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Dementia is a complex neurodegenerative syndrome that by 2050 could affect about 135 Million people worldwide. People with dementia experience a progressive decline in their cognitive abilities and have serious problems coping with activities of daily living, including
orientation and wayfinding tasks. They even experience difficulties in finding their way in a familiar environment. Being lost or fear of getting lost may consequently develop into other psychological deficits such as anxiety, suspicions, illusions, and aggression. Frequent results are social isolation and a reduced quality of life. Moreover, the lives of relatives and
caregivers of people with dementia are also negatively affected.
Regarding navigation and orientation, most existing approaches focus on outdoor environment and people with mild dementia, who have the capability to use mobile devices. However, Rasquin (2007) observe that even a device with three buttons may be too complicated for
people with moderate to severe dementia. In addition, people who are living in care homes mainly perform indoor activities. Given this background, we decided to focus on designing a system for indoor environments for people with moderate to severe dementia, who are unable
or reluctant to use smartphone technology.
Adopting user-centered design approach, context and requirements of people with dementia were gathered as a first step to understand needs and difficulties (especially in spatial disorientation and wayfinding problems) experienced in dementia care facilities. Then, an "Implicit Interactive Intelligent (III) Environment" for people with dementia was proposed emphasizing implicit interaction and natural interface. The backbone of this III Environment is based on supporting orientation and navigation tasks with three systems: a Monitoring system, an intelligent system, and a guiding system. The monitoring system and intelligent system automatically detect and interpret the locations and activities performed by the users i.e. people with dementia. This approach (implicit input) reduces cognitive workload as well as physical workload on the user to provide input. The intelligent system is also aware of context, predicts next situations (location, activity), and decides when to provide an appropriate service to the users. The guiding system with intuitive and dynamic environmental cues (lighting with color) has the responsibility for guiding the users to the places they need to be.
Overall, three types of a monitoring system with Ultra-Wideband and iBeacon technologies, different techniques and algorithms were implemented for different contexts of use.
They showed a high user acceptance with a reasonable price as well as decent accuracy and precision. In the intelligent system, models were built to recognize the users’ current activity, detect the erroneous activity, predict the next location and activity, and analyze the
history data, detect issues, notify them and suggest solutions to caregivers via visualized web interfaces. About the guiding systems, five studies were conducted to test and evaluate the effect of lighting with color on people with dementia. The results were promising. Although
several components of III Environment in general and three systems, in particular, are in place (implemented and tested separately), integrating them all together and employing this in the dementia context as a fully properly evaluation with formal stakeholders (people with
dementia and caregivers) are needed for the future step.
Time-resolved spectroscopy allows for analyzing light-induced energy conversion and
chromophore–chromophore interactions in molecular systems, which is a prerequisite in
the design of new materials and for improving the efficiency of opto-electronic devices.
To elucidate photo-induced dynamics of complex molecular systems, transient absorption
(TA) and coherent two-dimensional (2D) spectroscopy were employed and combined
with additional experimental techniques, theoretical approaches, and simulation models
in this work.
A systematic series of merocyanines, synthetically varied in the number of chromophores
and subsitution pattern, attached to a benzene unit was investigated in cooperation with
the group of Prof. Dr. Frank Würthner at the University of Würzburg. The global analysis
of several TA experiments, and additional coherent 2D spectroscopy experiments, provided
the basis to elaborate a relaxation scheme which was applicable for all merocyanine
systems under investigation. This relaxation scheme is based on a double minimum on the
excited-state potential energy surface. One of these minima is assigned to an intramolecular
charge-transfer state which is stabilized in the bis- and tris-chromophoric dyes by
chromphore–chromophore interactions, resulting in an increase in excited-state lifetime.
Electro-optical absorption and density functional theory (DFT) calculations revealed a
preferential chromophore orientation which compensates most of the dipole moment of
the individual chromophores. Based on this structural assignment the conformationdependent
exciton energy splitting was calculated. The linear absorption spectra of the
multi-chromophoric merocyanines could be described by a combination of monomeric and
excitonic spectra.
