe GRBs. DDOTI’s improved reduction abilities were confirmed by a produced report about GRB 190129B after a 10-hour observation, and by the fact that DDOTI could accurately observed asteroid fields. In addition, code manuals and functional flow chart diagrams were all produced by the end of this project.

Photovoltaic panels are commonly used for their versatility in on-site generation of clean electricity in urban environments, specifically on rooftops. However, their implementation on rooftops poses potential (positive and negative) impacts on the energy use of buildings, and urban climates. The negative impacts are compounded if PV is installed on top of a high-albedo rooftop. This study quantitively investigates these impacts from PV installation on top of a building with a white roof in Phoenix, AZ. We supplemented our measurements with EnergyPlus simulations to model the energy implications for archetypical residential and retail buildings and calculated the energy penalty to generation ratio as well as sensible heat flux for each combination of panel height and building type. Results indicate that the daily cooling energy penalty to due blockage of outgoing longwave radiation can be 4.9—11.2% of the PV generation. In addition, while we observed a small decrease in nighttime sensible heat flux to the ambient, PV cases increased the daytime heat flux by more than a factor of 10. This study highlights the potential unintended consequences of rooftop PV under certain conditions and provides a broader perspective for building designers and urban planners.

The Epoch of Reionization (EoR) is the period in the evolution of the universe during which neutral hydrogen was ionized by the first luminous sources, and is closely linked to the formation of structure in the early universe. The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) is a radio interferometer currently under construction in South Africa designed to study this era. Specifically, HERA is dedicated to studying the large-scale structure during the EoR and the preceding Cosmic Dawn by measuring the redshifted 21-cm line from neutral hydrogen. However, the 21-cm signal from the EoR is extremely faint relative to galactic and extragalactic radio foregrounds, and instrumental and environmental systematics make measuring the signal all the more difficult. Radio frequency interference (RFI) from terrestrial sources is one such systematic. In this thesis, we explore various methods of removing RFI from early science-grade HERA data and characterize the effects of different removal patterns on the final 21-cm power spectrum. In particular, we focus on the impact of masking narrowband signals, such as those characteristic of FM radio and aircraft or satellite communications, in the context of the algorithms currently used by the HERA collaboration for analysis.

Error-correcting codes are fundamental in modern digital communication with applications in data storage and data transmission. Interest in a class of error-correcting codes called low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes has been growing since their recent rediscovery because of their low decoding complexity and their high-performance. However, practical applications have been limited due to the difficulty of finding good LDPC codes for practical parameters. This paper proposes an exhaustive and a randomized algorithm for constructing a family of LDPC codes with practical parameters whose matrix representations meet the following requirements: for each row in the LDPC code matrix there exists exactly one common nonzero element, each row has a minimum weight of one and must be odd, and each column has a weight of at least two. These conditions improve performance of the resulting codes and simplify conversion into codes for quantum systems. Both algorithms utilize a maximal clique algorithm to construct LDPC matrices from graphs whose vertices are possible rows within said matrices and are adjacent the first condition is true. While these algorithms were found to be suitable for small parameters, future work which optimizes the resulting codes for their expected applications could also dramatically increase performance of the algorithms themselves.

Proteins continually and naturally incur evolutionary selection through mutagenesis that optimizes their fitness, which is primarily determined by their function. It is known that allosteric regulation alters a protein's conformational dynamics leading to functional changes. We have computationally introduced a mutation at a predicted regulatory site of a short, 46 residue-long, protein interaction module composed of a WW domain and corresponding polyproline ligand (PDB id: 1k9r). The dynamic flexibility index (DFI) was computed for the binding site of the wild type and mutant WW domains to quantify the mutations effect on the rigidity of the binding pocket. DFI is used as a metric to quantify the resilience of a given position to perturbation along the chain. Using steered molecular dynamics (SMD), we also measure the effect of the point mutation on allosteric regulation by approximating the binding free energy of the system calculated using Jarzynski's Equality. Calculation of the DFI shows that the overall flexibility of the protein complex increases as a result of the distal point mutation. Total change in DFI percentile of the binding site showed a 0.067 increase suggesting an allosteric, loss of function mutation. Furthermore, we see that the change in the binding free energy is greater for that of the mutated complex supporting the idea that an increase in flexibility is correlated to a decrease in proteinlig and binding affinity. We show that sequence mutation of an allosteric site affects the mechanical stability and functionality of the binding pocket.

This study explores the significant roles and responsibilities of Arizona physics teachers as well as the effect that these teachers have on students and thus their futures. In a two-fold survey administered to all 194 public comprehensive high school physics teachers with 60% participation, questions regarding the perception and expectations that physics teachers hold for themselves, students, and school counselors are addressed as well as the corresponding practices. This survey reveals that generally, teachers feel that students have preconceptions about what physics is and what the course requires, and yet approximately half of the teachers do not make significant recruitment efforts. It is pertinent to ask why physics has one of the lowest enrollment statuses out of all the sciences in high school. Even more so, it is crucial to ask why there is a teacher shortage in the subject of physics. In exploring these questions, results to the previously mentioned genres of questions will speak to the issues at hand and are intended to give a robust explanation as to why physics is fading away in Arizona.

