Bi-weekly student newspaper from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas that includes local, state and campus news along with advertising.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Authority of a county judge to unilaterally grant access to county financial records to a volunteer financial consultant (RQ-0908-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether an individual may simultaneously serve as Director of Judicial Support Services for Bexar County and as a visiting statutory county court judge in that county (RQ-0909-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a part-time municipal court judge may simultaneously serve as a member of the Board of Commissioners of the Jefferson County Drainage District No. 7 (RQ-0911-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a local civil service commission may impose a fee for an applicant to take a fire department promotional civil service examination (RQ-0912-GA)

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The vibrating wire (VW) technique employs a stretched wire as a magnetic field sensor. Because of the wire's small diameter ({approx}0.1mm or smaller) and because the wire can be supported from outside the magnet, this technique is very appealing for field measurements in small gap/bore undulators with small good field regions and with limited access to the tested field. In addition, in the case of elliptical undulators in which Hall probe (HP) measurements can be affected by the planar Hall effect, VW technique can be used as an independent method to verify and supplement HP measurements. In this article we studied the potential of the VW technique for measurement of magnetic field errors and for prediction of beam trajectories in undulator magnets using a 3.8m long LCLS undulator as a test bench. Introducing calibrated magnetic field distortion at various locations, we measured the sensitivity and spatial resolution of the method. The method demonstrated 0.9mm spatial resolution at a distance up to a few meters and 0.37Gcm sensitivity to the field integral. To compare Hall probe and Vibrating wire measurements side-by-side, we measured field errors in an LCLS undulator previously characterized by Hall probe measurements. The field errors found with the …

In order to achieve the high luminosity required at the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC), it is critical to focus the beams to nanometer size with the ILC Beam Delivery System, and to maintain the beams collisions with a nanometer-scale stability. To establish the technologies associated with this ultra-high precision beam handling, a special beamline has been designed and built as an extension of the existing extraction beamline of the Accelerator Test Facility at KEK, Japan. The ATF provides an adequate ultra-low emittance electron beam that is comparable to the ILC requirements; the ATF2 mimics the ILC final focus system to create a tightly focused, stable beam. There are 37 magnets in the ATF2, 29 quadrupoles, 5 sextupoles and 3 bends. These magnets had to be acquired in a short time and at minimum cost, which led to various acquisition strategies; but nevertheless they had to meet strict requirements on integrated strength, physical dimensions, compatibility with existing magnet movers and beam position monitors, mechanical stability and field stability and quality. This paper will describe how 2 styles of quadrupoles, 2 styles of sextupoles, one dipole style and their supports were designed, fabricated, refurbished or modified, measured and aligned by a …

The visible Multifilter Rotating Shadowband Radiometer (MFRSR) is a passive instrument that measures global and diffuse components of solar irradiance at six narrowband channels and one open, or broadband, channel (Harrison et al. 1994). Direct irradiance is not a primary measurement, but is calculated using the diffuse and global measurements. To collect one data record, the MFRSR takes measurements at four different shadowband positions. The first measurement is taken with the shadowband in the nadir (home) position. The next three measurements are, in order, the first side-band, sun-blocked, and second side-band. The side-band measurements are used to correct for the portion of the sky obscured by the shadowband. The nominal wavelengths of the narrowband channels are 415, 500, 615, 673, 870, and 940 nm. From such measurements, one may infer the atmosphere's aerosol optical depth at each wavelength. In turn, these optical depths may be used to derive information about the column abundances of ozone and water vapor (Michalsky et al. 1995), as well as aerosol (Harrison and Michalsky 1994) and other atmospheric constituents.

