The experiments to be described here were undertaken for the purpose of determining, if possible, by NMR techniques whether or not the hydroxyl protons in mica are bound in a regular crystalline array, and, if so, whether or not the hydroxyl protons occur in reasonably isolated pairs as in waters of hydration.

The emergence of optical applications, such as lasers, fiber optics, and semiconductor based sources and detectors, has created a drive for smaller and more specialized devices. Nanophotonics is an emerging field of study that encompasses the disciplines of physics, engineering, chemistry, biology, applied sciences and biomedical technology. In particular, nanophotonics explores optical processes on a nanoscale. This dissertation presents nanophotonic applications that incorporate various forms of the organic polymer N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPA) with inorganic semiconductors. This includes the material characterization of NIPA, with such techniques as ellipsometry and dynamic light scattering. Two devices were constructed incorporating the NIPA hydrogel with semiconductors. The first device comprises a PNIPAM-CdTe hybrid material. The PNIPAM is a means for the control of distances between CdTe quantum dots encapsulated within the hydrogel. Controlling the distance between the quantum dots allows for the control of resonant energy transfer between neighboring quantum dots. Whereby, providing a means for controlling the temperature dependent red-shifts in photoluminescent peaks and FWHM. Further, enhancement of photoluminescent due to increased scattering in the medium is shown as a function of temperature. The second device incorporates NIPA into a 2D photonic crystal patterned on GaAs. The refractive index change of the NIPA hydrogel as …

We address the problem of the DNA sequences developing a "dynamical" method based on the assumption that the statistical properties of DNA paths are determined by the joint action of two processes, one deterministic, with long-range correlations, and the other random and delta correlated. The generator of the deterministic evolution is a nonlinear map, belonging to a class of maps recently tailored to mimic the processes of weak chaos responsible for the birth of anomalous diffusion. It is assumed that the deterministic process corresponds to unknown biological rules which determine the DNA path, whereas the noise mimics the influence of an infinite-dimensional environment on the biological process under study. We prove that the resulting diffusion process, if the effect of the random process is neglected, is an a-stable Levy process with 1 < a < 2. We also show that, if the diffusion process is determined by the joint action of the deterministic and the random process, the correlation effects of the "deterministic dynamics" are cancelled on the short-range scale, but show up in the long-range one. We denote our prescription to generate statistical sequences as the Copying Mistake Map (CMM). We carry out our analysis of several DNA sequences, …