In traditional cryptography, an attacker tries to infer a mathematical relationship between the inputs and outputs of a cryptosystem to recover secret information. With the advances in the theoretical basis of the cryptographic algorithms, this task became harder and attackers started to seek different approaches. A family of attacks known as side-channel attacks have focused on using information leaked through the underlying device when the cryptographic algorithm is running. For instance, a power analysis attack...

Persistent and bioaccumulative pollutants (PBPs) are continually introduced into the environment as a part of the massive ongoing chemical production that began several decades ago. The PBPs include several chemical families such as: industrial compounds, personal care products, agricultural chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. Most of these PBPs are neutral and more than 60% of them are halogenated. However the concentration distributions in the environment, partitioning properties, and environmental fate and behavior of many PBPs have not...

In 2050, the European commission plans to achieve actual energetic transition, which contributes in meeting the climate change challenges by moving away from the fossil fuels and by developing a competitive low-carbon economy. As a consequence, a foreseeable massive introduction of intermittent renewable energy sources in the transmission and distribution systems is going to occur, which will impact randomly the balance of the electric consumption and production, and could jeopardize the electric grid stability. In...

The studies presented in this thesis aim to extend the current knowledge and understanding of the mechanical behavior of nanocrystalline materials with respect to temperature- and time dependence. Free standing electrodeposited nanocrystalline nickel specimen with mean grain sizes in the order of 40nm are synthesized and investigated. A miniaturized in situ test rig is developed, capable of performing uniaxial tensile tests on dedicated miniaturized specimen. A novel displacement controlled in situ high temperature indentation system...

Calcium aluminate cements (CAC) are often used in combination with calcium sulfate and Portland cement for special applications where rapid setting, rapid drying and shrinkage compensation are required. A growing fraction of the clinker, which has the highest CO2 intensity, is being replaced by supplementary cementitious materials (SCM). These SCM are usually from industrial by-products such as slag, fly ashes or can simply be raw materials such as limestone. This project aims at replacing the...

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have been indispensable components of embedded systems and datacenter infrastructures. However, energy efficiency of FPGAs has become a hard barrier preventing their expansion to more application contexts, due to two physical limitations: (1) The massive usage of routing multiplexers causes delay and power overheads as compared to ASICs. To reduce their power consumption, FPGAs have to operate at low supply voltage but sacrifice performance because the transistors drive degrade when...

The use of spectrometry to provide information for neutron radiation protection has become an increasingly important activity over recent years. The need for spectral data arises because neither area survey instruments nor personal dosimeters give the correct dose equivalent results at all neutron energies. It is important therefore to know the spectra of the fields in which these devices are used. One of the systems most commonly employed in neutron spectrometry and dosimetry is the...

Selective functionalization of peptides and proteins has always been a valuable tool for the study and manipulation of biological processes. In this context, cysteines are of particular interest. Their intrinsic high nucleophilicity makes these amino acids excellent targets for peptides and proteins modification. As a result, cysteine labeling techniques have been extensively investigated. Nevertheless, while bioconjugation requires high efficiency, selectivity and kinetic under mild and aqueous conditions, most of the reported methodologies exhibit significant limitations....

Thermal conductivity (k) plays an essential role in functional devices. In some cases, high value is required to transfer heat efficiently. In others, low k assists in maintaining a temperature gradient necessary for device operation. It is profitable to design materials where one can tune k in a broad range according to its function. Beyond functionality, k is a fundamental property of matter, and a fantastic probe to assess vibrational dynamics and electronic structure in...

Magnetic resonance images acquired at the highest strength of the main magnetic field B0 are of interest since they highly benefit from an increased signal to noise ratio. At ultra high field strengths (B0 > 7 Tesla) images with more contrast and higher resolution can thus be obtained, opening new insights into the understanding of organ structures and disease evolutions. One of the main challenges of ultra high field MR imaging is that the wavelength...

Cyclic peptide therapeutics fill the gap between small molecules (<500 Da) and biologics (>5000 Da) as a separate class of drugs, combining the advantages of both in terms of high selectivity, bioavailability, synthetic accessibility and low toxicity. However, their conformational flexibility and proteolytic instability results in fast metabolism. Therefore, modification of their chemical and structural properties at the proteolytically vulnerable sites can circumvent these deficiencies. Several strategies exist to stabilise peptides through local or global...

In tokamak fusion plasmas, micro-turbulence transport is known to be the cause of large losses of heat and particles. The present work deals with the study of electrostatic micro-turbulence transport driven by instabilities of essentially two types: the ion temperature gradient (ITG) modes and the trapped electron modes (TEM). The plasma is described within the gyrokinetic framework, which permits to save computational resources compared to the classical Vlasov kinetic description. In gyrokinetic simulations of fusion...

High energy demands of our society stimulate the development of sustainable tech-nologies, such as those based on solar energy conversion or photovoltaics. Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are an emerging photovoltaic technology that consist of the perov-skite film positioned between the electron transport and hole transport layer, while the photovoltaic properties are determined by each component of the structure, as well as the corresponding interfaces. Since 2009, power conversion efficiency of solar cells has already achieved...

Minimal nonlinear dynamic neuron models of the generic bifurcation type may provide the middle way between the detailed models favored by experimentalists and the simplified threshold and rate model of computational neuroscientists. This thesis investigates to which extent generic bifurcation type models grasp the essential dynamical features that may turn out play a role in cooperative neural behavior. The thesis considers two neuron models, of increasing complexity, and one model of synaptic interactions. The FitzHugh-Nagumo...

Owing to their unique antimicrobial properties, silver nanoparticles (AgNP) are among the most widely used engineered nanoparticles in a variety of consumer products and medical applications. Their resulting release into the aquatic environment raises concern about potential adverse effects in aquatic organisms. This thesis therefore focused on the interaction of AgNP with cells derived from fish gill, specifically a fish gill cell line from rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), in an integrative way, starting from AgNP...

Spatial Justice as Pragmatic. An Experimental Approach to the Reorganisation of the Swiss Hospital Map. Since the reorganisation of hospital systems are on the agenda in most developed countries, this research project aims to know and render geographically precise citizens' arguments, with the identification and implementation of what could be considered as spatial justice as the issue. The theoretical notion of spatial justice is a recent one, and this new reality encounters another one, that...