The past decade has witnessed rapid proliferation of wireless communications, which continues to enjoy a booming growth driven by unprecedented technology advances and strong consumer demands. New wireless technologies are being developed to provide people with high-speed low-cost multi-mode multi-task wireless communication environments with high quality of service (QoS). Of all the proposed wireless techniques, ultra wideband (UWB) is a promising technology, which becomes a front contender for various extremely high data throughput wireless applications, particularly for wireless video streaming and wireless sea-volume data transformation typically requiring a data speed up to several giga bit per second (Gbps).

This dissertation describes research and integrated circuit (IC) implementation of a single-full-band carrier-free impulse-radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) system. The IR-UWB transceiver adopts a simple-most-digital architecture with low design complexity, aiming to achieve the whole IR-UWB system-on-a-chip (SoC) in standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process. Detail analysis for the IR-UWB system architecture is provided. Critical circuit building blocks, such as pulse generator (PG), BPSK modulation, receiver front-end low-noise amplifier (LNA) and correlator, are described both theoretically and experimentally.

Adequate on-chip electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection is required for all IC chips and ESD protection design for radio-frequency (RF) IC emerges as a challenging design task as semiconductor IC technologies continue to advance into the very-deep-sub-micron (VDSM) regime. ESD protection for IR-UWB ICs is more challenging compared with narrow band IC designs. In this thesis, a novel ESD-RFIC co-design technique for UWB ICs was developed and experimentally verified. The interactions between ESD protection unit and core UWB IC were thoroughly investigated. The IR-UWB transmitter, front-end LNA and correlator ICs were designed with full ESD protection using the new ESD-RFIC co-design technique in this work.

While chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy has emerged as a promising method for cancer therapy by engineering autologous T cells to redirect them to the specific tumor-associate antigen and kill the tumor cells, these engineered T cells also have “on-target, off-tumor” toxicity, which can harm normal tissues and can be life-threatening. The non-specific activity inspires us to control CAR expression with high spatiotemporal precisions. Therefore, we present the design of heat inducible CAR, which can upregulate CAR expression after heat stimulation. The thesis introduces the study of heat inducible anti-prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) CAR T cells, which has been proved to be able to sense heat and produce CARs for the targeting of prostate cancer cells and triggering activation of T cells. The study can serve as a foundation for broader application in solid tumor therapy.

Jet tomography has become a powerful tool for the study of properties of dense matter in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. I will discuss recent progresses in the phenomenological study of jet quenching, including momentum, colliding energy and nuclear size dependence of single hadron suppression, modification of dihadron correlations and the soft hadron distribution associated with a quenched jet.

Similar to the radiative parton energy loss due to gluon bremsstrahlung, elastic energy loss of a parton undergoing multiple scattering in a finite medium is demonstrated to be sensitive to interference effect. The interference between amplitudes of elastic scattering via a gluon exchange and that of gluon radiation reduces the effective elastic energy loss in a finite medium and gives rise to a non-trivial length dependence. The reduction is most significant for a propagation length L< 4/\pi T in a medium with a temperature T. Though the finite size effect is not significant for the average parton propagation in the most central heavy-ion collisions, it will affect the centrality dependence of its effect on jet quenching.

It is essential for intelligent agents to not only excel in isolated situations but also coordinate with partners to achieve common goals. Current Multi-agent Coordination methods rely on Reinforcement Learning techniques to train agents that can work together effectively. On the other hand, agents based on Large Language Models (LLM) have shown promising reasoning and planning capabilities in single-agent tasks, at times outperforming RL-based methods. In this study, we build and assess the effectiveness of LLM agents in various coordination scenarios. We introduce the LLM-Coordination Framework to enable LLMs to complete coordination tasks. We evaluate our method on three game environments and organize the evaluation into five aspects: Theory of Mind, Situated Reasoning, Sustained Coordination, Robustness to Partners, and Explicit Assistance. First, the evaluation of the Theory of Mind and Situated Reasoning reveals the capabilities of LLM to infer the partner's intention and reason actions accordingly. Then, the evaluation around Sustained Coordination and Robustness to Partners further showcases the ability of LLMs to coordinate with an unknown partner in complex long-horizon tasks, outperforming Reinforcement Learning baselines. Lastly, to test Explicit Assistance, which refers to the ability of an agent to offer help proactively, we introduce two novel layouts into the Overcooked-AI benchmark, examining if agents can prioritize helping their partners, sacrificing time that could have been spent on their tasks. This research underscores the promising capabilities of LLMs in sophisticated coordination environments and reveals the potential of LLMs in building strong real-world agents for multi-agent coordination.

Medium modification of jet fragmentation function due to multiple scattering and induced gluon radiation leads directly to jet quenching or suppression of leading particle distribution from jet fragmentation. One can extract an effective total parton energy loss which can be related to the total transverse momentum broadening. For an expanding medium, both are shown to be sensitive to the initial parton density and formation time. Therefore, one can extract the initial parton density and formation time from simultaneous measurements of parton energy loss and transverse momentum broadening. Implication of the recent experimental data on effects of detailed balance in parton energy loss is also discussed.

Recent progresses in the study of jet modification inhot medium and their consequences in high-energy heavy-ioncollisions are reviewed. In particular, I will discuss energy lossfor propagating heavy quarks and the resulting modifiedfragmentation function. Medium modification of the parton fragmentation function due to quark recombination are formulated within finite temperature field theory and their implication onthe search for deconfined quark-gluon plasma is also discussed.