Post Occupancy Evaluation an Academic Building: Lessons to Learn

Post occupancy evaluation (POE) is a tool used to determine the users’ satisfaction of a building after its completion. Most educational facilities do not conduct a post occupancy evaluation due to the absence of it in the contract agreement between the institution and architect. The client often chooses to bypass the POE to reduce the cost of the project. The purpose of this research is to conduct a POE of an academic building and identify areas of user dissatisfaction in order to enhance future projects. An academic building on a major, Midwestern university campus was remodeled during the academic year of 2014-15 followed by a POE with end users (students, faculty, and staff). The building houses the Dean’s office and two departments with a total of approximately 1400 Students and 65 Full-time faculty and staff. Personal interviews were conducted with the staff of the architectural firm responsible for the project (architect, Interior designer, and construction manager), and the university facility planning director and architect. Interviews and walk-throughs were also conducted with program directors and chairpersons. A questionnaire in three different formats to accommodate different majors was distributed to 750 students and 45 faculty and staff. Specialized areas included a student operated restaurant and kitchen, as well as interior design studios and apparel design labs. Overall, users were satisfied with the remodeled building with the exception of a few minor issues such as navigation through the building and temperature

Signatures of the excitonic memory effects in four-wave mixing processes in cavity polaritons

We report the signatures of the exciton correlation effects with finite memory time in frequency domain degenerate four-wave mixing (DFWM) in semiconductor microcavity. By utilizing the polarization selection rules, we discriminate instantaneous, mean field interactions between excitons with the same spins, long-living correlation due to the formation of biexciton state by excitons with opposite spins, and short-memory correlation effects in the continuum of unbound two-exciton states. The DFWM spectra give us the relative contributions of these effects and the upper limit for the time of the exciton-exciton correlation in the unbound two-exciton continuum. The obtained results reveal the basis of the cavity polariton scattering model for the DFWM processes in high-Q GaAs microcavity.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figur

Nuclear spin qubits in a pseudo-spin quantum chain

We analyze a quantum computer (QC) design based on nuclear spin qubits in a quasi-one-dimensional (1D) chain of non-Kramers doublet atoms. We explore the use of spatial symmetry breaking to obtain control over the local dynamics of a qubit. We also study the decoherence mechanisms at the single qubit level and the interactions mediated by the magnetic media. The design can be realized in $\textrm{PrBr}_{\textrm{3}-x}\textrm{F}_{x}$ with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure