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Low-Mass Stars and Their Companions
Get PDFIn this thesis, I present seven studies aimed towards better understanding the demographics and physical properties of M dwarfs and their companions. These studies focus in turn on planetary, brown dwarf, and stellar companions to M dwarfs.
I begin with an analysis of radial velocity and transit timing analyses of multi-transiting planetary systems, finding that if both signals are measured to sufficiently high precision the stellar and planetary masses can be measured to a high precision, eliminating a need for stellar models which may have systematic errors. I then combine long-term radial velocity monitoring and a direct imaging campaign to measure the occurrence rate of giant planets around M dwarfs. I find that 6.5 +/- 3.0% of M dwarfs host a Jupiter mass or larger planet within 20 AU, with a strong dependence on stellar metallicity.
I then present two papers analyzing the LHS 6343 system, which contains a widely separated M dwarf binary (AB). Star A hosts a transiting brown dwarf (LHS 6343 C) with a 12.7 day period. By combining radial velocity data with transit photometry, I am able to measure the mass and radius of the brown dwarf to 2% precision, the most precise measurement of a brown dwarf to date. I then analyze four secondary eclipses of the LHS 6343 AC system as observed by Spitzer in order to measure the luminosity of the brown dwarf in both Spitzer bandpasses. I find the brown dwarf is consistent with theoretical models of an 1100 K T dwarf at an age of 5 Gyr and empirical observations of field T5-6 dwarfs with temperatures of 1070 +/- 130 K. This is the first non-inflated brown dwarf with a measured mass, radius, and multi-band photometry, making it an ideal test of evolutionary models of field brown dwarfs.
Next, I present the results of an astrometric and radial velocity campaign to measure the orbit and masses of both stars in the GJ 3305 AB system, an M+M binary comoving with 51 Eridani, a more massive star with a directly imaged planetary companion. I compare the masses of both stars to largely untested theoretical models of young M dwarfs, finding that the models are consistent with the measured mass of star A but slightly overpredict the luminosity of star B.
In the final two science chapters I focus on space-based transit surveys, present and future. First, I present the first catalog of statistically validated planets from the K2 mission, as well as updated stellar and planetary parameters for all systems with candidate planets in the first K2 field. The catalog includes K2-18b, a ``mini-Neptune'' planet that receives a stellar insolation consistent with the level that the Earth receives from the Sun, making it a useful comparison against planets of a similar size that are highly irradiated, such as GJ 1214 b. Finally, I present predictions for the WFIRST mission. While designed largely as a microlensing mission, I find it will be able to detect as many as 30,000 transiting planets towards the galactic bulge, providing information about how planet occurrence changes across the galaxy. These planets will be able to be confirmed largely through direct detection of their secondary eclipses. Moreover, I find that more than 50% of the planets it detects smaller than Neptune will be found around M dwarf hosts.</p
Electrical Impedance Based Spectroscopy and Tomography Techniques for Obesity and Heart Diseases
Get PDFDespite advances in diagnosis and therapy, atherosclerosis cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Predicting metabolically active atherosclerotic lesions has remained an unmet clinical need. Specially, atherosclerotic plaques that are prone to rupture are of extremely high-risk and can cause detrimental heart attacks and/or strokes, leading to sudden death. It has been shown that atheroscleroses is correlated to the level of obesity of an individual [1] Usually in clinical practice, the doctor will assess a patient's "risk factor" based on his or her Body Mass Index (BMS), and measurement of the waist circumference. Meanwhile the level of fatty droplet deposits in the liver is an important bio-marker to assess the patient's risk factor, however the patient will need to undergo radiation imaging such as CT scan or MRI scan.
