QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 4 matching student topics
Displaying 1–4 of 4 results
The role of complex singularities in geometric flows
A popular topic in differential geometry involves studying the singularity structure of geometric flows. The most well-known example is mean curvature flow. In this example, surfaces evolve according to a flow rule that relates the speed of the surface to its curvature. Certain surfaces will evolve until singularities occur in finite time, and these singularities can be studied using similarity solutions and asymptotic analysis.In this project, a different perspective is applied to these problems, namely the use of complex variable …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Separating nonlinear optical effects in optical limiters
Optical limiting uses a medium’s nonlinear response to allow light at low intensities to be transmitted, but restricts transmission at high intensities so as to safeguard sensitive detectors including the eye. A popular nonlinear process used in optical limiters is two photon absorption where two high intensity light photons are simultaneously absorbed thereby reducing the light transmission through the medium. Unfortunately, in gold nanoparticle optical limiters a second nonlinear process can arise – saturated absorption which leads to an increase …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Weakly nonlinear water waves in the complex plane
Weakly nonlinear waves are described by dispersive pdes, such as the famous Korteweg–De Vries (KdV) equation. These models have applications to a variety of phenomena in physics, including the propagation of water waves, but they are also interesting from a mathematical perspective because they can have special properties.While the KdV equation and its variants are well-studied in the literature, a new approach is to attempt to learn about wave propagation by investigating solution behaviour in complex plane. For example, there …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Curvature dependence of reaction-diffusion wave front speed with nonlinear diffusion.
Reaction-diffusion waves describe the progression in space of wildfires, species invasions, epidemic spread, and biological tissue growth. When diffusion is linear, these waves are known to advance at a rate that strongly depends on the curvature of the wave fronts. How nonlinear diffusion affects the curvature dependence of the progression rate of these wavefronts remains unknown.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
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