Erbium (Er) is a lanthanide element, mainly used in its trivalent ionic form (Er3+), as an active dopant in optical devices, for light amplification or generation. The luminescence of Er3+ lies within the conventional ...

This Ph.D thesis is concerned with the design, fabrication and mea- surement of silicon-on-insulator based nanowire devices that exhibit quantum effects in their operation. The devices were all formed us- ing top-down ...

The understanding of atomic structures and processes is continually improving with the great technological development in imaging techniques. Ultrafast electron and X-ray techniques are able to perform measurements at ...

The magnitude of of the CKM matrix element |Vcb| is determined based on the exclusive semileptonic B0 → D*lν decay with data from the Belle experiment at KEKB. Two different parameterisations of the hadronic transition ...

Serial X-ray crystallography has quickly developed as an approach for the determination of crystal structures from proteins that do not form crystals of sufficient size or quality for conventional X-ray crystallography ...

This thesis investigates the use of the Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) centre in diamond as a novel sensor for magnetic resonance spectroscopy on the nanoscale. The need for novel nanoscale sensors of nuclear spins, for the application ...

The search for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson produced in association with top quarks - known as ttH production - plays a crucial role in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) physics programme, as it allows a direct ...

How galaxies form at high redshift remains a puzzle due to our limited observational capability. Yet determining how the first generation of galaxies formed and evolved is critical to our understanding of how the Universe ...

Why is the mass density of dark matter throughout the universe similar to that of ordinary matter? Asymmetric symmetry breaking models can explain this apparent coincidence by exploring how dark matter could naturally have ...

Gravitational waves, perturbations in space-time propagating at the speed of light, provide information about astrophysical sources. In recent years, transient gravitational-wave signals from compact binary coalescences ...