For the vulnerable plaques that can lead to sudden rupture, the ability to distinguish them at an early stage remains largely lacking. Therefore it is of great clinical interest to find improved diagnostic techniques to identify and localize such vulnerable plaques. Meanwhile, lipid has significantly lower electrical impedance than the rest of the vessel tissues in certain frequency bands [2]. In this thesis we explore spectroscopic and tomographic methods to characterize such plaques. In addition, with the Electrical Impedance Tomography method we will propose a novel method to detect fatty liver in an early stage with non-radiating and non-invasive manner.</p
Multiwavelength Characterization of the Brown Dwarf Auroral Phenomenon - Establishing the Nature of the Electrodynamic Engine
Get PDFStellar coronal activity has been shown to persist into the low-mass star regime, down to late M-dwarf spectral types. However, there is now an accumulation of evidence suggesting that at the end of the main sequence there is a transition in the nature of the magnetic activity from chromospheric and coronal to planet-like and auroral, from local impulsive heating via flares and MHD wave dissipation to energy dissipation from strong large-scale magnetospheric current systems. In this dissertation, I examine the effects of these processes on the atmospheres of brown dwarfs across multiple different wavebands and investigate the underlying mechanisms powering the electrodynamic engine responsible for auroral emission in brown dwarfs. I conduct observational surveys looking for the emission features of Hα and H3+ as indicative of auroral systems across the ultracool dwarf regime. I further provide a comprehensive view of brown dwarf magnetic activity and auroral phenomena, detailing the various emission processes, and expectations for auroral brown dwarfs. I also initiate a preliminary analysis of the detailed emission features and discuss the constraints imposed on the electrodynamic engine of these objects
Identifying Isoprene and Toluene Gas-Phase Oxidation Products to Better Constrain Ozone and Secondary Organic Aerosol Formation in the Atmosphere
Get PDFAnthropogenic pollutants such as NOx interact with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as isoprene and toluene to produce ozone (O3) and oxidized low volatility compounds that are responsible for forming secondary organic aerosol (SOA). Understanding the processes that form O3 and SOA from VOCs is important for understanding climate interactions and air quality. Both O3 and SOA are harmful air pollutants. O3 directly contributes to warming while the influence of aerosols is far more complicated, but ultimately leads to regional cooling. Understanding the chemistry that produces O3 and SOA will help better predict how future regulations will influence climate and air quality. A series of experiments using the Caltech chamber facility were designed and performed to better understand the influence of isoprene and toluene gas-phase oxidation products on O3 and SOA formation.
First, in order to conduct experiments, the new Caltech chamber facility was characterized. Second, to understand the oxidation products from isoprene in the presence of anthropogenic pollutants such as NOx, a chemical ionization mass spectrometer (CIMS) was used to identify the gas-phase products from the oxidation of isoprene by the nitrate radical (NO3). First-generation nitrates were identified to be predominantly δ-nitrates while first-generation nitrates formed from OH oxidation of isoprene in the presence of NO are predominantly β-nitrates. This has important consequences for NOx recycling and O3 generation because these β- and δ-nitrates react with O3 and OH at different rates and form different products. Photooxidation products from nitrooxy hydroperoxide, a product from isoprene + NO3 oxidation (in the presence of hydroperoxy radical-HO2), were identified to be predominantly propanone nitrate and nitrooxy hydroxy epoxide. Nitrooxy hydroxy epoxide undergoes reactive uptake to seed aerosol similar to isoprene dihydroxy epoxide, suggesting it may be important for SOA formation.
Lastly, first- and later-generation photooxoidation products from cresol and benzaldehyde oxidation were identified. Cresol and benzaldehyde are products from toluene OH oxidation. Low volatility ring-retaining products produced from cresol oxidation were detected in the gas phase by the CIMS and in the particle phase using offline direct analysis in real time mass spectrometry (DART-MS). Products detected included polyols such as dihydroxy, trihydroxy, tetrahydroxy, and pentahydroxy toluenes and benzoquinones such as hydroxy, dihydroxy, and trihydroxy methyl benzoquinones. These results suggest that even though the cresol pathway only contributes ∼20% to gas-phase toluene oxidation, products from the cresol channel potentially generate a significant fraction ( ∼20-40%) of toluene SOA. </p
A System Level Approach to Optimal Controller Design for Large-Scale Distributed Systems
Get PDFModern cyber-physical systems, such as the smart grid, software-defined networks, and automated highway systems, are large-scale, physically distributed, and interconnected. The scale of these systems poses fundamental challenges for controller design: the traditional optimal control methods are globally centralized, which require solving a large-scale optimization problem with the knowledge of the global plant model, and collecting global measurement instantaneously during implementation. The ultimate goal of distributed control design is to provide a local, distributed, scalable, and coordinated control scheme to achieve centralized control objectives with nearly global transient optimality.
