Doctoral School

Reading date: 15/04/2026

• JEBBAD, RAGHDA: Impacts of climate change on the ports of the Southwestern coast of the Alboran Sea
  
  Author: JEBBAD, RAGHDA
  Thesis file: (contact the Doctoral School to confirm you have a valid doctoral degree and to get the link to the thesis)
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN CIVIL ENGINEERING
  Department: Barcelona School of Civil Engineering (ETSECCPB)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 18/02/2026
  Reading date: 15/04/2026
  Reading time: 11:00
  Reading place: ETSECCPB, Campus Nord BarcelonaC/ Jordi Girona, edificio B1 aula 005
  Thesis director: MÖSSO ARANDA, OCTAVIO CESAR | SIERRA PEDRICO, JUAN PABLO
  Thesis abstract: Climate change is altering the coastal conditions that ports are designed to withstand, through sea-level rise and changes in storm-driven wave regimes. These changes can reduce operability, increase overtopping impacts on exposed structures, and affect harbour agitation and breakwater performance. This thesis develops an applied and integrated framework to translate offshore climate projections into port‑scale impact indicators and adaptation pathway planning for Moroccan Mediterranean ports along the southwestern Alboran Sea.Offshore wave conditions are characterised using a four‑dataset Med-CORDEX ensemble under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, and propagated to the nearshore with a regional SWAN model featuring port‑scale nesting. Combined with sea level rise projections, these forcings are used to quantify four port‑impact indicators: berthing inoperability based on still‑water‑level exceedance relative to minimum freeboard requirements; wave overtopping discharge at exposed structures; harbour agitation exceedance within the basin; and breakwater stability under extreme forcing. The overtopping assessment is applied across eight ports to establish relative exposure and identify the most exposed sites. Berthing inoperability and an indicative dock‑raising cost estimate are developed for Tangier‑Med. A multi‑process assessment is carried out for Al Hoceima, together with an applied adaptation‑pathways case study that links impact levels to response options over time. The thesis also develops an uncertainty‑evaluation framework to support the interpretation of wave‑driven port impact projections.
  

• PUJOL CLOSA, MARIA DEL PILAR: Wave Propagation in Hyperbolic Metamaterial Waveguides
  
  Author: PUJOL CLOSA, MARIA DEL PILAR
  Thesis file: (contact the Doctoral School to confirm you have a valid doctoral degree and to get the link to the thesis)
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN PHOTONICS
  Department: Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 11/03/2026
  Reading date: 15/04/2026
  Reading time: 10:00
  Reading place: ICFO Auditorium
  Thesis director: ARTIGAS GARCIA, DAVID
  Thesis abstract: Low-loss waveguides are essential for energy-efficient photonic circuits, optical communications, and sensing applications. Over the past century, two lossless phenomena—Dyakonov modes and Bound States in the Continuum (BICs)—have been discovered in anisotropic waveguides, where permittivities differ but share the same sign. Hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) exhibit extreme anisotropy, with ordinary and extraordinary permittivities of opposite signs, enabling unconventional light manipulation. Their unique properties have attracted broad interest for applications including subdiffraction imaging, spontaneous emission control, and enhanced light-matter interactions. This raises a fundamental question: can extreme hyperbolic anisotropy support novel confinement mechanisms or new regimes of lossless propagation? Prior research on HMM waveguides has been constrained to simplified models or propagation along principal axes, leaving systematic exploration of arbitrary propagation directions, and the phenomena they may reveal, as a critical gap.To address this gap, this thesis develops a semi-analytical computational framework that combines a transfer-matrix formulation with a complex-plane Newton-Raphson root finder, enabling stable tracking of guided and leaky modes for arbitrary propagation directions. This tool allows systematic exploration of a wide range of parameters and configurations previously difficult to study.This thesis provides the most comprehensive investigation to date of light propagation in planar HMM waveguides. For the first time, the work analyzes both type I and type II HMM waveguides across all in-plane propagation directions and with arbitrary optic axis orientations. The analysis reveals how hyperbolic anisotropy fundamentally influences polarization, confinement, polarization exchange between modes, mode ordering, radiation mechanisms, and slow light arising from topological transitions. This establishes general trends, identifies new guiding regimes, and maps the landscape of wave phenomena in these extreme anisotropic systems.The exploration of leaky modes enabled a key discovery: Dirac points embedded in the Continuum (DECs), a novel class of topological degeneracy in non-Hermitian systems. DECs emerge when a symmetry-protected BIC and an interferometric BIC intersect linearly. At this intersection, the system exhibits a real eigenvalue, two orthogonal modes, and zero radiation loss—locally Hermitian behavior despite being embedded in a non-Hermitian system. The presence of both BICs suppresses Exceptional Points (EPs) and collapses the Fermi arc to a single point. Because DECs arise from universal BIC interactions rather than material-specific properties, this phenomenon extends beyond hyperbolic media, with implications in the fields of topological photonics and non-Hermitian physics.This thesis demonstrates the framework’s generality and reliability through application to anisotropic liquid-crystal waveguides, where predicted BIC trajectories match experimental observations, and to $\sigma$-near-zero metasurfaces, where the framework accurately reproduces published dispersion diagrams. These validations confirm its applicability beyond hyperbolic systems.This thesis establishes a comprehensive theoretical and computational understanding of wave propagation in planar HMM waveguides for both type I and type II configurations and discovers DECs as a novel physical phenomenon with implications beyond hyperbolic media. By revealing how extreme anisotropy enables new guiding regimes and loss suppression, this work advances the understanding of light confinement in open, strongly anisotropic systems and provides new routes for designing low-loss photonic devices.
  

