Chapter 1 introduces some key elements of important topics such as; quantum mechanics,

representation theory of the Lorentz and Poincare groups, and a review of some basic rela- ´

tivistic wave equations that will play an important role in the work to follow. In Chapter 2,

a complex covariant form of the classical Maxwell’s equations in a moving medium or at

rest is introduced. In addition, a compact, Lorentz invariant, form of the energy-momentum

tensor is derived. In chapter 3, the concept of photon helicity is critically analyzed and its

connection with the Pauli-Lubanski vector from the viewpoint of the complex electromag- ´

netic field, E+ iH. To this end, a complex covariant form of Maxwell’s equations is used.

Chapter 4 analyzes basic relativistic wave equations for the classical fields, such as Dirac’s

equation, Weyl’s two-component equation for massless neutrinos and the Proca, Maxwell

and Fierz-Pauli equations, from the viewpoint of the Pauli-Lubanski vector and the Casimir ´

operators of the Poincare group. A connection between the spin of a particle/field and ´

consistency of the corresponding overdetermined system is emphasized in the massless

case. Chapter 5 focuses on the so-called generalized quantum harmonic oscillator, which

is a Schrodinger equation with a time-varying quadratic Hamiltonian operator. The time ¨

evolution of exact wave functions of the generalized harmonic oscillators is determined

in terms of the solutions of certain Ermakov and Riccati-type systems. In addition, it is

shown that the classical Arnold transform is naturally connected with Ehrenfest’s theorem

for generalized harmonic oscillators. In Chapter 6, as an example of the usefulness of the

methods introduced in Chapter 5 a model for the quantization of an electromagnetic field

in a variable media is analyzed. The concept of quantization of an electromagnetic field

in factorizable media is discussed via the Caldirola-Kanai Hamiltonian. A single mode

of radiation for this model is used to find time-dependent photon amplitudes in relation

to Fock states. A multi-parameter family of the squeezed states, photon statistics, and the

uncertainty relation, are explicitly given in terms of the Ermakov-type system.

Divergence-free vector field interpolants properties are explored on uniform and scattered nodes, and also their application to fluid flow problems. These interpolants may be applied to physical problems that require the approximant to have zero divergence, such as the velocity field in the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and the magnetic and electric fields in the Maxwell's equations. In addition, the methods studied here are meshfree, and are suitable for problems defined on complex domains, where mesh generation is computationally expensive or inaccurate, or for problems where the data is only available at scattered locations.

The contributions of this work include a detailed comparison between standard and divergence-free radial basis approximations, a study of the Lebesgue constants for divergence-free approximations and their dependence on node placement, and an investigation of the flat limit of divergence-free interpolants. Finally, numerical solvers for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in primitive variables are implemented using discretizations based on traditional and divergence-free kernels. The numerical results are compared to reference solutions obtained with a spectral

method.

High-order methods are known for their accuracy and computational performance when applied to solving partial differential equations and have widespread use

in representing images compactly. Nonetheless, high-order methods have difficulty representing functions containing discontinuities or functions having slow spectral decay in the chosen basis. Certain sensing techniques such as MRI and SAR provide data in terms of Fourier coefficients, and thus prescribe a natural high-order basis. The field of compressed sensing has introduced a set of techniques based on $\ell^1$ regularization that promote sparsity and facilitate working with functions having discontinuities. In this dissertation, high-order methods and $\ell^1$ regularization are used to address three problems: reconstructing piecewise smooth functions from sparse and and noisy Fourier data, recovering edge locations in piecewise smooth functions from sparse and noisy Fourier data, and reducing time-stepping constraints when numerically solving certain time-dependent hyperbolic partial differential equations.

Swarms of animals, fish, birds, locusts etc. are a common occurrence but their coherence and method of organization poses a major question for mathematics and biology.The Vicsek and the Attraction-Repulsion are two models that have been proposed to explain the emergence of collective motion. A major issue for the Vicsek Model is that its particles are not attracted to each other, leaving the swarm with alignment in velocity but without spatial coherence. Restricting the particles to a bounded domain generates global spatial coherence of swarms while maintaining velocity alignment. While individual particles are specularly reflected at the boundary, the swarm as a whole is not. As a result, new dynamical swarming solutions are found.