This dissertation provides a novel theoretical and computational contribution to the area of constrained linear optimal control, with a particular emphasis on addressing the scalability of controller design and implementation for large-scale distributed systems. Our approach provides a fundamental rethinking of controller design: we extend a control design problem to a system level design problem, where we directly optimize the desired closed loop behavior of the feedback system. We show that many traditional topics in the optimal control literature, including the parameterization of stabilizing controller and the synthesis of centralized and distributed controller, can all be cast as a special case of a system level design problem. The system level approach therefore unifies many existing results in the field of distributed optimal control, and solves many previously open problems.
Our system level approach has at least the following four technical merits. First, we characterize the broadest known class of constrained linear optimal control problem that admits a convex formulation. Specifically, we show that the set of convex system level design problems is a strict superset of those that can be parameterized using quadratic invariance. Second, we identify a class of system level design problems, which we called the localized optimal control problems, that are scalable to arbitrary large-scale systems. In particular, the parallel synthesis and implementation complexity of the localized optimal controller are O(1) compared to the size of the networked system. Third, we provide a unified framework to simultaneously incorporate user-specified design specification on the closed loop and the hardware implementation constraints on the controller into the optimal controller design process. Lastly, we provide a system level approach that supports the co-design of optimal controller and its sensing and actuating architecture.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a 51200-state randomized heterogeneous power network model, and show that the system level approach provides superior scalability over the centralized and distributed method. For such a large-scale example, the theoretical computation time for the centralized scheme is more than 200 days, and the distributed optimal control scheme is intractable. In contrast, it only takes 38 minutes to synthesize a localized optimal controller that achieves at least 99% global optimality guarantee.</p
Long-Baseline Laser Interferometry for the Detection of Binary Black-Hole Mergers
Get PDFLate in 2015, gravitational physics reached a watershed moment with the first direct detections of gravitational waves. Two events, each from the coalescence of a binary black hole system, were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). At present, LIGO comprises two 4 km laser interferometers, one in Washington and the other in Louisiana; a third detector is planned to be installed in India. These interferometers, known as Advanced LIGO, belong to the so-called “second generation” of gravitational-wave detectors. Compared to the first-generation LIGO detectors (Initial and Enhanced LIGO), these instruments use multi-stage active seismic isolation, heavier and higher-quality mirrors, and more laser power to achieve an unprecedented sensitivity to gravitational waves. In 2015, both Advanced LIGO detectors achieved a strain sensitivity better than 10-23/Hz1/2 at a few hundred hertz; ultimately, these detectors are designed to achieve a sensitivity of a few parts in 10-24/Hz1/2 at a few hundred hertz.
This thesis covers several topics in gravitational physics and laser interferometry. First, it presents the design, control scheme, and noise performance of the Advanced LIGO detector in Washington during the first observing run (O1). Second, it discusses some issues relating to interferometer calibration, and the impact of calibration errors on astrophysical parameter estimation. Third, it discusses the prospects for using terrestrial and space-based laser interferometers as dark matter detectors.