Reading date: 16/04/2026

• PUCH GINER, IGNASI: Optimization of Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics Techniques for Receptor–Ligand Binding Studies
  
  Author: PUCH GINER, IGNASI
  Thesis file: (contact the Doctoral School to confirm you have a valid doctoral degree and to get the link to the thesis)
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN COMPUTATIONAL AND APPLIED PHYSICS
  Department: Department of Physics (FIS)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 16/02/2026
  Reading date: 16/04/2026
  Reading time: 10:00
  Reading place: Sala TeleensenyamentEdifici B3 - Ricardo Valle Sala 103 Planta 1Campus Nord
  Thesis director: GUALLAR TASIES, VÍCTOR
  Thesis abstract: Drug discovery is a complex and resource-intensive process that requires the identification of molecular candidates with optimal binding properties to their corresponding targets. Computational techniques play a central role in streamlining this process by predicting biomolecular interactions, optimizing molecular properties, and accelerating early-stage drug development.This thesis focuses on advancing computational strategies for biomolecular modeling, integrating molecular mechanics techniques—such as Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations—with state-of-the-art machine learning tools. The objective is to improve scoring functions, enhance simulation accuracy, and develop a framework that enables the application of these methods to real-world pharmacological challenges.A key contribution of this work is the systematic characterization of the PELE (Protein Energy Landscape Exploration) simulation framework, including the rationalization of binding energy estimators and the assessment of their predictive performance and computational efficiency. These benchmarks address existing knowledge gaps in scoring functions and facilitate more accurate predictions of protein–ligand interactions, thereby supporting the prioritization of promising molecules for experimental evaluation.Beyond methodological advances, this thesis applies the developed computational approaches to pharmacologically relevant case studies. The structural characterization of the amino acid transporter Asc1/CD98hc was carried out using an integrated computational pipeline, providing new insights into its binding and transport mechanisms. Furthermore, the study of the Meis1–Hoxb13 transcription factors explores novel drug–DNA interactions with potential implications for targeted therapies. Another application focuses on Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, where computational simulations contributed to understanding GDAP1–LAMP1 tethering dysfunction and possible therapeutic interventions. These examples highlight the versatility of the proposed computational strategies across diverse biological contexts.The results of this research propose a practical framework for improving ligand-binding predictions. The explored methodologies strengthen molecular modeling by combining physics-based techniques with varying speed–accuracy trade-offs and data-driven approaches, bridging the gap between traditional simulation methods and AI-driven predictions. The findings have implications for both academic research and industrial drug discovery, offering scalable and generalizable solutions for structure-based and ligand-based design.
  

Reading date: 17/04/2026

• PERA I FERRERUELA, JORDI: Itinerant ferromagnetism and polarons in SU(N) Fermi gases
  