Subsequently, a structurally complex polymeric squaraine dye was studied in collaboration
with the research groups of Prof. Dr. Christoph Lambert and Prof. Dr. Roland Mitric
at the University of Würzburg. This polymer consists of a superposition of zigzag and
helix structures depending on the solvent. High-level DFT calculations confirmed the previous
assignment that zigzag and helix structures can be treated as J- and H-aggregates,
respectively. TA experiments revealed that in dependence on the solvent as well as the
excitation energy, ultrafast energy transfer within the squaraine polymer proceeds from
initially excited helix segments to zigzag segments or vice versa. Additionally, 2D spectroscopy
confirmed the observed sub-picosecond dynamics. In contrast to other conjugated
polymers such as MEH-PPV, which is investigated in the last chapter, ultrafast
energy transfer in squaraine polymers is based on the matching of the density of states
between donor and acceptor segments due to the small reorganization energy in cyanine-like
chromophores.
Finally, the photo-induced dynamics of the aggregated phase of the conjugated polymer
MEH-PPV was investigated in cooperation with the group of Prof. Dr. Anna Köhler at the University of Bayreuth. Our collaborators had previously described the aggregation of MEH-PPV upon cooling by the formation of so-called HJ-aggregates based on exciton
theory. By TA measurements and by making use of an affiliated band analysis distinct
relaxation processes in the excited state and to the ground state were discriminated. By
employing 2D spectroscopy the energy transfer between different conjugated segments
within the aggregated polymer was resolved. The initial exciton relaxation within the
aggregated phase indicates a low exciton mobility, in contrast to the subsequent energy
transfer between different chromophores within several picoseconds.
This work contributes by its systematic study of structure-dependent relaxation dynamics
to the basic understanding of the structure-function relationship within complex
molecular systems. The investigated molecular classes display a high potential to increase
efficiencies of opto-electronic devices, e.g., organic solar cells, by the selective choice of
the molecular morphology.
Within the framework of this thesis, photolysis reactions in the liquid phase were investigated by means of ultrafast optical spectroscopy. Apart from molecular studies dealing with the highly spin-dependent reactivity of diphenylcarbene (DPC) in binary solvent
mixtures and ligand dissociation reactions of so-called CO-releasing molecules (CORMs),
special emphasis was put on the implementation and characterization of methods improving
and extending the signal detection in conventional pump–probe transient absorption setups.
The assumption of DPC being an archetypal triplet-ground-state arylcarbene was recently questioned by matrix-isolation studies at low temperatures. DPC embedded in argon matrices revealed a hitherto unknown reactivity when the carbene environment was modified by small amounts of methanol dopant molecules. To complement these findings with liquid-phase experiments at room temperature, femtosecond pump–probe transient absorption spectroscopy with probing in the visible and ultraviolet regime was employed to unravel primary reaction processes of DPC in solvent mixtures. Supported by quantum chemical simulations conducted by our collaborators, it was shown that a competition between the reaction pathways occurs that not only depends on the solvent molecule near-by but also on its interaction with other solvent molecules. In-depth analysis of the solvation dynamics and the amount of nascent intermediates corroborates the importance of a hydrogen-bonded complex with a protic solvent molecule, in striking analogy to complexes found at cryogenic temperatures.
Probing the transient absorption of molecules in the mid-infrared spectral range benefits from the high chemical specificity of molecules’ vibrational signatures. The technique of chirped-pulse upconversion (CPU) constitutes a promising alternative to standard direct multichannel MCT detection when accessing this spectral detection window. Hence, one chapter of this thesis is dedicated to a direct comparison between both detection methods. By conducting an exemplary pump–probe transient absorption experiment, it became evident, that the additional nonlinear interaction step is responsible for increased noise levels when using CPU. However, a correction procedure capable of removing these additional noise contributions—stemming from the fundamental laser radiation used for upconversion—was successfully tested. Perhaps most importantly for various spectroscopic applications, CPU scored with a significantly extended detection bandwidth owing to the high pixel numbers of modern CCD cameras.