The Attraction-Repulsion Model set with a long-range attraction and short-range repulsion interaction potential typically stabilizes to a well-studied flock steady state solution. The particles for a flock remain spatially coherent but have no spatial bound and explore all space. A bounded domain with specularly reflecting walls traps the particles within a specific region. A fundamental refraction law for a swarm impacting on a planar boundary is derived. The swarm reflection varies from specular for a swarm dominated by

kinetic energy to inelastic for a swarm dominated by potential energy. Inelastic collisions lead to alignment with the wall and to damped pulsating oscillations of the swarm. The fundamental refraction law provides a one-dimensional iterative map that allows for a prediction and analysis of the trajectory of the center of mass of a flock in a channel and a square domain.

The extension of the wall collisions to a scattering experiment is conducted by setting two identical flocks to collide. The two particle dynamics is studied analytically and shows a transition from scattering: diverging flocks to bound states in the form of oscillations or parallel motions. Numerical studies of collisions of flocks show the same transition where the bound states become either a single translating flock or a rotating (mill).

Factory production is stochastic in nature with time varying input and output processes that are non-stationary stochastic processes. Hence, the principle quantities of interest are random variables. Typical modeling of such behavior involves numerical simulation and statistical analysis. A deterministic closure model leading to a second order model for the product density and product speed has previously been proposed. The resulting partial differential equations (PDE) are compared to discrete event simulations (DES) that simulate factory production as a time dependent M/M/1 queuing system. Three fundamental scenarios for the time dependent influx are studied: An instant step up/down of the mean arrival rate; an exponential step up/down of the mean arrival rate; and periodic variation of the mean arrival rate. It is shown that the second order model, in general, yields significant improvement over current first order models. Specifically, the agreement between the DES and the PDE for the step up and for periodic forcing that is not too rapid is very good. Adding diffusion to the PDE further improves the agreement. The analysis also points to fundamental open issues regarding the deterministic modeling of low signal-to-noise ratio for some stochastic processes and the possibility of resonance in deterministic models that is not present in the original stochastic process.

Modern measurement schemes for linear dynamical systems are typically designed so that different sensors can be scheduled to be used at each time step. To determine which sensors to use, various metrics have been suggested. One possible such metric is the observability of the system. Observability is a binary condition determining whether a finite number of measurements suffice to recover the initial state. However to employ observability for sensor scheduling, the binary definition needs to be expanded so that one can measure how observable a system is with a particular measurement scheme, i.e. one needs a metric of observability. Most methods utilizing an observability metric are about sensor selection and not for sensor scheduling. In this dissertation we present a new approach to utilize the observability for sensor scheduling by employing the condition number of the observability matrix as the metric and using column subset selection to create an algorithm to choose which sensors to use at each time step. To this end we use a rank revealing QR factorization algorithm to select sensors. Several numerical experiments are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.

Vector Fitting (VF) is a recent macromodeling method that has been popularized by its use in many commercial software for extracting equivalent circuit's of simulated networks. Specifically for material measurement applications, VF is shown to estimate either the permittivity or permeability of a multi-Debye material accurately, even when measured in the presence of noise and interferences caused by test setup imperfections. A brief history and survey of methods utilizing VF for material measurement will be introduced in this work. It is shown how VF is useful for macromodeling dielectric materials after being measured with standard transmission line and free-space methods. The sources of error in both an admittance tunnel test device and stripline resonant cavity test device are identified and VF is employed for correcting these errors. Full-wave simulations are performed to model the test setup imperfections and the sources of interference they cause are further verified in actual hardware measurements. An accurate macromodel is attained as long as the signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) in the measurement is sufficiently high such that the Debye relaxations are observable in the data. Finally, VF is applied for macromodeling the time history of the total fields scattering from a perfectly conducting wedge. This effort is an initial test to see if a time domain theory of diffraction exists, and if the diffraction coefficients may be exactly modeled with VF. This section concludes how VF is not only useful for applications in material measurement, but for the solution of modeling fields and interactions in general.

