Electrical conductivities of fluid oxygen were measured between 30 and 80 GPa at a few 1000 K. These conditions were achieved with a reverberating shock wave technique. The measured conductivities were several orders of magnitude lower than measured previously on the single shock Hugoniot because of lower temperatures achieved under shock reverberation. Extrapolation of these data suggests that the minimum metallic conductivity of a metal will be reached near 100 GPa.

X-ray free-electron lasers will produce pulses of x-rays that are 10 orders of magnitude brighter than today's undulator sources at synchrotrons. This may enable atomic resolution imaging of single macromolecules.

Accelerator Physics issues, such as the dynamical aperture, the beam lifetime and the current--intensity limitation are carefully studied for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The single layer superconducting magnets, of 8 cm coil inner diameter, satisfying the beam stability requirements have also been successfully tested. The proposal has generated wide spread interest in the particle and nuclear physics. 1 ref., 4 figs., 3 tabs.

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We present collective x-ray scattering (CXS) measurements using a Chlorine He-{alpha} x-ray source pumped with less than 200 J of laser energy. The experimental scattering spectra show plasmon resonances from shocked samples. These experiments use only 10{sup 12} x-ray photons at the sample of which 10{sup -5} have been scattered and detected with a highly efficient curved crystal spectrometer. Our results demonstrate that x-ray scattering is a viable technique on smaller laser facilities making CXS measurements accessible to a broad scientific community.

The exit from mitosis is the last critical decision a cell has to make during a division cycle. A complex regulatory system has evolved to evaluate the success of mitotic events and control this decision. Whereas outstanding genetic work in yeast has led to rapid discovery of a large number of interacting genes involved in the control of mitotic exit, it has also become increasingly difficult to comprehend the logic and mechanistic features embedded in the complex molecular network. Our view is that this difficulty stems in part from the attempt to explain mitotic exit control using concepts from traditional top-down engineering design, and that exciting new results from evolutionary engineering design applied to networks and electronic circuits may lend better insights. We focus on four particularly intriguing features of the mitotic exit control system: the two-stepped release of Cdc14; the self-activating nature of Tem1 GTPase; the spatial sensor associated with the spindle pole body; and the extensive redundancy in the mitotic exit network. We attempt to examine these design features from the perspective of evolutionary design and complex system engineering.

Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) Recommendation 2002-1 (''Quality Assurance for Safety-Related Software'') identified a number of quality assurance issues on the use of software in Department of Energy (DOE) facilities for analyzing hazards, and designing and operating controls to prevent or mitigate potential accidents. Over the last year, DOE has begun several processes and programs as part of the Implementation Plan commitments, and in particular, has made significant progress in addressing several sets of issues particularly important in the application of software for performing hazard and accident analysis. The work discussed here demonstrates that through these actions, Software Quality Assurance (SQA) guidance and software tools are available that can be used to improve resulting safety analysis. Specifically, five of the primary actions corresponding to the commitments made in the Implementation Plan to Recommendation 2002-1 are identified and discussed in this paper. Included are the web-based DOE SQA Knowledge Portal and the Central Registry, guidance and gap analysis reports, electronic bulletin board and discussion forum, and a DOE safety software guide. These SQA products can benefit DOE safety contractors in the development of hazard and accident analysis by precluding inappropriate software applications and utilizing best practices when incorporating software results …

Radiation drive diagnostics during the NIF early light campaign was supported by an 18 channel soft x-ray spectrometer (Dante). In order to achieve a measurement accuracy of 2% in radiation temperature absolute calibration of the individual channels was necessary and signal distortion through long transmission lines had to be compensated for as well. For fast signals the signal attenuation due to the long (50m) cables amounted to {approx} 20% {at} 100MHz, which was corrected by a cable compensation in the frequency domain. The varying effects of cable distortion for a variety of signals between 1ns and 9ns in length were evaluated and corrections were applied. Results of the thus calculated temperatures of the NEL campaign will be presented compared to LASNEX predictions, showing agreement in peak radiation temperature within less than 2%.

The growth of laser development & technology has been remarkable. Unfortunately, a number of traps or obstacles to laser safety have also developed with that growth. The goal of this article is to highlight those traps, in the hope that an aware laser user will avoid them. These traps have been the cause or contributing factor of many a preventable laser accident.