Transition-metal complexes capable of releasing small molecular messengers upon photoactivation are promising sources of gasotransmitters such as carbon monoxide (CO) or nitric oxide (NO) in biological applications. However, only little is known about the characteristic time scales of ligand dissociation in this class of molecules. For this purpose, two complexes were investigated with femtosecond time resolution: [Mn(CO)3(tpm)]Cl with tpm=tris(2-pyrazolyl)methane, a manganese tricarbonyl complex which has proven to be selective and cytotoxic to cancer cells, and [Mo(CO)2(NO)(iPr3tacn)]PF6 with iPr3tacn=1,4,7-triisopropyl-1,4,7-triazacyclononane, a molybdenum complex containing both carbonyl and nitrosyl ligands. By conducting pump–probe transient absorption measurements in different spectral probing windows supported by quantum chemical calculations and linear absorption spectroscopy, it was shown that both complexes are able to release one CO ligand within the first few picoseconds after UV excitation. The results complement existing studies which focused on the molecules’ ligand-releasing properties upon long-term exposure. The additional information gained on an ultrafast time scale provides a comprehensive understanding of individual reaction steps connected with ligand release in this class of molecules. Hence, the studies might create new incentives to develop modified molecules for specific applications.
This work brings forward successful implementations of ultrafast chirality-sensitive spectroscopic techniques by probing circular dichroism (CD) or optical rotation dispersion (ORD). Furthermore, also first steps towards chiral quantum control, i.e., the selective variation of the chiral properties of molecules with the help of coherent light, are presented.
In the case of CD probing, a setup capable of mirroring an arbitrary polarization state of an ultrashort laser pulse was developed. Hence, by passing a left-circularly polarized laser pulse through this setup a right-circularly polarized laser pulse is generated. These two pulse enantiomers can be utilized as probe pulses in a pump--probe CD experiment. Besides CD spectroscopy, it can be utilized for anisotropy or ellipsometry spectroscopy also. Within this thesis, the approach is used to elucidate the photochemistry of hemoglobin, the oxygen transporting protein in mammalian blood. The oxygen loss can be triggered with laser pulses as well, and the results of the time-resolved CD experiment suggest a cascade-like relaxation, probably through different spin states, of the metallo-porphyrins in hemoglobin.
The ORD probing was realized via the combination of common-path optical heterodyne interferometric polarimetry and accumulative femtosecond spectroscopy. Within this setup, on the one hand the applicability of this approach for ultrafast studies was demonstrated explicitly. On the other hand, the discrimination between an achiral and a racemic solution without prior spatial separation was realized. This was achieved by inducing an enantiomeric excess via polarized femtosecond laser pulses and following its evolution with the developed polarimeter. Hence, chiral selectivity was already achieved with this method which can be turned into chiral control if the polarized laser pulses are optimized to steer an enhancement of the enantiomeric excess.
Furthermore, within this thesis, theoretical prerequisites for anisotropy-free pump--probe experiments with arbitrary polarized laser pulses were derived. Due to the small magnitude of optical chirality-sensitve signals, these results are important for any pump--probe chiral spectroscopy, like the CD probing presented in this thesis. Moreover, since for chiral quantum control the variation of the molecular structure is necessary, the knowledge about rearrangement reactions triggered by photons is necessary. Hence, within this thesis the ultrafast Wolff rearrangement of an α-diazocarbonyl was investigated via ultrafast photofragment ion spectroscopy in the gas phase. Though the compound is not chiral, the knowledge about the exact reaction mechanism is beneficial for future studies of chiral compounds.
