Painting, Popular Culture, Putrefaction: Depicting Tradition on the Eve of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

This dissertation focuses on painterly explorations of tradition, modernity that supposedly opposed it, and the putrefaction and decay inherent in each cultural pole, during the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War. These themes are manifest in the work of José Gutiérrez Solana (1886 – 1945), Maruja Mallo (1902 – 1995) and Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989), all active as painters in Madrid at the beginning of the 20th century. Although each came from provinces wherein regional identities were strongly asserted, their artistic output does not betray evidence of a particular interest in exploring these aspects of locality. Rather these artists, also all accomplished writers, were drawn toward the complex realities of everyday historical existence as they played out more generally in a Spanish context. They refused promotion of the stereotypical cultural elements of Spanish folklore just as they were suspicious of modernity and the supposed infrastructural and social improvements it involved. Solana, a member of the old guard of painting, celebrated by Madrid’s avant-garde circles, looks at Spain and sees and paints decay. His treatment of the theme in a sustained pictorial language is so recognizable that it engendered its own adjective: solanesco. Mallo and Dali, committed modernists, celebrate the diverse offerings of the machine age, which would seem to place them a world apart from the older artist. Moreover, in their paintings the younger artists, friends during their student years, were known for the application of an ever-changing panoply of figurative styles, further differentiating their work from Solana’s. Yet like Solana they recognized elements of decay and putrefaction within their environs, and their plastic considerations of these themes took on a decidedly solanesco character. This dissertation brings the paintings and writings of these artists into a productive conversation revealing not only shared attitudes concerning tradition in Spain during the first decades of the 20th century, but also allowing for a reframing of their work. I consider Solana’s oeuvre not as representative of the end of particular tradition of Spanish genre painting, but as a stimulus for avant-gardists Mallo and Dalí, usually discussed within the context of Surrealism.PhDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133504/1/amwieck_1.pd

Origins of conductance anomalies in a p-type GaAs quantum point contact

Low temperature transport measurements on a p-GaAs quantum point contact are presented which reveal the presence of a conductance anomaly that is markedly different from the conventional `0.7 anomaly'. A lateral shift by asymmetric gating of the conducting channel is utilized to identify and separate different conductance anomalies of local and generic origins experimentally. While the more generic 0.7 anomaly is not directly affected by changing the gate configuration, a model is proposed which attributes the additional conductance features to a gate-dependent coupling of the propagating states to localized states emerging due to a nearby potential imperfection. Finite bias conductivity measurements reveal the interplay between the two anomalies consistently with a two-impurity Kondo model

Measurement of the Transmission Phase of an Electron in a Quantum Two-Path Interferometer

A quantum two-path interferometer allows for direct measurement of the transmission phase shift of an electron, providing useful information on coherent scattering problems. In mesoscopic systems, however, the two-path interference is easily smeared by contributions from other paths, and this makes it difficult to observe the \textit{true} transmission phase shift. To eliminate this problem, multi-terminal Aharonov-Bohm (AB) interferometers have been used to derive the phase shift by assuming that the relative phase shift of the electrons between the two paths is simply obtained when a smooth shift of the AB oscillations is observed. Nevertheless the phase shifts using such a criterion have sometimes been inconsistent with theory. On the other hand, we have used an AB ring contacted to tunnel-coupled wires and acquired the phase shift consistent with theory when the two output currents through the coupled wires oscillate with well-defined anti-phase. Here, we investigate thoroughly these two criteria used to ensure a reliable phase measurement, the anti-phase relation of the two output currents and the smooth phase shift in the AB oscillation. We confirm that the well-defined anti-phase relation ensures a correct phase measurement with a quantum two-path interference. In contrast we find that even in a situation where the anti-phase relation is less well-defined, the smooth phase shift in the AB oscillation can still occur but does not give the correct transmission phase due to contributions from multiple paths. This indicates that the phase relation of the two output currents in our interferometer gives a good criterion for the measurement of the \textit{true} transmission phase while the smooth phase shift in the AB oscillation itself does not.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Spin coherence of holes in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells

The carrier spin coherence in a p-doped GaAs/(Al,Ga)As quantum well with a diluted hole gas has been studied by picosecond pump-probe Kerr rotation with an in-plane magnetic field. For resonant optical excitation of the positively charged exciton the spin precession shows two types of oscillations. Fast oscillating electron spin beats decay with the radiative lifetime of the charged exciton of 50 ps. Long lived spin coherence of the holes with dephasing times up to 650 ps. The spin dephasing time as well as the in-plane hole g factor show strong temperature dependence, underlining the importance of hole localization at cryogenic temperatures.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures in PostScript forma