This thesis has the internal LIGO document number P1600295.</p
Chromatin Topology and Transcription in Myogenesis
Get PDFHigh-throughput sequencing and the resulting development of biochemical "-Seq" experiments such as ChIP-Seq, DNase-Seq, and Methyl-Seq over the past decade has given rise to a wealth of predicted enhancers and other cis-regulatory regions (CRMs). These new assays provide a new opportunity to compare the number, location, and possible nature of CRMs that are predicted by various new biochemical techniques to instances of known CRMs, which until recently have primarily been located—for reasons of technological limitations—at a few tens of highly expressed, mostly developmentally-specific genes and the several kilobases (kb) upstream of their promoters. For example, an early surprise in the first ChIP-Seq experiments was that the number of predicted tissue-specific transcription factor-occupied sites outnumbered the number of tissue-specific genes by at least a factor of 10, and that many of these occupied sites were nowhere near developmentally relevant genes. In this thesis, I use the ChIA-PET technique, which preserves factor-containing physical interactions between loci in the genome that are far from each other (10kb-2Mb), where the factors used in this thesis are RNA Polymerase II (pol2) to capture active genes, and separately the developmental transcription factor Myogenin to additionally capture CRMs not at promoters. Overall, I report that (1) the closer together two occupied regions are, the more likely they are to be connected, and (2) that a gene’s activity level is highly correlated with its likelihood of being physically engaged with a distant occupied locus. These lead to the discoveries that occupied regions tend to engage with the active genes nearest to them regardless of the developmental profile of the genes, that many genes engage with multiple individual loci, and that many occupied regions interact with multiple genes, including genes that are not at all related in terms of their expression patterns. Individual elements that have multiple connections likely represent sequential rather than simultaneous interactions, and developmental genes may require more engaged enhancers than genes that are expressed in all cell types. Most excitingly, it is possible that many genes with unchanging expression patterns, including so-called "housekeeping genes," use CRMs; very few such genes have ever been assayed with respect to gene regulation, and they are the vast majority of genes in the genome
The Search for Stellar Coronal Mass Ejections
Get PDFCoronal mass ejections (CMEs) may dramatically impact habitability and atmospheric composition of planets around magnetically active stars, including young solar analogs and many M dwarfs. Theoretical predictions of such effects are limited by the lack of observations of stellar CMEs. This thesis addresses this gap through a search for the spectral and spatial radio signatures of CMEs on active M dwarfs.
Solar CMEs produce radio bursts with a distinctive spectral signature, narrow-band plasma emission that drifts to lower frequency as a CME expands outward. To search for analogous events on nearby stars, I worked on system design, software, and commissioning for the Starburst project, a wideband single-baseline radio interferometry backend dedicated to stellar observations. In addition, I led a survey of nearby active M dwarfs with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), detecting coherent radio bursts in 13 out of 23 epochs, over a total of 58 hours. This survey's ultra-wide bandwidth (0.23-6.0 GHz) dynamic spectroscopy, unprecedented for stellar observations, revealed diverse behavior in the time-frequency plane. Flare star UV Ceti produced complex, luminous events reminiscent of brown dwarf aurorae; AD Leo sustained long-duration, intense, narrow-band "storms"; and YZ CMi emitted a burst with substructure with rapid frequency drift, resembling solar Type III bursts, which are attributed to electrons moving at speeds of order 10% of the speed of light.
To search for the spatial signature of CMEs, I led 8.5-GHz observations with the Very Long Baseline Array simultaneous to 24 hours of the VLA survey. This program detected non-thermal continuum emission from the stars in all epochs, as well as continuum flares on AD Leo and coherent bursts on UV Ceti, enabling measurement of the spatial offset between flaring and quiescent emission.
These observations demonstrate the diversity of stellar transients that can be expected in time-domain radio surveys, especially with the advent of large low-frequency radio telescopes. Wide bandwidth radio dynamic spectroscopy, complemented by high-resolution imaging of the radio corona, is a powerful technique for detecting stellar eruptions and characterizing dynamic processes in the stellar corona.</p
Online Learning for the Control of Human Standing via Spinal Cord Stimulation
Get PDFMany applications in recommender systems or experimental design need to make decisions online. Each decision leads to a stochastic reward with initially unknown distribution, while new decisions are made based on the observations of previous rewards. To maximize the total reward, one needs to balance between exploring different strategies and exploiting currently optimal strategies within a given set of strategies. This is the underlying trade-off of a number of clinical neural engineering problems, including brain-computer interface, deep brain stimulation, and spinal cord injury therapy. In these systems, complex electronic and computational systems interact with the human central nervous system. A critical issue is how to control the agents to produce results which are optimal under some measure, for example, efficiently decoding the user's intention in a brain-computer interface or performs temporal and spatial specific stimulation in deep brain stimulation. This dissertation is motivated by electrical sipnal cord stimulation with high dimensional inputs(multi-electrode arrays). The stimulation is applied to promote the function and rehabilitation of the remaining neural circuitry below the spinal cord injury, and enable complex motor behaviors such as stepping and standing. To enable the careful tuning of these stimuli for each patient, the electrode arrays which deliver these stimuli have become increasingly more sophisticated, with a corresponding increase in the number of free parameters over which the stimuli need to be optimized. Since the number of stimuli is growing exponentially with the number of electrodes, algorithmic methods of selecting stimuli is necessary, particularly when the feedback is expensive to get.
