My PhD thesis: Characterizing quantum-dot cellular automata

Overview

This repository contains everything related to my PhD thesis:

• Latex source files (directory tex)
• Graphics (directory gfx)
• Graphs (directory plots)
• Numerical data to produce the graphs (directory experiments)
• IPython notebooks which generate the graphs from the data (directory notebooks)
• Corrections from my committee (directory corrections)
• Different versions of the thesis for printing and viewing (files *.pdf)
• Makefile

Variants

The following variants of the thesis exist:

• onesided: One-sided.
• twosided: Two-sided.
• print: Suitable for printing, no coloured links.
• fgsr: Complies with the University of Alberta's FGSR guidelines. One-sided, no coloured links, and an ugly title page (as required by the FGSR).

For reading on a screen, phd_thesis_onesided.pdf is the preferred variant; for printing the preferred variant is phd_thesis_twosided_print.pdf. The final version as submitted to the University of Alberta's FGSR is Ritter_Burkhard_201407_PhD.pdf, equivalent to phd_thesis_fgsr.pdf but converted to PDF/A format (using a trial version of Adobe Acrobat).

Reproducing data and graphs

It should be possible to reproduce all data and graphs. The "numerical" experiments in experiments contain not only the data, but also Python run scripts to produce the data. My Python packages coma and qca are required to run the simulations. Both are available under an open license. All analysis and graphs are in the IPython notebooks in notebooks. Again, the Python packages coma and qca are required to run those notebooks.

Latex

The Makefile will build all the different versions of the thesis. E.g.

make

There is also a make target "nicenames" to get more verbosely named pdf files.

make nicenames

Most of the used Latex packages are pretty standard, with the possible exception of "glossaries", which, on Ubuntu, is in the package "texlive-latex-extra".

The main latex file is tex/phd_thesis.tex. Different variants are built from tex/phd_thesis_[variant].tex and simply set some flags and then include the main phd_thesis.tex file.

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Burkhard Ritter ([email protected] ), September 2014.