The Galactic diffuse emission is potentially able to reveal much about the sources and propagation of cosmic rays (CR), their spectra and intensities in distant locations. It can possibly unveil WIMP dark matter (DM) through its annihilation signatures. The extragalactic background may provide vital information about the early stages of the universe, neutralino annihilation, and unresolved sources (blazars) and their cosmological evolution. The g-ray instrument EGRET on the CGRO contributed much to the exploration of the Galactic diffuse emission. The new NASA Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is scheduled for launch in 2007; study of the diffuse g-ray emission is one of the priority goals. We describe current understanding of the diffuse emission and its potential for future discoveries.

We demonstrate that the Qbox code supports unprecedented large-scale First-Principles Molecular Dynamics (FPMD) applications on the BlueGene/L supercomputer. Qbox is an FPMD implementation specifically designed for large-scale parallel platforms such as BlueGene/L. Strong scaling tests for a Materials Science application show an 86% scaling efficiency between 1024 and 32,768 CPUs. Measurements of performance by means of hardware counters show that 37% of the peak FPU performance can be attained.

Kondo coupling of f and conduction electrons is a common feature of f-electron intermetallics. Similar effects should occur in carbon ring systems (metallocenes). Evidence for Kondo coupling in Ce(C{sub 8}H{sub 8}){sub 2} (cerocene) and the ytterbocene Cp*{sub 2}Yb(bipy) is reported from magnetic susceptibility and L{sub III}-edge x-ray absorption spectroscopy. These well-defined systems provide a new way to study the Kondo effect on the nanoscale, should generate insight into the Anderson Lattice problem, and indicate the importance of this often-ignored contribution to bonding in organometallics.

Solidification of polymeric materials, a complex process in which the entangled polymer melt becomes a composite of amorphous and crystalline domains, strongly depends on how the melt is cooled below its crystallization temperature. If cooling is at moderate rates, the most common and well. understood mechanism is via nucleation and growth of spherulites, but special cases exist where crystallization is preceded by a pre pre-transition state induced by density fluctuations. Such multi-step crystallization scenarios are suggested by many experiments, and recent theoretical and simulation work. Via energetic and geometric analyses, we have examined the structure of mesomorphic domains and the dynamics of their formation and evolution, including atomic scale details of molecular addition to ordered domains, as well as particle dynamics in the system, including high mobility jumps in the ordered domains at wavelengths matching the monomer spacing.

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We report recent progress of x-ray diagnostic techniques in laser plasma experiment with using imaging plates. Imaging plate is a photo-stimulable phosphor screen (BaF(Br0.85,10.15):Eu{sup 2+}) deposited on flexible metal or plastic substrate. We applied the imaging plate to x-ray microscopy in laser fusion experiment experiments. Self-emission x-ray images of imploded core were obtained successfully with using imaging plate and high magnification target mounted pinhole arrays. The imaging plates were applied also in ultra-intense laser experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Small samarium foil was irradiated by high intensity laser pulse from the Vulcan laser system. The k shell x-rays from the foil ({approx}40keV) was used as a line x-ray source for microscopic radiography. Performance of imaging plate on high-energy x-ray backlit radiography was demonstrated by imaging sinusoidal grooves of 6um amplitude on a Au foil. Detailed spectrum of k shell x-ray from Cu embedded foil target was successfully observed by fully coupling imaging plate with a highly ordered pyrolytic graphite crystal spectrometer. The performances of the imaging plates evaluated in actual laser plasma experiments will be presented.

A Mach-Zehnder interferometer was used for analysis of pressure waves generated by ultrashort laser pulse ablation of water. It was found that the shock wave generated by plasma formation rapidly decays to an acoustic wave. Both experimental and theoretical studies demonstrated that the energy transfer to the mechanical shock was less than 1%.

Inertia welding is widely used to join cylindrically shaped objects such as disks and shafts in turbine engines, turbochargers, etc. Flash control in many of these applications is not critical because the excess material is on external surfaces and can readily be removed by machining. Internal flash on hollow vessels, however, may be difficult or impossible to remove and may be either controlled by the use of flash traps or the part can be used as welded. Both internal flash and flash traps reduce internal volume and the conditions are not always acceptable. To address this short-coming, several innovative methods have been tested to determine their effect on flash control in inertia welding of hollow vessels. The methods include introduction of high pressure inert gas and incorporation of an expendable mandrel to divert the flash. Both gas and internal mandrels appear promising methods for diverting flash.