  Author: PERA I FERRERUELA, JORDI
  Thesis file: (contact the Doctoral School to confirm you have a valid doctoral degree and to get the link to the thesis)
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN COMPUTATIONAL AND APPLIED PHYSICS
  Department: Department of Physics (FIS)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 13/03/2026
  Reading date: 17/04/2026
  Reading time: 11:00
  Reading place: Aula Graus, Edifici C4, Planta baixa, Campus Nord - UPC
  Thesis director: CASULLERAS AMBROS, JOAQUIN | BORONAT MEDICO, JORDI
  Thesis abstract: This thesis presents an in-depth study of the magnetic properties of repulsive Fermi gases in the continuum. Once a purely academic subject, Fermi gases can now be realized experimentally in ultracold atom laboratories, making a theoretical understanding of their behavior both timely and necessary. Our analysis focuses primarily on whether such systems favor a transition to a ferromagnetic state or remain paramagnetic. As technique, we use a perturbative approach that systematically includes the effects of higher-order terms, temperature, and mass imbalance. In the final part of the thesis, we also study the Fermi polaron problem. First, we examine a simple case: a Fermi gas with equal masses at zero temperature up to second order in perturbation theory. As this chapter can be considered an introduction to the magnetic phenomenology of Fermi gases, we compare the outcome of our second order analysis with the well-known scenario of the Stoner model, which is the first-order model. In both cases, a ferromagnetic transition always occurs. Moving from the Stoner model to the second-order one, there are two differences to point out: the continuous phase transition observed at S=1/2 becomes discontinuous, and the ferromagnetic phase arises at lower densities. The next step is to improve the description of the potential interaction. We do so by going up to third order in perturbation theory. However, this improvement comes with a cost; as we now have more information about the potential, the complexity of the problem is higher. We split the analysis into two parts. We first consider a hard-sphere potential without p-wave intra-particle interaction. We observe the same tendencies that we encounter when we move from first order to second order, but, more importantly, we recover the continuous phase transition for S=1/2. Having now at hand the third-order energies, we explore a wide range of different potentials. Surprisingly, for each spin S we observe a richness of scenarios: continuous transitions, discontinuous ones, combinations of the other two, stairs-like cases, and even, no transition at all. Next, we introduce another variable to our problem: the temperature. Thermal effects do not eliminate the ferromagnetic phase for any potential, but they clearly go against it: either they force the system to remain paramagnetic or make the transition to occur at higher densities, which probably hinders the ferromagnetic phase. Nevertheless, larger spins better resist these thermal effects. Additionally, temperature reduces the diversity of magnetic behavior, leading to more universal patterns: continuous transitions for S=1/2 and discontinuous ones for larger spins. Up to this point, we assumed that all the particles have the same mass. The next step is to consider different relations of masses. Adding another variable increases even more the complexity of the problem and, hence, we only inspect it at second order and at zero temperature. As we have commented above, at second order there is always a ferromagnetic transition. Now, this is also the case, but with some nuances. The massive particles are always the promoted ones, even at low densities. For S=1/2, this is the end of the story. But for larger spins, as we can have many mass relations, we can obtain lots of configurations, which may give us more tunability. Finally, we move beyond magnetic properties to study the Fermi polaron problem: an impurity immersed in a Fermi sea. We focus on how impurities affect our system. We examine the main properties of the Fermi polaron at third order and the effects of mass. Specifically, the massive polaron works just fine, but the light polaron is unstable. Altogether, this work offers a detailed and thorough exploration of Fermi gases, providing both qualitative insight and quantitative predictions relevant to experimental efforts.
  

• PINEDO VILCAHUAMÁN, PAUL JOSÉ: Simulation of blast-induced liquefaction with an unconventional elastoplasticity model
  
  Author: PINEDO VILCAHUAMÁN, PAUL JOSÉ
  Thesis file: (contact the Doctoral School to confirm you have a valid doctoral degree and to get the link to the thesis)
  Programme: DOCTORAL DEGREE IN GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING
  Department: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DECA)
  Mode: Normal
  Deposit date: 19/03/2026
  Reading date: pending
  Reading time: pending
  Reading place: pending
  Thesis director: ARROYO ALVAREZ DE TOLEDO, MARCOS | GENS SOLE, ANTONIO
  Thesis abstract: Soil liquefaction is a phenomenon that typically occurs following earthquakes, although it may also be triggered by non-seismic loading. During liquefaction, a substantial and rapid reduction in the strength and stiffness of soils occurs due to pore pressure generation. Soil liquefaction is systematically investigated in the laboratory using element and model tests; however, certain aspects that prove critical in field liquefaction (e.g., soil fabric, dynamic loading, drainage conditions and ageing effects) are challenging to reproduce in the laboratory. This has prompted researchers to investigate liquefaction directly in the field by means of blast tests, i.e. experiments in which liquefaction is induced by controlled explosive detonations.Numerical simulation is nowadays frequently employed to simulate the onset and development of soil liquefaction. In this context, the primary objective of the present study is the numerical simulation of a controlled blast-induced liquefaction test conducted at a silty sand site in Bondeno, Ferrara, Italy. To this end, a constitutive model named CASM-SM has been implemented to reproduce soil behaviour during cyclic loading, having been recast within a subloading plasticity framework. The modelling of soil behaviour under blast loading is challenging due to several factors, including the characteristics of soil deformation close to the explosive, soil stiffness degradation, high frequencies in acceleration records (exceeding 100 Hz), and a significant increase of excess pore water pressure over a short timeframe (on the order of milliseconds). The Bondeno blast test simulation served as an excellent platform for validating the performance of the CASM-SM model. Particular attention was paid to the reproduction of the acceleration records, as well as velocities, Arias intensity, Fourier spectra, and spectral acceleration. Moreover, excess pore water pressures were compared against pore pressure transducer data. The results obtained from the numerical simulation provide relevant insights into blast-induced liquefaction within the silty sand layer.