30 January 2024 to 29 February 2024
University of Houston - Main Campus
US/Central timezone

Contribution List

39 out of 39 displayed
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  1. 30/01/2024, 09:00

    9:00am: Arrive at 101 Farish Hall

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  2. 30/01/2024, 09:30

    Presentations about physics concepts and careers, and how to apply for and succeed in STEM majors

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  3. 30/01/2024, 10:15

    Guided tours of research labs in the department

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  4. James Lesmeister
    30/01/2024, 12:30

    NOvA (NuMI Off-Axis $\nu_e$ Appearance experiment) is an experiment located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory studying neutrino oscillations, a quantum mechanical effect in which neutrinos change flavor as they travel. This poster presents a study of $\nu_{\mu}$ CC (muon neutrino charged-current) interactions with a nucleus accompanied by low hadronic activity using data from the...

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  5. Lilly Schaffer (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 12:35

    A system for measuring Intensity Modulated Photovoltage Spectroscopy (IMVS) data on photoelectrodes was built utilizing a standard laboratory lock-in amplifier. IMVS measurement was performed on TiO2 thin film photoanodes under UV illumination to determine recombination time for electrons and holes, and charge transfer efficiency at the photoelectrode/electrolyte interface. Results from the...

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  6. Uchenna Ubeh
    30/01/2024, 12:40

    Since the discovery of graphene, two-dimensional (2D) materials have sparked great interest among condensed matter physicists. These materials exhibit new physical properties, and their magnetic versions promise numerous applications for spintronics, optoelectronic devices, and quantum computing hardware. 2D magnets are attractive, but the van der Waals (VdW) form has exhibited new and exotic...

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  7. Jayajeewana Ranhili Pelige (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 12:45

    CrSBr is a new 2D magnetic material that has received enormous research interest recently. The material shows exceptional properties including air stability compared with other highly studied 2D magnets. Recent findings of this material have shown reversible strain-induced magnetic phase transitions, strong spin-orbit (SOC), and magneto-electronic coupling (MEC) effects.
    In our work, we...

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  8. Joel Gard
    30/01/2024, 12:50

    Biomolecules experience confined conditions during many biological processes in vivo. The behavior of these biomolecules depends strongly on the local curvature of the confining geometry, inducing conformational changes which may affect binding activity in vitro and in vivo. An effective coarse-grained approach consists of modeling biomolecules as semi-flexible polymers, facilitating the...

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  9. Mr Timothy Burt (Computational Biomedicine Lab & Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 12:55

    I present AI-SNIPS (AI Support for Network Intelligence-based Pharmaceutical Security), a platform that enables stakeholder decision-making, secure data sharing, and interdisciplinary research in the fight against Illicit, Substandard, and Falsified Medical Products (ISFMP). AI-SNIPS takes as input cases: a case consists of one or more URLs suspected of ISFMP activity. Cases can be...

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  10. Atrayee Sarkar (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 13:00

    Complex networks represent the relationships between interacting objects in a wide range of contexts, where nodes represent the interacting entities and edges represent interactions between them. In a directed signed network, the interactions can be positive (+1) or negative (-1), with the state of a node dictated by the state of its upstream neighbors. Biological regulatory networks are an...

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  11. Alek Hutson (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 13:00

    In an effort to better understand thermal behavior and particle yields in p-p collisions we recast the problem using the language of quantum information. In the last 50 years physicists have used the parton model, very successfully, to describe particle collisions. In the parton model the proton is put into a high momentum frame in which constituents are viewed as quasi-free. However, quantum...

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  12. Pablo Lopez-Duque (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 13:00

    A bipartite system composed by an inertial observer (Alice) and an accelerated observer (Charlie) has been used in previous studies to show a connection between entanglement degradation and the Unruh effect. The degradation in entanglement between two modes of a non-interacting scalar field is attributed to the relative acceleration between the observers. In this work, we analyze the influence...

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  13. Donnie Munford
    30/01/2024, 13:05

    Neutrinos are a fundamental particle with a strange and unique characteristic: they have mass states that describe how they travel through space and time and flavor states that describe how they interact. In order to study the relationship between the neutrino's mass and flavor quantum states, it's important to understand how readily they will interact with the neutrino detector by measuring...

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  14. Mr Sumit Khadka (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 13:10

    At temperatures below 250K, 1T’ MoTe$_2$ undergoes a first-order structural phase transition (SPT) to a non-centrosymmetric orthorhombic T$_d$ phase, marked by the appearance of Weyl points protected by broken inversion symmetry. Despite the similar structures of these two phases and a small energy barrier between them, distortions are evident at both macroscopic and atomic scales. This study...