The ecosystem of the high northern latitudes is affected by the recently changing environmental conditions. The Arctic has undergone a significant climatic change over the last decades. The land coverage is changing and a phenological response to the warming is apparent. Remotely sensed data can assist the monitoring and quantification of these changes. The remote sensing of the Arctic was predominantly carried out by the usage of optical sensors but these encounter problems in the Arctic environment, e.g. the frequent cloud cover or the solar geometry. In contrast, the imaging of Synthetic Aperture Radar is not affected by the cloud cover and the acquisition of radar imagery is independent of the solar illumination. The objective of this work was to explore how polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) data of TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, Radarsat-2 and ALOS PALSAR and interferometric-derived digital elevation model data of the TanDEM-X Mission can contribute to collect meaningful information on the actual state of the Arctic Environment. The study was conducted for Canadian sites of the Mackenzie Delta Region and Banks Island and in situ reference data were available for the assessment. The up-to-date analysis of the PolSAR data made the application of the Non-Local Means filtering and of the decomposition of co-polarized data necessary.
The Non-Local Means filter showed a high capability to preserve the image values, to keep the edges and to reduce the speckle. This supported not only the suitability for the interpretation but also for the classification. The classification accuracies of Non-Local Means filtered data were in average +10% higher compared to unfiltered images. The correlation of the co- and quad-polarized decomposition features was high for classes with distinct surface or double bounce scattering and a usage of the co-polarized data is beneficial for regions of natural land coverage and for low vegetation formations with little volume scattering. The evaluation further revealed that the X- and C-Band were most sensitive to the generalized land cover classes. It was found that the X-Band data were sensitive to low vegetation formations with low shrub density, the C-Band data were sensitive to the shrub density and the shrub dominated tundra. In contrast, the L-Band data were less sensitive to the land cover. Among the different dual-polarized data the HH/VV-polarized data were identified to be most meaningful for the characterization and classification, followed by the HH/HV-polarized and the VV/VH-polarized data. The quad-polarized data showed highest sensitivity to the land cover but differences to the co-polarized data were small. The accuracy assessment showed that spectral information was required for accurate land cover classification. The best results were obtained when spectral and radar information was combined. The benefit of including radar data in the classification was up to +15% accuracy and most significant for the classes wetland and sparse vegetated tundra. The best classifications were realized with quad-polarized C-Band and multispectral data and with co-polarized X-Band and multispectral data. The overall accuracy was up to 80% for unsupervised and up to 90% for supervised classifications. The results indicated that the shortwave co-polarized data show promise for the classification of tundra land cover since the polarimetric information is sensitive to low vegetation and the wetlands. Furthermore, co-polarized data provide a higher spatial resolution than the quad-polarized data.
The analysis of the intermediate digital elevation model data of the TanDEM-X showed a high potential for the characterization of the surface morphology. The basic and relative topographic features were shown to be of high relevance for the quantification of the surface morphology and an area-wide application is feasible. In addition, these data were of value for the classification and delineation of landforms. Such classifications will assist the delineation of geomorphological units and have potential to identify locations of actual and future morphologic activity.
Numerical Simulations of Heavy Fermion Systems: From He-3 Bilayers to Topological Kondo Insulators
(2014)
Even though heavy fermion systems have been studied for a long time, a strong interest in heavy fermions persists to this day. While the basic principles of local moment formation, Kondo effect and formation of composite quasiparticles leading to a Fermi liquid, are under- stood, there remain many interesting open questions. A number of issues arise due to the interplay of heavy fermion physics with other phenomena like magnetism and superconduc- tivity.
In this regard, experimental and theoretical investigations of He-3 can provide valuable insights. He-3 represents a unique realization of a quantum liquid. The fermionic nature of He-3 atoms, in conjunction with the absence of long-range Coulomb repulsion, makes this material an ideal model system to study Fermi liquid behavior.
Bulk He-3 has been investigated for quite some time. More recently, it became possible to prepare and study layered He-3 systems, in particular single layers and bilayers. The pos- sibility of tuning various physical properties of the system by changing the density of He-3 and using different substrate materials makes layers of He-3 an ideal quantum simulator for investigating two-dimensional Fermi liquid phenomenology.
In particular, bilayers of He-3 have recently been found to exhibit heavy fermion behavior. As a function of temperature, a crossover from an incoherent state with decoupled layers to a coherent Fermi liquid of composite quasiparticles was observed. This behavior has its roots in the hybridization of the two layers. The first is almost completely filled and subject to strong correlation effects, while the second layer is only partially filled and weakly correlated. The quasiparticles are formed due to the Kondo screening of localized moments in the first layer by the second-layer delocalized fermions, which takes place at a characteristic temperature scale, the coherence scale Tcoh.
