PhD Thesis Publications As part of planning ahead for a PhD in Theoretical Physics, I wanted to read some of the published PhD thesis, so as to get an idea of choice of topics and the depth of research. Unfortunately, although I could find the list of Thesis Topics done by previous PhD students in institutes like Harvard or Berkeley, I could rarely find any pdf copies nor DOI for a vast number of thesis papers.
I was wondering if anyone could suggest me sources where I could find PhD thesis pdf versions in Theoretical / Mathematical Physics in general.  Also, is there any reason why PhD Thesis are not made public, or is it that they didn't care to digitalize it? In particular I am referring to Harvard or Berkeley.
 A: Most PhD theses are internal university publications, rather than journal publications (though in many cases the material contained in the dissertation is also submitted as one or more journal publications). So to find the thesis itself, you'll have to figure out how to navigate that university's library. When I finished my PhD a dozen years ago, I had the option of preparing a physical, printed and bound copy of my dissertation to live on the shelf on the library's sixth floor, or of submitting an entirely digital document, or both.  That might have been the first year that a paper copy was not required by my university's library.  I chose all-digital; I kind of regret not making a few archival-quality paper copies.
Learning to use a research library is a non-trivial part of getting a PhD. A comment under your question links to the Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard database, but the comment link goes to a list of all open-access documents deposited from the Physics department, most of which are not theses. If you choose "Communities & Collections" > "Faculty of Arts & Sciences" > "FAS Theses and Dissertations" then you can browse just theses and dissertations, but you can't limit them by department, and they only seem to display in groups of three. There is probably a better interface than this that I haven’t found in ten minutes of looking.
For the Berkeley library, search their local catalog for “berkeley dissertations physics” (source).
You can also use databases like ProQuest or WorldCat which catalogue dissertations in their own special category; you may need to find a library with a subscription to get full use of those databases.