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  15. Alejandro Florez
    30/01/2024, 13:15

    Currently Lattice QCD simulations provide the best method of deriving the pressure of QCD as a function of the temperature. In the low-temperature regime, the thermodynamics can be understood in terms of a gas of non-interacting hadrons and resonances, but the contribution of the single hadronic species cannot be easily isolated. In this work we propose linear combinations of susceptibilities...

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  16. TANIA GHOSH (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 13:15

    Tania Ghosh 1,2, R.K.P. Zia 1,3, and Kevin E Bassler 1,2

    1Department of Physics, University of Houston, Houston, Texas
    2Texas Center for Superconductivity, University of Houston, Houston, Texas
    3Department of Physics, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

    Arguably the most fundamental problem in Network Science is finding structure within a complex network. One approach is to partition the...

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  17. Abhijit Bera (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 13:15

    Diffusive behavior is normally governed by the Central Limit Theorem (CLT), which states that the displacement $x(t)$ in the limit of large time $t$ has a Gaussian distribution with a width that increases as $t^{1/2}$. However, diffusive behavior that differs from the CLT is found in a wide array of experimental systems.
    In many cases, the dynamics in these systems can be modeled with...

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  18. Jingcheng Yuan
    30/01/2024, 13:20

    Over recent years, many techniques have been developed to improve the performance of medical x-ray imaging. Traditional x-ray imaging is based on x-ray attenuations. However, the attenuation contrast is low for light elements or density-similar materials such as soft tissues. X-ray phase contrast imaging (PCI) has drawn many researchers' attention in the past years since phase contrast is much...

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  19. Aymen Nomani (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 13:30

    Recent experiments have seen surface superconductivity in Weyl semimetals, which raises the question of whether Fermi arcs can support superconductivity without any proximity effect from the bulk. This question is of further interest as the 2D surface is lower in dimensionality but has a finite density of states. In contrast, the 3D bulk is higher in dimensionality, but the density of states...

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  20. Oveis Sheibani (University of Houston (US))
    30/01/2024, 13:30

    Atoms are held by the electromagnetic force between electrons and protons while a proton itself is composed of quarks bounded together with strong force or gluon exchange. To understand the nature of strong force one way is to smash the protons or lead nuclei (Pb) in high kinematic energy to reach a certain penetration depth to probe that length scale. In ALICE the energy is in order of a few...

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  21. Micheal Kahangirwe
    30/01/2024, 13:30

    In Ref. [1], results for the QCD equation of state from the lattice Taylor expansion were combined with the 3D Ising model critical behavior, to build a family of equations of state which match first principle results and contain a critical point in the expected universality class for QCD. This family of equations of state was limited to chemical potentials $0 \leq \mu_B\leq$450 MeV, due to...

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  22. Ethan Speakman
    30/01/2024, 13:45

    The human genome is divided into exons and introns. Exons are the expressed portion of the gene and must be separated from the introns (the “junk” portion of DNA) during a process called splicing before they can be expressed as proteins. This division is import for alternate splicing, where the same gene can be expressed with different composite exons. But this can result in genes from two...

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  23. Alejandro Ramirez
    30/01/2024, 13:45

    Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is used to observe metabolic processes within patients. It works by reconstructing the annihilation origin of incident gamma rays produced by a positron emitting tracer. However, inefficiencies of current PET technology, such as the use of photomultiplier tubes, can result in poor imaging. In addition, current PET scanners possess a small field of view which...

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  24. David Waligo (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 13:50

    Understanding light-semiconductor interaction is critical for the development of absorbers for efficient solar energy to electrical or chemical energy (fuel) conversion. Numerical simulation methods are often used to support experimental results and explain various optical phenomena in materials. The finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method has emerged as a tool for simulating and modeling...

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  25. Iris Likmeta (University of Houston (US))
    30/01/2024, 14:00

    In heavy-ion collisions at relativistic energies that Large Hadron Collider (LHC) achieves, a hot and dense medium called quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is created. Intriguingly, the collective motion of produced particles forms an almond shape, that is thought to be the signature of QGP formation. Colliding Xe-Xe nuclei in ALICE experiment at the LHC we can determine the initial state of the...

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  26. Swadeepan Nanda
    30/01/2024, 14:00

    The chiral vortical effect is a chiral anomaly-induced transport phenomenon characterized by an axial current in a uniformly rotating chiral fluid. It is well-understood for Weyl fermions in high energy physics, but its realization in condensed matter band structures, including those of Weyl semimetals, has been controversial. In this work, we develop the Kubo response theory for electrons in...

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  27. Minghui Ning
    30/01/2024, 14:10

    The industrial scale of fresh water electrolysis to produce hydrogen (H2) will make the shortage of fresh water resource even worse. Seawater, which consists of 97% of the water resource on earth, is much more abundant for water electrolysis. However, the presence of Cl−, Ca2+, and Mg2+ causes several critical problems for the seawater electrolysis. Firstly, the presence of Cl− introduces...

