Structures of belonging: the poetry of Seamus Heaney

This thesis is divided into three parts – Word, Body and Transubstantiation. Collectively these are the central motifs of Catholicism’s Eucharist. According to Scripture, Christ is the word made flesh. The Eucharist recalls his words and actions at the Last Supper when he shares bread and wine with his disciples and tells them that they are his body and blood. In the Catholic faith partaking of wine and bread during the communion of mass is believed to be a partaking of the real presence of Christ. By consuming the body (bread) and blood (wine) of Christ, the participating community symbolise their collective belonging in and to Christ. The Catholic Eucharist consequently explodes difference in a utopic leap of faith whereby transubstantiation conflates and reconciles language and physical being, sub specie eternitatis. Whilst it is a religious formation, a relationship between word and body and their overlap also maps into preoccupations in recent philosophical and cultural theory which bear on Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Rather than converging word and body through a utopic leap of faith (transubstantiation), poststructuralism (following Saussure) posits an irreconcilable interstice between signifier and signified and (in the language of Derrida) infinitely defers meaning. Psychoanalysis (following Lacan) suggests desire is a consequence of the space between signifier and signified. Anthropological and sociological body theories (following Foucault) propose a disparity between corporeality and discursive constructions of bodies. Questions of a persistent gap in secular philosophy are therefore opposed to a sacred structure (converging word and body in a utopic leap of faith) that is most clearly marked and symbolised in the Catholic Eucharist. By appropriating this religious structure and these cultural theories, an ongoing secularisation of belonging in Heaney’s poetry emerges

Angular distributions of high-mass dilepton production in hadron collisions

The SeaQuest experiment is a fixed-target dimuon experiment currently running at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL). By utilizing the high-intensity, 120GeV proton beam delivered by the FNAL Main Injector (MI), SeaQuest is able to measure proton-induced Drell-Yan dimuon production off of various nuclear targets in kinematic regions inaccessible to previous similar experiments. A suitably large fraction of the final dataset has been recorded, reconstructed, and analyzed. Very preliminary results from light-sea flavor asymmetry, nuclear dependence, and partonic energy loss analyses have been presented at numerous international conferences. A novel, FPGA-based trigger system has been designed, implemented, and optimized for the SeaQuest experiment. By implementing the trigger decision logic in FPGA firmware, it is more adaptable to changing experimental conditions. Additionally, the peripheral tasks of timing alignment, "trigger matrix" generation, and firmware uploading have been mostly automated, reducing the likelihood of user error in the maintenance and operation of the trigger system. Significant upgrades to hardware and firmware have greatly improved the performance of the trigger system since the 2012 commissioning run of SeaQuest. Four additional v1495 modules were added to facilitate thorough pulser testing of the firmware designs and in-situ pulser tests of all compiled firmware. These pulser tests proved crucial for diagnosing many errors that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. A significant change to the internal clocking of the trigger system eliminated a subtle source of rate-dependent trigger efficiency. With this upgrade, the trigger finally meets the "dead-time free" design specification. Drell-Yan dimuon data have been collected and analyzed for central θCS, with nearly flat acceptance in ϕCS, in the mass range 5.0GeV < M_ɣ* < 10.0 GeV at forward x_F with the SeaQuest spectrometer at FNAL. A very preliminary extraction of ƛ has been performed, and the remaining difficulties in extracting ν have been evaluated. Although the results are not yet publishable, significant progress has been made in developing this very challenging angular distributions analysis. A simple scheme for correcting for the angular acceptances of the spectrometer, trigger, and reconstruction has been developed and demonstrated. A generally applicable correction for the kinematically-dependent, rate-dependent reconstruction efficiency has been developed and applied to all current analyses on SeaQuest data. This rate-dependence correction was the first major hurdle in the path to publication of many preliminary SeaQuest results. The last remaining major correction for all analyses, but especially important for the angular parameter extraction, is the full characterization, rate-dependence correction, and subtraction of the combinatoric background contribution to the reconstructed dimuon sample. Independently, an intuitive, kinematic derivation of the single-event definitions of the Drell-Yan angular parameters has been developed under the assumption of unpolarized annihilating quarks within unpolarized nuclei. At O(α_s), where the quarks remain co-planar with the hadrons in the photon rest frame, this kinematic method reproduces the Lam-Tung relation and derives an additional equality for μ^2, which is only interpretable for single-event parameters. This method has been extended to the case of quark non-coplanarity, and the coplanar equalities become inequalities. A new equality was discovered, which should be obeyed by single-event parameters even in the case of a non-coplanar quark axis. The non-coplanar parameter relations have been used to derive constraints on the experimentally accessible values of ƛ and v. These constraints are compared with existing data and have been found consistent, except in the cases where significant contributions from non-zero Boer-Mulders functions are expected. Finally, the kinematically-derived parameter definitions have been applied to high-precision CMS data. The relative contributions of the q(bar q) and qg processes to the Z-boson "Drell-Yan" cross-section have been extracted. Further, an average measure of non-coplanarity, likely caused by O(α_s^2) and higher processes, has been extracted

Computational simulation of metal nucleation on diamond electrodes

Metal nanocluster deposition is an important fabrication process that can be used to grow nanoarchitectures for use in various applications such as electronics and electrocatalysis. Classical nucleation theory is a powerful theory that can be used to qualitatively capture nucleation thermodynamics for many systems, but has been found to be inappropriate to describe the initial stages of nucleation due to its inherent assumptions. Despite the development of atomistic nucleation theories, much still remains unclear about the early stages of metal deposition and the role of the atomic-scale structure on the surface. In this regard, atomistic simulations based on electronic structure methods can play an important role in the elucidation of the initial nucleation processes and mechanisms. This thesis will use density functional theory and its derived methods to characterise the adsorption of gold nanoclusters on polycrystalline boron-doped diamond surfaces. First, a detailed investigation into the most stable oxygenation state of diamond (110) surfaces is conducted, and the most stable surface phase is shown to comprise coexistent and adjacent carbonyl and ether functional groups. Afterwards, the structural stability of single gold atoms on oxygen-terminated diamond (110) surfaces is investigated, and defects and dopants within the diamond surface are shown to significantly increase the adsorption energy and diffusion barriers of single gold atoms. The atom-by-atom growth of gold dimers, trimers and tetramers on diamond surfaces is subsequently studied by analysing their stabilities and identifying preferred morphologies. Finally, machine learning-based interatomic potentials are developed to facilitate accurate and computationally efficient geometry optimisations, and are used to predict the structures and stabilities of larger gold nanoclusters ranging from 6 to 147 atoms. This thesis is part of a scientific effort to develop modern atomistic theories of atomby- atom particle growth, and will help guide the controlled design of nanostructured catalysts in the future

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography, supplement 125

This bibliography lists 407 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in July 1980

Energy. A continuing bibliography with indexes, issue 26, 1 April - 30 June 1980

This bibliography lists 1134 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System from April 1, 1980 through June 30, 1980