Signaling cascades transduce signals received on the cell membrane to the nucleus. While noise filtering, ultra-sensitive switches, and signal amplification have all been shown to be features of such signaling cascades, it is not understood why cascades typically show three or four layers. Using singular perturbation theory, Michaelis-Menten type equations are derived for open enzymatic systems. When these equations are organized into a cascade, it is demonstrated that the output signal as a function of time becomes sigmoidal with the addition of more layers. Furthermore, it is shown that the activation time will speed up to a point, after which more layers become superfluous. It is shown that three layers create a reliable sigmoidal response progress curve from a wide variety of time-dependent signaling inputs arriving at the cell membrane, suggesting that natural selection may have favored signaling cascades as a parsimonious solution to the problem of generating switch-like behavior in a noisy environment.

Solution methods for certain linear and nonlinear evolution equations are presented in this dissertation. Emphasis is placed mainly on the analytical treatment of nonautonomous differential equations, which are challenging to solve despite the existent numerical and symbolic computational software programs available. Ideas from the transformation theory are adopted allowing one to solve the problems under consideration from a non-traditional perspective. First, the Cauchy initial value problem is considered for a class of nonautonomous and inhomogeneous linear diffusion-type equation on the entire real line. Explicit transformations are used to reduce the equations under study to their corresponding standard forms emphasizing on natural relations with certain Riccati(and/or Ermakov)-type systems. These relations give solvability results for the Cauchy problem of the parabolic equation considered. The superposition principle allows to solve formally this problem from an unconventional point of view. An eigenfunction expansion approach is also considered for this general evolution equation. Examples considered to corroborate the efficacy of the proposed solution methods include the Fokker-Planck equation, the Black-Scholes model and the one-factor Gaussian Hull-White model. The results obtained in the first part are used to solve the Cauchy initial value problem for certain inhomogeneous Burgers-type equation. The connection between linear (the Diffusion-type) and nonlinear (Burgers-type) parabolic equations is stress in order to establish a strong commutative relation. Traveling wave solutions of a nonautonomous Burgers equation are also investigated. Finally, it is constructed explicitly the minimum-uncertainty squeezed states for quantum harmonic oscillators. They are derived by the action of corresponding maximal kinematical invariance group on the standard ground state solution. It is shown that the product of the variances attains the required minimum value only at the instances that one variance is a minimum and the other is a maximum, when the squeezing of one of the variances occurs. Such explicit construction is possible due to the relation between the diffusion-type equation studied in the first part and the time-dependent Schrodinger equation. A modication of the radiation field operators for squeezed photons in a perfect cavity is also suggested with the help of a nonstandard solution of Heisenberg's equation of motion.

This thesis considers the application of basis pursuit to several problems in system identification. After reviewing some key results in the theory of basis pursuit and compressed sensing, numerical experiments are presented that explore the application of basis pursuit to the black-box identification of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with both finite (FIR) and infinite (IIR) impulse responses, temporal systems modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODE), and spatio-temporal systems modeled by partial differential equations (PDE). For LTI systems, the experimental results illustrate existing theory for identification of LTI FIR systems. It is seen that basis pursuit does not identify sparse LTI IIR systems, but it does identify alternate systems with nearly identical magnitude response characteristics when there are small numbers of non-zero coefficients. For ODE systems, the experimental results are consistent with earlier research for differential equations that are polynomials in the system variables, illustrating feasibility of the approach for small numbers of non-zero terms. For PDE systems, it is demonstrated that basis pursuit can be applied to system identification, along with a comparison in performance with another existing method. In all cases the impact of measurement noise on identification performance is considered, and it is empirically observed that high signal-to-noise ratio is required for successful application of basis pursuit to system identification problems.