Creativity, Productivity, Aging: The Case of Benjamin Britten

British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) died at the age of only six- ty-three, but ill health in his last years parachuted him into what he himself saw as older age and its consequences. His story of challenge and adaptation allows us to examine the particular impact of illness and impairment on the role of productivity in definitions of creativity. Composing was the life blood of this prolific artist, known for his work ethic and professionalism. Though he completed only nine independent works after his operation, the last works stand as some of his best creations. Britten’s sense of selfhood depended to a large extent upon this self-iden- tification as an active working composer. While he retained this to the end, his other life narrative had to be abandoned with his sudden entry into older age: that of being ever youthful. His self-fashioning as youthful and his tastes— in food, humor, habits—were formed in boyhood and never changed. Yet, through his letters and creative work, Britten reconstructed in the face of the challenges of aging that evolving life narrative of himself as the professional “working composer” that enabled his continuing creativity

Novel methods to predict solid-state material properties

Solid-state materials find ubiquitous use in modern technology - from semiconductors in electronics to steel in buildings and superconductors in MRI machines. Theoretical understanding of the atomic-scale behaviour of these materials can be leveraged to design new materials with desirable properties. In this thesis, we investigate the challenges that arise when this is attempted in practice. Accurate and inexpensive methods to tackle the atomic-scale problem are a prerequisite for materials discovery. We begin with a description of existing methods. This is followed by the development of a Monte Carlo method to calculate expectation values from the many-body picture without the need for a trial wavefunction, which is both a fundamental, and practical, limitation in existing techniques. Having explored first-principles methods, we turn to their use in understanding materials, beginning with an investigation of the structure of Lithium. Structure searching calculations result in a mixed-phase model at low temperatures, in good agreement with previous experimental and theoretical results. The quasi-harmonic treatment of finite-temperature thermodynamics is extended to include anharmonic nuclear vibrations, which are shown to not alter the phase diagram despite the small mass of the Li atoms. Focus then shifts towards leveraging these same methods to discover novel superconductors. This begins with an investigation of the LaH$_{10}$ and YH$_{10}$ compounds, where a new hexagonal phase of LaH$_{10}$ provides an explanation for recent experimental measurements. Machine-learning techniques and novel screening methods are then employed to discover hydrides of Rb and Cs that exhibit superconductivity at significantly lower pressures than LaH$_{10}$. Optimizations to, and automation of, the workflow then enables the discovery of superconductors on an unprecedented scale, leading to hundreds of new high-temperature superconductors. Throughout the thesis, the importance of structures that are saddle-points of the energy landscape becomes apparent. The thesis closes with the development of a new algorithm to locate saddle-points that requires no additional information beyond that used by the cheapest existing methods. This thesis demonstrates that there is progress to be made at every stage of the first-principles materials discovery process and highlights that improving the workflow itself is a non-trivial, but fruitful, pursuit

Creativity, Productivity, Aging

British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) died at the age of only six- ty-three, but ill health in his last years parachuted him into what he himself saw as older age and its consequences. His story of challenge and adaptation allows us to examine the particular impact of illness and impairment on the role of productivity in definitions of creativity. Composing was the life blood of this prolific artist, known for his work ethic and professionalism. Though he completed only nine independent works after his operation, the last works stand as some of his best creations. Britten’s sense of selfhood depended to a large extent upon this self-iden- tification as an active working composer. While he retained this to the end, his other life narrative had to be abandoned with his sudden entry into older age: that of being ever youthful. His self-fashioning as youthful and his tastes— in food, humor, habits—were formed in boyhood and never changed. Yet, through his letters and creative work, Britten reconstructed in the face of the challenges of aging that evolving life narrative of himself as the professional “working composer” that enabled his continuing creativity

Monitoring the reservoir geochemistry of the Pembina Cardium CO2 monitoring project, Drayton Valley, Alberta

AbstractThe Pembina Cardium CO2 Monitoring Project in central Alberta was built to assess the Cardium formation’s storage potential for CO2 and stimulate oil production. Three baseline trips and 28 monitoring trips were undertaken over a three year period from February 2005 to March 2008 to collect fluids and gas from eight producing wells. Chemical and isotope analyses were conducted on the fluid and gas samples to determine the changes in the geochemistry of the pilot area and to assess the fate of the injected CO2. It was found that within 67 days after commencement of CO2 injection, injection CO2 break-through occurred in four of the eight monitoring wells. Further, CO2 dissolution was observed in three of the four monitoring wells in this time frame and in one well, 12–12, both CO2 dissolution and calcite mineral dissolution were observed within 67 days of the onset of CO2 injection. Within 18 months siderite dissolution and calcite dissolution were observed in all four of these wells. In the remaining four wells, CO2 dissolution was observed, indicated by a slow decreased in pH from 7.5 to 7.2 with no significant change in total alkalinity or calcium concentration in the water. Inter-well communications were observed between wells 08–11 and 12–12 by means of residual “kill fluid” migration occurring from well 12–12 to well 08–11

Topological Analysis of Functions on Arbitrary Grids: Applications to Quantum Chemistry

Algorithms are presented for performing a topological analysis of an arbitrary function, evaluated on an arbitrary grid of points. These algorithms work strictly by post-processing the data and require no additional function evaluations. This is achieved by connecting the grid points with a neighborhood graph, allowing the topological analysis to be recast as a problem in the graph theory. The flexibility of the approach is demonstrated for various applications involving analysis of the charge and magnetically induced current densities in molecules, where features of the neighborhood graph are found to correspond to chemically relevant topographical properties, such as Bader charges. These properties converge using orders of magnitude fewer grid points than uniform-grid approaches while exhibiting an appealing O[N log(N)] scaling of the computational cost. The issue of grid bias is discussed in the context of graph-based algorithms and strategies for avoiding this bias are presented. Python implementations of the algorithms are provided

Interactions of CO2 with Formation Waters, Oil and Minerals and CO2 storage at the Weyburn IEA EOR site, Saskatchewan, Canada

The Weyburn oil field in Saskatchewan, Canada, is hosted in Mississippian carbonates and has been subject to injection of CO2 since 2000. A detailed mineralogy study was completed as the basis for modeling of mineral storage of injected CO2. Combining the mineralogy with kinetic reaction path models and water chemistry allows estimates of mineral storage of CO2 over 50 years of injection. These results, combined with estimates of pore volume, solubility of CO2 in oil and saline formation waters, and the initial and final pore volume saturation with respect to oil, saline water and gas/supercritical fluid allow an estimate of CO2 stored in saline water, oil and minerals over 50 years of CO2 injection. Most injected CO2 is stored in oil (6.5•106 to 1.3•107 tonnes), followed closely by storage in supercritical CO2 (7.2•106 tonnes) with saline formation water (1.5 - 2•106 tonnes) and mineral storage (2 - 6•105 tonnes) being the smallest sinks. If the mineral dawsonite forms, as modeling suggests, the majority of CO2 dissolved in oil and salineformation water will be redistributed into minerals over a period of approximately 5000 years. The composition of produced fluids from a baseline sampling program, when compared to produced fluids taken three years after injection commenced, suggest that dawsonite is increasingly stable as pH decreases due to CO2 injection. The results suggest that hydrocarbon reservoirs that contain low gravity oil and little or no initial gas saturation prior to CO2 injection, may store the majority of injected CO2 solubilized in oil, making such reservoirs the preferred targets for combined enhanced oil recovery-CO2 storage projects