The following students received Ph.D. Degrees in Fall 2011 and Spring 2012:

Physics PH.D. Degrees            Fall 2011

Benjamín  Alemán                                              Adviser: Alex Zettl

Carbon Nanotube and Graphene Nanoelectromechanical Systems

Zoe Boekelheide                                     Adviser: Frances Hellman

Effects of Nanoscale Structure on the Magnetism and Transport Properties of Chromium and Chromium-Aluminum Alloys

Steven Chapman                               Adviser: Joel Fajans

The Effect of Multiple-Enhanced Diffusion on the Joule Heating of a Cold Non-Neutral Plasma

Michael  Childress                   Advisers: Greg Aldering and Saul Perlmutter

Host Galaxies of Type Ia Supernovae from the Nearby Supernova Factory

Jack Deslippe                                     Adviser: Steven G. Louie

Optical and Electronic Properties of Nano-Materials from First Principles Computation

Hung-Chung Fang                                   Adviser: Marjorie Shapiro

A Measurement of the Relative Branching Ratio BR (B-->D0 K-)/BR(B-->D0 pi-) in Three D0 Decay Modes

Christopher Herdman              Advisers: K. Birgitta Whaley and Ashvin Vishwanath

Loop Condensation in Quantum Dimer Models

Craig Hetherington                           Adviser: Carlos Bustamante

Dynamics of Viral Packaging: Single-Molecule Observations in Multiple Dimensions

Laura Kogler                           Adviser: Stuart Freedman

A measurement of the 2 neutrino double beta decay rate of 130 Te in the CUORICINO experiment

Yiping Ma                                           Adviser: Edgar Knobloch

Localized Structures in Forced Oscillatory Systems

Thomas O’Donnell                Adviser: Stuart Freedman

Precision Measurement of Neutrino Oscillation Parameters with KamLAND

Daniel Queen                                     Adviser: Frances Hellman

The Specific Heat of Pure and Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon

Maxwell Scherzer                              Adviser: Beate Heinemann

Measurement of the Upsilon (1S) Production Cross Section in Proton-Proton Collisions at Center of Mass Energy 7 TeV

Erik Shirokoff                                                Adviser: William Holzapfel

The South Pole Telescope Bolometer Array and the Measurement of Secondary Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropy at Small Angular Scales

Vasudha Shivamoggi                                              Adviser: Joel Moore

Majorana Fermions and Dirac Edge States in Topological Phases

Daniel Slichter                                                         Adviser: Irfan Siddiqi

Quantum Jumps and Measurement Backaction in a Superconducting Qubit

Patrick Varilly                                   Advisers: David Chandler and Jan Liphardt

Fluctuations in Water and their Relation to the Hydrophobic Effect

Seth Zenz                                                 Advisers: Ian Hinchliffe and James Siegrist

Properties of Jets Measured with Charged Particles with the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider

Physics PH.D. Degrees            Spring 2012

Nicole Carlson                                                    Adviser: Michael DeWeese

Sparse Coding of Speech Data Predicts Properties of the Early Auditory System

David Cho                                                Advisers: Feng Wang and Yuen Ron Shen

Optical Characterization of Plasmonic Metamaterials

Eric Corsini                                                    Adviser: Dmitry Budker and Wojciech Gawlik

The Saga of Light-matter Interaction and Magneto-optical Effects;  Applications to Atomic Magnetometry, Laser Cooled Atoms, Atomic Clocks, Geo-magnetism and Plant Bio-magnetism

Jackson DeBuhr                                            Advisers: Chung-Pei Ma and Eliot Quataert

Numerical Models of Galaxy Evolution: Black Hole Feedback and Disk Heating

 Nicholas Dunn                                  Advisers: Christian Bauer and Lawrence Hall

Effective Field Theory Techniques for Resummation in Jet Physics

Marat Freytsis                                        Advisers: Zoltan Ligeti and Lawrence Hall

Non-standard Models of Dark Matter and their Experimental Signatures

Candace Gilet                                                           Advisers: John Bell and Christopher McKee

Low Mach Number Simulation of Core Convection in Massive Stars

Pavan Hosur                                                  Adviser: Ashvin Vishwanath

Consequences of Non-trivial Band Topology in Condensed Matter Systems

Satoru Inoue                                                 Adviser: Wick Haxton

Use of Effective Theories in Nuclear Physics

Zigmund Kermish                             Adviser: Adrian Lee

The POLARBEAR Experiment: Design and Characterization

Ruza Markov                                                 Adviser: Ori Ganor

Dualities and Topological Field Theories from Twisted Geometries

Charles Melby-Thompson                          Adviser: Petr Hořava

Anisotropy in Gravity and Holography

Roger Mong                                                   Adviser: Joel Moore

Classification and Characterization of Topological Insulators and Superconductors

 David  Siegel                                               Adviser: Alessandra Lanzara

The Electronic Structure of Single-Layer Graphene

Kyle Sundqvist                                               Adviser: Bernard Sadoulet

Carrier Transport and Related Effects in Detectors of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search

Joseph Virzi                                                   Adviser: Marjorie Shapiro

A Measurement of the Underlying Event Distributions in Proton-Proton Collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV in Events containing Charged Particle Jets using the ATLAS Detector at the Large Hadron Collider

Yi Frank Zhang                                                        Adviser: Ashvin Vishwanath

Theory of Topological Phenomena in Condensed Matter Systems