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I review a number of topics where conventional wisdom relevant to hadron physics at the LHC has been challenged. For example, the initial-state and final-state interactions of the quarks and gluons entering perturbative QCD hard-scattering subprocesses lead to the breakdown of traditional concepts of factorization and universality for transverse-momentum-dependent observables at leading twist. These soft-gluon rescattering effect produce single-spin asymmetries, the breakdown of the Lam-Tung relation in Drell-Yan reactions, as well as diffractive deep inelastic scattering, The antishadowing of nuclear structure functions is predicted to depend on the flavor quantum numbers of each quark and antiquark. Isolated hadrons can be produced at large transverse momentum directly within a hard higher-twist QCD subprocess, rather than from jet fragmentation, even at the LHC. Such 'direct' processes can explain the observed deviations from pQCD predictions of the power-law fall-off of inclusive hadron cross sections as well as the 'baryon anomaly' seen in high-centrality heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. The intrinsic charm contribution to the proton structure function at high x can explain the large rate for high p{sub T} photon plus charm-jet events observed at the Tevatron and imply a large production rate for charm and bottom jets at high p{sub T} at the …

The effect of radiation friction is included in the Hamiltonian treatment of wave-particle interactions with autoresonant phase-locking, yielding a generalized canonical approach to the problem of dissipative dynamics near a nonlinear resonance. As an example, the negativemass eff ect exhibited by a charged particle in a pump wave and a static magnetic field is studied in the presence of the friction force due to cyclotron radiation. Particles with negative parallel masses m! are shown to transfer their kinetic energy to the pump wave, thus amplifying it. Counterintuitively, such particles also undergo stable dynamics, decreasing their transverse energy monotonically due to cyclotron cooling, whereas some of those with positive m! undergo cyclotron heating instead, extracting energy from the pump wave.

Mixing and CP violation in charm meson decays provide a unique probe of possible physics beyond the standard model. In this paper, we give a brief review of the current measurements from the BABAR experiment.

In the Standard Model, CP violation in weak interactions involving quarks is parameterized by an irreducible complex phase in the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) quark-mixing-matrix. The precise determination of the CKM elements is a necessary ingredient for a stringent test of the Standard Model predictions, and is a crucial input for reducing the theoretical error in many New Physics searches with flavor, e.g., in the kaon sector. The unitarity of the CKM matrix is typically expressed as a triangle relationship among its parameters, where the area of the so-called Unitarity Triangle visually depicts the amount of asymmetry between the decays of B particles and their antimatter counterparts. In the past few years, the BABAR and Belle experiments have been able to measure all three angles of the triangle from CP asymmetry measurements. The first asymmetry measurements in B particle decays, about ten years ago, allowed to determine {beta}, which is now known to better than 5% precision. The angles {alpha} and {gamma}, measured in much rarer processes, required several years of data taking before analyses could yield reliable answers. A remarkable feature is that the direct measurement of the angles of the Unitarity Triangle generates an area that is consistent with the …

The main linacs of the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC) consist of superconducting cavities operated at 2K. The accelerating cavities are contained in a contiguous series of cryogenic modules that also house the main linac quadrupoles, thus the quadrupoles also need to be superconducting. In an early ILC design, these magnets are about 0.6 m long, have cos (2{theta}) coils, and operate at constant field gradients up to 60 T/m. In order to preserve the small beam emittances in the ILC linacs, the e+ and e- beams need to traverse the quadrupoles near their magnetic centers. A quadrupole shunting technique is used to measure the quadrupole alignment with the beams; this process requires the magnetic centers move by no more than about 5 micrometers when their strength is changed. To determine if such tight stability is achievable in a superconducting quadrupole, we at SLAC measured the magnetic center motions in a prototype ILC quadrupole built at CIEMAT in Spain. A rotating coil technique was used with a better than 0.1 micrometer precision in the relative field center position, and less than a 2 micrometer systematic error over 30 minutes. This paper describes the warm-bore cryomodule that houses the quadrupole in …

The Savannah River Site (SRS) is removing liquid radioactive waste from its Tank Farm. To treat waste streams that are low in Cs-137, Sr-90, and actinides, SRS developed the Actinide Removal Process and implemented the Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction (CSSX) Unit (MCU). The Actinide Removal Process contacts salt solution with monosodium titanate to sorb strontium and select actinides. After monosodium titanate contact, the resulting slurry is filtered to remove the monosodium titanate (and sorbed strontium and actinides) and entrained sludge. The filtrate is transferred to the MCU for further treatment to remove cesium. The solid particulates removed by the filter are concentrated to {approx} 5 wt %, washed to reduce the sodium concentration, and transferred to the Defense Waste Processing Facility for vitrification. The CSSX process extracts the cesium from the radioactive waste using a customized solvent to produce a Decontaminated Salt Solution (DSS), and strips and concentrates the cesium from the solvent with dilute nitric acid. The DSS is incorporated in grout while the strip acid solution is transferred to the Defense Waste Processing Facility for vitrification. The facilities began radiological processing in April 2008 and started processing of the third campaign ('MarcoBatch 3') of waste in June …

