Keeping still life away from death: Functions and dynamics of gene expression during dormacy of Saccharomyces cerevisiae spores

While life is present everywhere on earth, each individual species can only grow and proliferate in a specific set of conditions. Moreover due to inherent fluctuation of the environment, individual organisms are often periodically confronted to stressful conditions that prohibit growth, reproduction and increase mortality. One of the most common...

Enabling yeast replication in extreme cold and heat

Open questions are whether life can be enabled in uninhabitable environments, and whether there is a limit to howmuch one can tune the speed of proliferation. Answering such questions has broad implications. It may reveal whether we can live in unforeseen habitats, whether we can slow down aging, and whether there are limits to lifespan. In this...

Andreev bound states in potentially topological setups

Quantum effects of superconducting phase

The microscopic theory of superconductivity proposed by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer has been a vital milestone of condensed matter physics and the basis of development of new quantum technologies. It explained the superconductivity as an emergent phenomenon arising from weak phonon-mediated attraction of individual...

On cooperativity in cellular habitats, with quantitative experiments and modelling

Tales of a Fountain of Youth and the invention of medicine illustrate our age-long obsession with two themes: life and death. What it takes to stay alive, and not to be dead, is a basic question in science that is easy to state, and yet difficult to address at a profound level. One striking feature of many living organisms is the ability of...

Spin dynamics with the interplay of elasticity and radiation in hybrid systems

Originated from the electron’s intrinsic angular momentum, magnetism has endowed various manipulations in both macroscopic and microscopic setups with another degree of freedom. Beyond the traditionally developed usage such as storage and sensors, there are enormous applications based on engineering and integrating magnetism into...

Cavity optomagnonics: Manipulating magnetism by light

We discuss theoretically the coupling of magnetization and infrared photons in whispering gallery mode cavities.

Zenith of the quantum doctrine: Dissection of the uses and misuses of quantum theory in the quest for macroscopic mechanical quanta

The reflections composing this thesis examine the usage and necessity of quantum theory, with an emphasis on systems featuring mechanical resonators. The first chapter introduces the quantum formalism, reviews the historical motivation for the quantization of harmonic oscillators, and presents a derivation of the interaction between the...

Optomechanics in a 3D microwave cavity

This thesis explores certain technologies that are related to the field of cavity optomechanics; specifically, optomechanics where the cavity is a 3Dmicrowave cavity.

Nonlinear Microwave Optomechanics

The nonlinearity is essential for creation of non-classical states of the cavity or mechanical resonator such as squeezed or cat states. A microwave cavity can be made nonlinear by, for instance, adding Josephson junctions. The mechanical resonator is inherently nonlinear. The radiation pressure interaction between cavity and mechanical...

Quantum transport in strongly interacting one-dimensional nanostructures

In this thesis we study quantum transport in several one-dimensional systems with strong electronic interactions. The first chapter contains an introduction to the concepts treated throughout this thesis, such as the Aharonov-Bohm effect, the Kondo effect, the Fano effect and quantum state transfer. It also includes a brief historical...

Interplay of Charge Current and Spin in Nanostructures

Controlling magnetization on short time scales and/or small dimensions is a hot topic in the field of spintronics, owing to its fundamental physics and its applications for information technology. The most straightforward way to control magnetization is by using an external magnetic field. However, because of the technical limitation in using a...

On quantum entanglement, measurement and decoherence in nanosystems

This thesis discusses the interplay between entanglement, measurement and decoherence in quantum nanosystems.