The success of nonrigid motion analysis using physical finite element model is dependent on the mesh that characterizes the object's geometric structure. We suggest a deformable mesh adapted to the natural features of images. The adaptive mesh requires much fewer number of nodes than the fixed mesh which was used in our previous work. We demonstrate the higher efficiency of the adaptive mesh in the context of estimating burn scar elasticity relative to normal skin elasticity using the observed 2D image sequence. Our results show that the scar assessment method based on the physical model using natural feature adaptive mesh can be applied to images which do not have artificial markers.

Discharge - charge cycling of thin-film rechargeable lithium batteries with an amorphous or nanocrystalline LiXMn2.Y04 cathode reveals evidence for a true hysteresis in the lithium insertion reaction. This is compared with an apparent hysteresis attributed to a kinetically hindered phase transition near 3 V for batteries with either a crystalline or a nanocrystalline LiJ@Yo4 cathode.

The major problem with cavitation in pumps and hydraulic systems is that there is no effective (conventional) method for detecting or predicting its inception. The traditional method of recognizing cavitation in a pump is to declare the event occurring when the total head drops by some arbitrary value (typically 3%) in response to a pressure reduction at the pump inlet. However, the device is already seriously cavitating when this happens. What is actually needed is a practical method to detect impending rather than incipient cavitation. Whereas the detection of incipient cavitation requires the detection of features just after cavitation starts, the anticipation of cavitation requires the detection and identification of precursor features just before it begins. Two recent advances that make this detection possible. The first is acoustic sensors with a bandwidth of 1 MHz and a dynamic range of 80 dB that preserve the fine details of the features when subjected to coarse vibrations. The second is the application of Bayesian parameter estimation which makes it possible to separate weak signals, such as those present in cavitation precursors, from strong signals, such as pump vibration. Bayesian parameter estimation derives a model based on cavitation hydrodynamics and produces a figure …

Diamond switches are well suited for use in high temperature electronics. Laboratory feasibility of diamond switching at 1 kV and 18 A was demonstrated. DC blocking voltages up to 1 kV were demonstrated. A 50 {Omega} load line was switched using a diamond switch, with switch on-state resistivity {approx}7 {Omega}-cm. An electron beam, {approx}150 keV energy, {approx}2 {mu}s full width at half maximum was used to control the 5 mm x 5 mm x 100 {mu}m thick diamond switch. The conduction current temporal history mimics that of the electron beam. These data were taken at room temperature.

Composites that consist of a dielectric host containing a particulate conductor as a second phase are of interest for electrical switching applications. Such composites are "smart" materials that can function as either voltage or current limiters, and the difference in fimction depends largely upon whether the dielectric is filled to below or above the percolation threshold. It also is possible to combine current and voltage limiting in a single composite to make a "super-smart" material.

The Beamlet laser is a single-aperture prototype for the National Ignition Facility (NIF). We have recently installed and activated a 55 m{sup 3} vacuum vessel and associated diagnostic package at the output of the Beamlet that we are using to characterize target plane irradiance at high power. Measurements obtained both with and without a kinoform diffractive optic are reported. Dependences on critical laser parameters including output power, spatial filtering, and wavefront correction are discussed and compared with simulations.

The floor of a black liquor recovey boiler at a mill in central Canada has experienced cracking and delamination of the composite tubing near the spout wall and deformation of the floor panels that is most severe in the vicinity of the spout wall. One possible explanation for the observed damage is impacts of salt cake falling from the convective section onto the floor. In order to determine if such impacts do occur, strain gauges and thermocouples were installed on the boiler floor in areas where cracking and deformation were most frequent. The data obtained from these instruments indicate that brief, sudden temperature fluctuations do occur, and changes in the strain experienced by the affected tube occur simultaneously. These fluctuations appear to occur less often along the spout wall and more frequently with increasing distance from the wall. The frequency of these temperature fluctuations is insufficient for thermal fatigue to be the sole cause of the cracking observed on the tubes, but the data are consistent with what might be expected from pieces of falling salt cake.