It is well accepted that unabsorbed as well as absorbed AGN are needed to explain the nature and the shape of the Cosmic X-ray background, even if the fraction of highly absorbed objects (dubbed Compton-thick sources) substantially still escapes detection. We derive and analyze the absorption distribution using a complete sample of AGN detected by Swift-BAT in the first three years of the survey. The fraction of Compton-thick AGN represents only 4.6% of the total AGN population detected by Swift-BAT. However, we show that once corrected for the bias against the detection of very absorbed sources the real intrinsic fraction of Compton-thick AGN is 20{sub -6}{sup +9}%. We proved for the first time (also in the BAT band) that the anti-correlation of the fraction of absorbed AGN and luminosity it tightly connected to the different behavior of the luminosity functions (XLFs) of absorbed and unabsorbed AGN. This points towards a difference between the two subsamples of objects with absorbed AGN being, on average, intrinsically less luminous than unobscured ones. Moreover the XLFs show that the fraction of obscured AGN might also decrease at very low luminosity. This can be successfully interpreted in the framework of a disk cloud outflow scenario …

The Nuclear Forensics Analysis Center (NFAC) is part of Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) and is one of only two USG National Laboratories accredited to perform nuclear forensic analyses to the requirements of ISO 17025. SRNL NFAC is capable of analyzing nuclear and radiological samples from bulk material to ultra-trace samples. NFAC provides analytical support to the FBI's Radiological Evidence Examination Facility (REEF), which is located within SRNL. REEF gives the FBI the capability to perform traditional forensics on material that is radiological and/or is contaminated. SRNL is engaged in research and development efforts to improve the USG technical nuclear forensics capabilities. Research includes improving predictive signatures and developing a database containing comparative samples.

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Over a decade of concerted effort in code development for accelerator applications has resulted in a new set of electromagnetic codes which are based on higher-order finite elements for superior geometry fidelity and better solution accuracy. SLAC's ACE3P code suite is designed to harness the power of massively parallel computers to tackle large complex problems with the increased memory and solve them at greater speed. The US DOE supports the computational science R&D under the SciDAC project to improve the scalability of ACE3P, and provides the high performance computing resources needed for the applications. This paper summarizes the advances in the ACE3P set of codes, explains the capabilities of the modules, and presents results from selected applications covering a range of problems in accelerator science and development important to the Office of Science.

The SLAC 3km linear electron accelerator has been cut at the two-thirds point to provide beams to two independent programs. The last third provides the electron beam for the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), leaving the first two-thirds available for FACET, the new experimental facility for accelerator science and test beams. In this paper, we describe this separation and projects to prepare the linac for the FACET experimental program.

Collaborative work between the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) and SIA Radon in Russia was divided among three tasks for calendar year 2010. The first task focused on the study of simplified high level waste glass compositions with the objective of identifying the compositional drivers that lead to crystallization and poor chemical durability. The second task focused on detailed characterization of more complex waste glass compositions with unexpectedly poor chemical durabilities. The third task focused on determining the structure of select high level waste glasses made with varying frit compositions in order to improve models under development for predicting the melt rate of the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) glasses. The majority of these tasks were carried out at SIA Radon. Selection and fabrication of the glass compositions, along with chemical composition measurements and evaluations of durability were carried out at SRNL and are described in this report. SIA Radon provided three summary reports based on the outcome of the three tasks. These reports are included as appendices to this document. Briefly, the result of characterization of the Task 1 glasses may indicate that glass compositions where iron is predominantly tetrahedrally coordinated have more of a tendency to crystallize nepheline …

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate inviting the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Texas to address a joint session of the legislature on February 23, 2011.

Concurrent resolution introduced by the Texas House of Representatives and Senate inviting the governor to address a joint session of the legislature on February 8, 2011.