In many online learning settings, particularly those that involve human feedback, reliable feedback is often limited to pairwise preferences instead of real valued feedback. Examples include implicit or subjective feedback for information retrieval and recommender systems, such as clicks on search results, and subjective feedback on the quality of recommended care. Sometimes with real valued feedback, we require that the sampled function values exceed some prespecified ``safety'' threshold, a requirement that existing algorithms fail to meet. Examples include medical applications where the patients' comfort must be guaranteed; recommender systems aiming to avoid user dissatisfaction; and robotic control, where one seeks to avoid controls that cause physical harm to the platform.
This dissertation provides online learning algorithms for several specific online decision-making problems. \selfsparring optimizes the cumulative reward with relative feedback. RankComparison deals with ranking feedback. \safeopt considers the optimization with real valued feedback and safety constraints. \cduel is designed for specific spinal cord injury therapy.
A variant of \cduel was implemented in closed-loop human experiments, controlling which epidural stimulating electrodes are used in the spinal cord of SCI patients. The results obtained are compared with concurrent stimulus tuning carried out by human experimenter. These experiments show that this algorithm is at least as effective as the human experimenter, suggesting that this algorithm can be applied to the more challenging problems of enabling and optimizing complex, sensory-dependent behaviors, such as stepping and standing in SCI patients.
In order to get reliable quantitative measurements besides comparisons, the standing behaviors of paralyzed patients under spinal cord stimulation are evaluated. The potential of quantifying the quality of bipedal standing in an automatic approach is also shown in this work.</p
Searches for New Physics at the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment and Precision Timing Calorimetry
Get PDFIn this thesis, we present several searches for beyond the standard model physics in proton-proton collisions recorded by the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment at center-of-mass energy of 8 and 13\TeV. We search for particle dark matter in events with two or more jets and missing transverse momentum at TeV, in this search we use the razor variables to discriminate signal from background events and thus improve the overall sensitivity of the analysis. We observe agreement between the observation and the background estimation. The interpretation of the results is carried out in the context of an effective field theory that couples the standard model quarks to the dark matter candidate. A search for anomalous production of Higgs bosons using 15.3 of proton-proton collisions at TeV is also presented; this search selects events with a Higgs boson in association with jets, where the Higgs candidate decays into two photons. We also employ the razor variables () to discriminate signal from background. We observe an excess of events in one of the search bins with relatively high values of and . The interpretation of this analysis is pair production of bottom squarks in the context of supersymmetry, this model is also presented in one of the appendices of this thesis. In the other appendix of this thesis, we present a search for new phenomena in high-mass diphoton events using 12.9 of proton-proton collisions at TeV. This search observed a significant excess (3.4 standard deviations, local) with 2015 data at a diphoton invariant mass of 750 GeV, equivalent to 20\% of the current dataset. By repeating the search with the larger dataset collected in 2016, we found that the aforementioned excess has been greatly disfavored. Additionally, in order to confirm the robustness and correctness of the data analysis techniques used in this search, we have carried out a second -- completely independent -- analysis, which confirms the absence of an excess at a diphoton invariant mass of 750 GeV.
We also present detector research and developments studies of electromagnetic calorimeters equipped with precision timing capabilities. We present several calorimeter prototypes that were tested at the Fermilab Test Beam Facility. These prototypes include LYSO-based calorimeters, tungsten-LYSO "shashlik" sampling calorimeters, micro-channel-plate sampling calorimeters, and silicon-based sampling calorimeters. The results of these studies indicate that time resolutions of the order of 30 ps are readily available when measuring electromagnetic showers. A discussion about the applications of precision timing in high energy physics experiments is also presented, with a particular interest in pileup rejection in the context of the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider foreseen to start in 2025.</p