UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Duality methods in networks, computer science models, and disordered condensed matter systems
    (2014) Mitchell, Joe Dan; Galitski, Victor M; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this thesis, I explore lattice independent duality and systems to which it can be applied. I first demonstrate classical duality on models in an external field, including the Ising, Potts, and x-y models, showing in particular how this modifies duality to be lattice independent and applicable to networks. I then present a novel application of duality on the boolean satsifiability problem, one of the most important problems in computational complexity, through mapping to a low temperature Ising model. This establishes the equivalence between boolean satisfiability and a problem of enumerating the positive solutions to a Diophantine system of equations. I continue by combining duality with a prominent tool for models on networks, belief propagation, deriving a new message passing procedure, dual belief propagation. In the final part of my thesis, I shift to propose and examine a semiclassical model, the two-component Coulomb glass model, which can explain the giant magnetoresistance peak present in disordered films near a superconductor-insulator transition as the effect of competition between single particle and localized pair transport. I numerically analyze the density of states and transport properties of this model.
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    K-theoretic Aspects of String Theory Dualities
    (2010) Mendez-Diez, Stefan Milo; Rosenberg, Jonathan M.; Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)

    String theory is a a physical field theory in which point particles are replaced by 1-manifolds propagating in time, called strings. The 2-manifold representing the time evolution of a string is called the string worldsheet. Strings can be either closed (meaning their worldsheets are closed surfaces) or open (meaning their worldsheets have boundary). A D-brane is a submanifold of the spacetime manifold on which string endpoints are constrained to lie.

    There are five different string theories that have supersymmetry, and they are all related by various dualities. This dissertation will review how D-branes are classified by K-theory. We will then explore the $K$-theoretic aspects of a hypothesized duality between the type I theory compactified on a 4-torus and the type IIA theory compactified on a K3 surface, by looking at a certain blow down of the singular limit of K3. This dissertation concludes by classifying D-branes on the type II orientifold T4/Z2 when the Z2 action is multiplication by -1 and the H-flux is trivial. We find that classifying D-branes on the singular limit of K3, T4/Z2 by equivariant K-theory agrees with the classification of D-branes on a smooth K3 surface by ordinary K-theory.