Tcoh can be tuned by changing the He-3 density. In particular, at a certain critical filling,
the coherence scale is expected to vanish, corresponding to a divergence of the quasiparticle effective mass, and a breakdown of the Kondo effect at a quantum critical point. Beyond the critical point, the layers are decoupled. The first layer is a local moment magnet, while the second layer is an itinerant overlayer.
However, already at a filling smaller than the critical value, preempting the critical point, the onset of a finite sample magnetization was observed. The character of this intervening phase remained unclear.
Motivated by these experimental observations, in this thesis the results of model calcula- tions based on an extended Periodic Anderson Model are presented. The three particle ring exchange, which is the dominant magnetic exchange process in layered He-3, is included in the model. It leads to an effective ferromagnetic interaction between spins on neighboring sites. In addition, the model incorporates the constraint of no double occupancy by taking the limit of large local Coulomb repulsion.
By means of Cellular DMFT, the model is investigated for a range of values of the chemical potential µ and inverse temperature β = 1/T . The method is a cluster extension to the Dy- namical Mean-Field Theory (DMFT), and allows to systematically include non-local correla- tions beyond the DMFT. The auxiliary cluster model is solved by a hybridization expansion CTQMC cluster solver, which provides unbiased, numerically exact results for the Green’s function and other observables of interest.
As a first step, the onset of Fermi liquid coherence is studied. At low enough temperature, the self-energy is found to exhibit a linear dependence on Matsubara frequency. Meanwhile, the spin susceptibility crossed over from a Curie-Weiss law to a Pauli law. Both observations serve as fingerprints of the Fermi liquid state.
The heavy fermion state appears at a characteristic coherence scale Tcoh. This scale depends strongly on the density. While it is rather high for small filling, for larger filling Tcoh is increas- ingly suppressed. This involves a decreasing quasiparticle residue Z ∼ Tcoh and an enhanced mass renormalization m∗/m ∼ Tcoh−1. Extrapolation leads to a critical filling, where the co-
herence scale is expected to vanish at a quantum critical point. At the same time, the effective mass diverges. This corresponds to a breakdown of the Kondo effect, which is responsible for the formation of quasiparticles, due to a vanishing of the effective hybridization between the layers.
Taking only single-site DMFT results into account, the above scenario seems plausible. However, paramagnetic DMFT neglects the ring exchange interaction completely. In or- der to improve on this, Cellular DMFT simulations are conducted for small clusters of size Nc = 2 and 3. The results paint a different physical picture. The ring exchange, by favor- ing a ferromagnetic alignment of spins, competes with the Kondo screening. As a result, strong short-range ferromagnetic fluctuations appear at larger values of µ. By lowering the temperature, these fluctuations are enhanced at first. However, for T < Tcoh they are increas- ingly suppressed, which is consistent with Fermi liquid coherence. However, beyond a certain threshold value of µ, fluctuations persist to the lowest temperatures. At the same time, while not apparent in the DMFT results, the total occupation n increases quite strongly in a very narrow range around the same value of µ. The evolution of n with µ is always continuous, but hints at a discontinuity in the limit Nc → ∞. This first-order transition breaks the Kondo effect. Beyond the transition, a ferromagnetic state in the first layer is established, and the second layer becomes a decoupled overlayer.
These observations provide a quite appealing interpretation of the experimental results. As a function of chemical potential, the Kondo breakdown quantum critical point is preempted by a first-order transition, where the layers decouple and the first layer turns into a ferromagnet. In the experimental situation, where the filling can be tuned directly, the discontinuous transition is mirrored by a phase separation, which interpolates between the Fermi liquid ground state at lower filling and the magnetic state at higher filling. This is precisely the range of the intervening phase found in the experiments, which is characterized by an onset of a finite sample magnetization.