This past summer, Pew Research Center conducted a ten-question survey to test Americans' knowledge on current events. Questions ranged from how Zika virus is transmitted, to the name of the current president of France. A majority of the participants were unable to answer half of the questions correctly (Pew Research Center, 2017). While previous Pew knowledge surveys saw a majority of Americans answer only one quarter of the questions correctly (2014), it is clear that Americans today are still not completely up-to-date on current affairs. Along with Americans lacking knowledge of current affairs, the recent election saw the rise in accusations of "fake news." These calls inspired me to undertake my thesis project to try to answer the question: "does fake news actually impact the public's policy preferences, and if so, by how much?" While studies have been conducted to test the relationship between policy misperceptions and policy preferences, there have not been many studies released to directly test the impact of incorrect information on policy preferences. The underlying purpose of this study is to test how introduction of new information, particularly falsehoods, influences policy preferences. Specifically, I focus on policy preferences related to anthropogenic climate change . Any valid research that seeks to analyze the effect of political information on policy preferences needs to starts by discovering how much the public knows about the particular policy issue that the researcher is focusing on. Without explicitly saying as much, all of the research on the subject that I have read has come to the same conclusion: American's are indeed politically unaware on a wide array of issues. The areas of policy that Americans lack knowledge on are widespread: education (Howell and West, 2009), welfare (Gilens, 2001), the war in Iraq (Berinsky, 2007; Kull, 2003), and facts about political candidates (Nyhan and Reifler, 2012) are just some of the issues that Americans seem to know little about. Literature discussed in the following section shows how researchers have tried to understand how policy knowledge impacts policy opinions. Researchers primarily collected their data either one of two ways: by analyzing existing survey data or by conducting their own survey.

This research compares shifts in a SuperSpec titanium nitride (TiN) kinetic inductance detector's (KID's) resonant frequency with accepted models for other KIDs. SuperSpec, which is being developed at the University of Colorado Boulder, is an on-chip spectrometer designed with a multiplexed readout with multiple KIDs that is set up for a broadband transmission of these measurements. It is useful for detecting radiation in the mm and sub mm wavelengths which is significant since absorption and reemission of photons by dust causes radiation from distant objects to reach us in infrared and far-infrared bands. In preparation for testing, our team installed stages designed previously by Paul Abers and his group into our cryostat and designed and installed other parts necessary for the cryostat to be able to test devices on the 250 mK stage. This work included the design and construction of additional parts, a new setup for the wiring in the cryostat, the assembly, testing, and installation of several stainless steel coaxial cables for the measurements through the devices, and other cryogenic and low pressure considerations. The SuperSpec KID was successfully tested on this 250 mK stage thus confirming that the new setup is functional. Our results are in agreement with existing models which suggest that the breaking of cooper pairs in the detector's superconductor which occurs in response to temperature, optical load, and readout power will decrease the resonant frequencies. A negative linear relationship in our results appears, as expected, since the parameters are varied only slightly so that a linear approximation is appropriate. We compared the rate at which the resonant frequency responded to temperature and found it to be close to the expected value.

Supernovae are vital to supplying necessary elements to forming bodies in our solar systems. This project studies the creation of a subset of these necessary elements, called short-lived radionuclides (SLRs). SLRs are isotopes with relatively short half-lives and can serve as heat sources for forming planetary bodies, and their traces can be used to date stellar events. Computational models of asymmetric supernovae provide opportunities to study the effect of explosion geometry on the SLR yields. We are most interested in the production of \iso{Al}{26}, \iso{Fe}{60}, and \iso{Ca}{41}, whose decayed products are found in our own solar system. To study the effect of explosion asymmetries in supernovae, we use TYCHO stellar evolution code, SNSHP smooth particle hydrodynamics code for 3D explosion simulations, Burn code for nucleosythesis post-processing, and Python code written to analyze the output of the post-processing code.

A search is underway to find baryon resonances that have been predicted, but yet remain unobserved. Nucleon resonances, due to their broad energy widths, overlap and must be disentangled in order to be identified. Meson photoproduction observables related to the orientation of the spin of the incoming photon and the spin of the target proton are useful tools to deconvolve the nucleon resonance spectrum. These observables are particularly sensitive to interference between phases of the complex amplitudes. A set of these observables has been measured using the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer (CLAS) at Jefferson Lab with linearly-polarized photons having energies from 725 to 1575 MeV with polar angle values of cos(theta) between -0.8 and 0.9 and transversely-polarized protons in the Jefferson Lab FRozen Spin Target (FROST). By fitting neutron yields from gamma p -> pi^+ n over azimuthal scattering angle, the observables \H and P have been extracted. These observables manifest as azimuthal modulations in the yields for the double-polarization experiment. Preliminary results for these observables will be presented and compared with predictions provided by the SAID Partial-Wave Analysis Facility.