ABSTRACT - DRUM - University of Maryland

Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Das Sarma
for his support during the years, as well as his guidance towards the right direction
at various stages of my graduate research. This thesis would not be possible at all
without his insight and advice. I also thank Professor Galitski for collaborations
and useful advise as my initial advisor at Maryland; I had benefited tremendously
from discussing physics with other colleagues at Condensed Matter Theory Center
and Joint Quantum Institute: Roman Lutchyn, Kai Sun, Qi Zhou, Xin Wang, Shuo
Yang, Christopher Varney, Dimitri Culcer, Maxim Dzero, Jay Sau, Xiong-Jun Liu,
Chenjie Wang, So Takei and Alejandro Lobos.
I would like to express my deep
apprecitation to Roman Lutchyn for collaborations and all the help.
I had the chance to work as a research intern at Microsoft Station Q and a
graduate fellow in KITP. Interaction with physicists in Santa Barbara had always
been very enjoyable and fruitful. I learnt a lot of “exotic” physics, which is characteristic
of Santa Barbara, from enlightening discussions with Zheng-Cheng Gu,
Hong-Cheng Jiang, Lukasz Fidkowski, Chetan Nayak, Zhenghan Wang, Bela Bauer
and Matthew Fisher.
I’m fortunate to make many great friends in the Physics Department whom I
learnt a lot from and spent good time with, especially Brandon Anderson and Chien-
Hung Lin. Brandon had been my office mate for almost two years and it was a lot
of fun to chat about physics and non-physics stuff like basketball. Chien-Hung Lin
is always there for stimulating discussions with his impressive enthusiasm on almost
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