Rice University Research Repository


The Rice Research Repository (R-3) provides access to research produced at Rice University, including theses and dissertations, journal articles, research center publications, datasets, and academic journals. Managed by Fondren Library, R-3 is indexed by Google and Google Scholar, follows best practices for preservation, and provides DOIs to facilitate citation. Woodson Research Center collections, including Rice Images and Documents and the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice, have moved here.



 

Recent Submissions

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A scientific machine learning framework to understand flash graphene synthesis
(Royal Society of Chemistry, 2023) Sattari, Kianoosh; Eddy, Lucas; Beckham, Jacob L.; Wyss, Kevin M.; Byfield, Richard; Qian, Long; Tour, James M.; Lin, Jian; NanoCarbon Center; Welch Institute for Advanced Materials
Flash Joule heating (FJH) is a far-from-equilibrium (FFE) processing method for converting low-value carbon-based materials to flash graphene (FG). Despite its promises in scalability and performance, attempts to explore the reaction mechanism have been limited due to the complexities involved in the FFE process. Data-driven machine learning (ML) models effectively account for the complexities, but the model training requires a considerable amount of experimental data. To tackle this challenge, we constructed a scientific ML (SML) framework trained by using both direct processing variables and indirect, physics-informed variables to predict the FG yield. The indirect variables include current-derived features (final current, maximum current, and charge density) predicted from the proxy ML models and reaction temperatures simulated from multi-physics modeling. With the combined indirect features, the final ML model achieves an average R2 score of 0.81 ± 0.05 and an average RMSE of 12.1% ± 2.0% in predicting the FG yield, which is significantly higher than the model trained without them (R2 of 0.73 ± 0.05 and an RMSE of 14.3% ± 2.0%). Feature importance analysis validates the key roles of these indirect features in determining the reaction outcome. These results illustrate the promise of this SML to elucidate FFE material synthesis outcomes, thus paving a new avenue to processing other datasets from the materials systems involving the same or different FFE processes.
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Cell behaviors underlying Myxococcus xanthus aggregate dispersal
(American Society for Microbiology, 2023) Murphy, Patrick; Comstock, Jessica; Khan, Trosporsha; Zhang, Jiangguo; Welch, Roy; Igoshin, Oleg A.; Center for Theoretical Physical Biology
The soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus is a model organism with a set of diverse behaviors. These behaviors include the starvation-induced multicellular development program, in which cells move collectively to assemble multicellular aggregates. After initial aggregates have formed, some will disperse, with smaller aggregates having a higher chance of dispersal. Initial aggregation is driven by two changes in cell behavior: cells slow down inside of aggregates and bias their motion by reversing direction less frequently when moving toward aggregates. However, the cell behaviors that drive dispersal are unknown. Here, we use fluorescent microscopy to quantify changes in cell behavior after initial aggregates have formed. We observe that after initial aggregate formation, cells adjust the bias in reversal timings by initiating reversals more rapidly when approaching unstable aggregates. Using agent-based modeling, we then show dispersal is predominantly generated by this change in bias, which is strong enough to overcome slowdown inside aggregates. Notably, the change in reversal bias is correlated with the nearest aggregate size, connecting cellular activity to previously observed correlations between aggregate size and fate. To determine if this connection is consistent across strains, we analyze a second M. xanthus strain with reduced levels of dispersal. We find that far fewer cells near smaller aggregates modified their bias. This implies that aggregate dispersal is under genetic control, providing a foundation for further investigations into the role it plays in the life cycle of M. xanthus.
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Thickness-Dependent Terahertz Permittivity of Epitaxially Grown PbTe Thin Films
(MDPI, 2023) Kawahala, Nicolas M.; Matos, Daniel A.; Rappl, Paulo H. O.; Abramof, Eduardo; Baydin, Andrey; Kono, Junichiro; Hernandez, Felix G. G.; Smalley-Curl Institute
The exceptional thermoelectric properties of PbTe are believed to be associated with the incipient ferroelectricity of this material, which is caused by strong electron–phonon coupling that connects phononic and electronic dynamics. Here, we have used terahertz time-domain spectroscopy measurements to generate complex permittivity spectra for a set of epitaxially grown PbTe thin films with thicknesses between 100 nm and 500 nm at temperatures from 10 K to 300 K. Using a Drude–Lorentz model, we retrieved the physical parameters of both the phononic and electronic contributions to the THz permittivity. We observed a strong decrease, or softening, of the transverse optical phonon mode frequency with decreasing temperature, determining a thickness-independent negative ferroelectric-transition critical temperature, while we found a thickness-dependent anharmonic phonon decay lifetime. The electronic contribution to the permittivity was larger in thinner films, and both the carrier density and mobility increased with decreasing temperature in all films. Finally, we detected a thickness-dependent longitudinal optical phonon mode frequency, indicating the presence of plasmon–phonon coupling.
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The role of stress and fluid saturation on the acoustic response of fractured rock
(Frontiers Media S.A., 2023) Lisabeth, Harrison P.; Ajo-Franklin, Jonathan
Standard rock physics models are formulated to describe the behavior of porous sedimentary reservoirs, with clean sandstones being the archetypal system; however, many situations demand geophysical monitoring of rocks with significantly different structures, such as low porosity, fractured reservoirs. Conventional models also suggest that these “stiff” reservoirs can be challenging to monitor seismically due to small fluid substitution effects, but the presence of fractures leads to stress dependence which may be leveraged for remote monitoring purposes. Using samples from the Duperow Formation (dolostone) obtained from the Danielson test well in Kevin Dome, MT, we conducted ultrasonic and multi-scale structural (profilometry, synchrotron micro-tomography, pressure sensitive film) measurements on naturally fractured core in order to characterize the effects of fluid substitution and effective stress on the acoustic response of fractured reservoir rock with a focus in particular on the textural and seismic characteristics of natural fractures. We find that changes in effective stress can yield changes in velocity of up to 20% and changes in attenuation up to 200%. Measured fluid substitution effects are resolvable, but stress effects dominate. These measurements provide insight into the physical processes controlling acoustic response of fractured rocks in general and can also be used to inform monitoring efforts in fractured reservoirs.
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Stable reconstruction of simple Riemannian manifolds from unknown interior sources
(IOP Publishing Ltd, 2023) Hoop, Maarten V. de; Ilmavirta, Joonas; Lassas, Matti; Saksala, Teemu
Consider the geometric inverse problem: there is a set of delta-sources in spacetime that emit waves travelling at unit speed. If we know all the arrival times at the boundary cylinder of the spacetime, can we reconstruct the space, a Riemannian manifold with boundary? With a finite set of sources we can only hope to get an approximate reconstruction, and we indeed provide a discrete metric approximation to the manifold with explicit data-driven error bounds when the manifold is simple. This is the geometrization of a seismological inverse problem where we measure the arrival times on the surface of waves from an unknown number of unknown interior microseismic events at unknown times. The closeness of two metric spaces with a marked boundary is measured by a labeled Gromov–Hausdorff distance. If measurements are done for infinite time and spatially dense sources, our construction produces the true Riemannian manifold and the finite-time approximations converge to it in the metric sense