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  28. Nathan Roberts
    30/01/2024, 14:15

    The Artemis I space vehicle was exposed to Florida weather for several weeks before it was finally released for launch on November 16, 2022. Florida sustains more lightning strikes than any other state in the US because sea breeze fronts blow from two coasts, forming many cumulonimbus clouds. Fortunately, Artemis missions are also guarded by three towers comprising a Lightning Protection...

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  29. Subash Bhandari
    30/01/2024, 14:15

    Proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) and water electrolysis (PEMWE) systems have been paying attention in recent decades in order to adapt to the increase in demand for green hydrogen and the fast development of electric vehicles. The proton exchange membrane (PEM) is one of the prime components of those technologies which plays a vital role to obtain the high efficiency and stability of...

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  30. Sebastian Torres-Lara
    30/01/2024, 14:30

    During a stellar core collapse, a large flux of neutrinos (1-100 MeV) is produced, escaping the core before any light can. If detected, these neutrinos can play a crucial role in providing both preliminary evidence of a stellar collapse, and an understanding of the mechanisms behind it.
    The SuperNova Early Warning System 2.0 (SNEWS 2.0) is a worldwide network of neutrino detectors whose...

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  31. Muyuan He
    30/01/2024, 14:30

    Atmospheric neutrinos are typically formed 15 km above earth’s surface, they form when cosmic ray strike atomic nucleus in Earth’s atmosphere. By studying atmospheric neutrinos, we can learn neutrino oscillations and non-standard neutrino interactions. DUNE and NOvA are two neutrino experiments that observe neutrinos produced in Fermilab and atmospheric neutrinos. The main objectives of these...

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  32. Xin Shi
    30/01/2024, 14:30

    AM2X2 (A = alkaline earth metals or divalent lanthanides; M = divalent transition metals or Mg; X = nitrogen group elements) can represent a number of high-temperature superconductors and decent thermoelectric materials. One major mystery brought to our attention in thermoelectric AM2X2 compounds is the significantly distinct thermoelectric figures of merit (zT) of AMg2Sb2 materials that can...

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  33. Ana Carolina Gonzalez Romero (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 14:45

    When a source of sound waves is active near the ocean surface, sound waves travel through the water and beneath the seafloor into the earth. The waves reflect from impedance changes in the earth and return to the ocean surface where sound measurements are recorded to then be processed and analyzed. From this study, a “picture” of the subsurface can be obtained that includes details such as...

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  34. Mr Johnathan Sanderson
    30/01/2024, 14:45

    The charge density wave (CDW) is a condensate known to carry electric current en masse, but collective CDW transport remains poorly understood at the microscopic level. Its quantum nature is clearly revealed by oscillations of period $h/2e$ in CDW conductance vs. magnetic flux, sometimes accompanied by telegraph-like switching, in $TaS3$ rings above 77 K. Here we show evidence for quantum time...

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  35. Fengjiao Pan
    30/01/2024, 14:50

    As the dimensional shrinkage of modern electronic and optoelectronic devices, materials with high thermal conductivity are required for the significantly increased demand for heat dissipation. Among metals and other bulk materials, cubic boron arsenide (c-BAs) is considered a promising material for heat dissipation of its ultrahigh thermal conductivity, κ, and outstanding semiconductor...

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  36. Chamini Pathiraja (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 15:00

    The recent discovery of ferromagnetism (FM) in two dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials down to the monolayer has led, 2D vdW chromium trihalides CrX$_{3}$ (X=Cl,Br and I) to gain recent research attraction because of their interesting electronic and magnetic properties. In the monolayer, all CrX$_{3}$ display in-plane FM order. The bilayer of CrX$_{3}$ becomes antiferromagnetic...

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  37. Dat Tran (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 15:10

    The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a next generation long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. DUNE is aiming to make groundbreaking discoveries, some of which are characterization of neutrino oscillations, search for nucleon decay, observation of supernovae neutrino bursts. DUNE will employ two detectors to measure neutrino oscillations over a long baseline, a near...

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  38. Paththini Kuttige nonis (University of Houston)
    30/01/2024, 15:30

    The world is seeking for the appropriate and efficient mixing technologies due to current approaches exhibit poor mixing performances and it requires a long operation time in mixing. In this project, our goal is to introduce a disruptive mixing technology that is rapid and cost-effective than current available mixing technologies.
    Our proposed naval mixing method is mainly based on...

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  39. Anjaly Menon

    Measurements of two particle correlations are sensitive to several characteristics of the
    medium created in heavy ion collisions. Looking at the correlations of charged and
    neutral kaons might provide information about the potential formation of disoriented
    chiral condensates (DCCs). Previous ALICE measurements have indeed shown a
    strong anti-correlation between charged and neutral kaons,...

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