Besides the interplay of heavy fermion physics and magnetic exchange, recently the spin- orbit coupling, which is present in many heavy fermion materials, attracted a lot of interest. In the presence of time-reversal symmetry, due to spin-orbit coupling, there is the possibility of a topological ground state.
It was recently conjectured that the energy scale of spin-orbit coupling can become dom- inant in heavy fermion materials, since the coherence scale and quasiparticle bandwidth are rather small. This can lead to a heavy fermion ground state with a nontrivial band topology; that is, a topological Kondo insulator (TKI). While being subject to strong correlation effects, this state must be adiabatically connected to a non-interacting, topological state.
The idea of the topological ground state realized in prototypical Kondo insulators, in par- ticular SmB6, promises to shed light on some of the peculiarities of these materials, like a residual conductivity at the lowest temperatures, which have remained unresolved so far.
In this work, a simple two-band model for two-dimensional topological Kondo insulators is devised, which is based on a single Kramer’s doublet coupled to a single conduction band. The model is investigated in the presence of a Hubbard interaction as a function of interaction strength U and inverse temperature β. The bulk properties of the model are obtained by DMFT, with a hybridization expansion CTQMC impurity solver. The DMFT approximation of a local self-energy leads to a very simple way of computing the topological invariant.
The results show that with increasing U the system can be driven through a topological phase transition. Interestingly, the transition is between distinct topological insulating states, namely the Γ-phase and M-phase. This appearance of different topological phases is possible due to the symmetry of the underlying square lattice. By adiabatically connecting both in- teracting states with the respective non-interacting state, it is shown that the transition indeed drives the system from the Γ-phase to the M-phase.
A different behavior can be observed by pushing the bare position of the Kramer’s doublet to higher binding energies. In this case, the non-interacting starting point has a trivial band topology. By switching on the interaction, the system can be tuned through a quantum phase transition, with a closing of the band gap. Upon reopening of the band gap, the system is in the Γ-phase, i. e. a topological insulator. By increasing the interaction strength further, the system moves into a strongly correlated regime. In fact, close to the expected transition to the M phase, the mass renormalization becomes quite substantial. While absent in the para- magnetic DMFT simulations conducted, it is conceivable that instead of a topological phase transition, the system undergoes a time-reversal symmetry breaking, magnetic transition.
The regime of strong correlations is studied in more detail as a function of temperature, both in the bulk and with open boundary conditions. A quantity which proved very useful is the bulk topological invariant Ns, which can be generalized to finite interaction strength and temperature. In particular, it can be used to define a temperature scale T ∗ for the onset of the topological state. Rescaling the results for Ns, a nice data collapse of the results for different values of U, from the local moment regime to strongly mixed valence, is obtained. This hints at T ∗ being a universal low energy scale in topological Kondo insulators. Indeed, by comparing T ∗ with the coherence scale extracted from the self-energy mass renormalization, it is found that both scales are equivalent up to a constant prefactor. Hence, the scale T ∗ obtained from the temperature dependence of topological properties, can be used as an independent measure for Fermi liquid coherence. This is particularly useful in the experimentally relevant mixed valence regime, where charge fluctuations cannot be neglected. Here, a separation of the energy scales related to spin and charge fluctuations is not possible.
The importance of charge fluctuations becomes evident in the extent of spectral weight transfer as the temperature is lowered. For mixed valence, while the hybridization gap emerges, a substantial amount of spectral weight is shifted from the vicinity of the Fermi level to the lower Hubbard band. In contrast, this effect is strongly suppressed in the local moment regime.
In addition to the bulk properties, the spectral function for open boundaries is studied as a function of temperature, both in the local moment and mixed valence regime. This allows an investigation of the emergence of topological edge states with temperature. The method used here is the site-dependent DMFT, which is a generalization of the conventional DMFT to inhomogeneous systems. The hybridization expansion CTQMC algorithm is used as impurity solver.
By comparison with the bulk results for the topological quantity Ns, it is found that the
temperature scale for the appearance of the topological edge states is T ∗, both in the mixed valence and local moment regime.