Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Llano, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

This report examines the President's budget request for Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service(IRS) in FY2006, some of the key policy issues it raised, and congressional action on the request.

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Weekly newspaper from The Colony, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The SPARC project has entered its installation phase at the Frascati National Laboratories of INFN: its main goal, the promotion of an R&D activity oriented to the development of a high brightness photoinjector to drive SASE-FEL experiments, is being vigorously pursued by a collaboration among ENEA-INFN-CNR-Universita di Roma Tor Vergata-INFM-ST. In this paper we will report on the installation and test of some major components, like Ti:Sa laser system, RF gun and RF power system. Advancements in the control and beam diagnostics systems will also be reported, in particular on the emittance-meter device for beam emittance measurements in the drift space downstream the RF gun. Recent results on laser pulse shaping show the feasibility of producing 10 ps flat-top laser pulses in the UV with rise time below 1 ps. First FEL experiments have been proposed, using SASE, seeding and non-linear resonant harmonics.

This document describes the development and application of a user-friendly and efficient groundwater management model of the Central Nevada Test Area (CNTA) and surrounding areas that will allow the U.S. Department of Energy and state personnel to evaluate the impact of future proposed scenarios. The management model consists of a simple hydrologic model within an interactive groundwater management framework. This framework is based on an object user interface that was developed by the U.S. Geological Survey and has been used by the Desert Research Institute researchers and others to couple disparate environmental resource models, manage the necessary temporal and spatial data, and evaluate model results for management decision making. This framework was modified and applied to the CNTA and surrounding Hot Creek Valley. The utility of the management model was demonstrated through the application of hypothetical future scenarios including mineral mining, regional expansion of agriculture, geothermal energy production, and export of water to large urban areas outside the region. While the results from some of the scenarios indicated potential impacts to the region near CNTA and others did not, together they demonstrate the usefulness of the management tool for managers who need to evaluate the impact proposed changes in groundwater …

Photocathode rf guns produce high-energy low-emittance electron beams. DC guns utilizing GaAs photocathodes have proven successful for generating polarized electron beams for accelerators, but they require rf bunching systems that significantly increase the transverse emittance of the beam. With higher extraction field and beam energy, rf guns can support higher current densities at the cathode. The source laser system can then be used to generate the high peak current, relatively low duty-factor micropulses required by the ILC without the need for post-extraction rf bunching. The net result is that the injection system for a polarized rf gun can be identical to that for an unpolarized rf gun. However, there is some uncertainty as to the survivability of an activated GaAs cathode in the environment of an operating rf gun. Consequently, before attempting to design a polarized rf gun for the ILC, SLAC plans to develop an rf test gun to demonstrate the rf operating conditions suitable for an activated GaAs cathode.

For much of the past century, physicists have searched for methods to control the release of energy stored in an atom's nucleus. Nuclear fission reactors have been one successful approach, but finding other methods to capitalize on this potential energy source have been elusive. One possible source being explored is nuclear isomers. An isomer is a long-lived excited state of an atom's nucleus--a state in which decay back to the nuclear ground state is inhibited. The nucleus of an isomer thus holds an enormous amount of energy. If scientists could develop a method to release that energy instantaneously in a gamma-ray burst, rather than slowly over time, they could use it in a nuclear battery. Research in the late 1990s indicated that scientists were closer to developing such a method--using x rays to trigger the release of energy from the nuclear isomer hafnium-178m ({sup 178m}Hf). To further investigate these claims, the Department of Energy (DOE) funded a collaborative project involving Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Argonne national laboratories that was designed to reproduce those earlier results.

With the Nation's coal-burning utilities facing tighter controls on mercury pollutants, the U.S. Department of Energy is supporting projects that could offer power plant operators better ways to reduce these emissions at much lower costs. Sorbent injection technology represents one of the simplest and most mature approaches to controlling mercury emissions from coal-fired boilers. It involves injecting a solid material such as powdered activated carbon into the flue gas. The gas-phase mercury in the flue gas contacts the sorbent and attaches to its surface. The sorbent with the mercury attached is then collected by a particulate control device along with the other solid material, primarily fly ash. We Energies has over 3,200 MW of coal-fired generating capacity and supports an integrated multi-emission control strategy for SO{sub 2}, NO{sub x}, and mercury emissions while maintaining a varied fuel mix for electric supply. The primary goal of this project is to reduce mercury emissions from three 90-MW units that burn Powder River Basin coal at the We Energies Presque Isle Power Plant. Additional goals are to reduce nitrogen oxide (NO{sub x}), sulfur dioxide (SO{sub 2}), and particulate matter (PM) emissions, allow for reuse and sale of fly ash, demonstrate a reliable mercury …

In many accelerator storage rings running positively charged beams, ionization of residual gas and secondary electron emission (SEE) in the beam pipe will give rise to an electron cloud which can cause beam blow-up or loss of the circulating beam. A preventative measure that suppresses electron cloud formation is to ensure that the vacuum wall has a low secondary emission yield (SEY). The SEY of thin films of TiN, sputter deposited Non-Evaporable Getters and a novel TiCN alloy were measured under a variety of conditions, including the effect of re-contamination from residual gas.

Strong gravitational lens systems with extended sources are of special interest because they provide additional constraints on the models of the lens systems. To use a gravitational lens system for measuring the Hubble constant, one would need to determine the lens potential and the source intensity distribution simultaneously. A linear inversion method to reconstruct a pixellated source distribution of a given lens potential model was introduced by Warren and Dye. In the inversion process, a regularization on the source intensity is often needed to ensure a successful inversion with a faithful resulting source. In this paper, we use Bayesian analysis to determine the optimal regularization constant (strength of regularization) of a given form of regularization and to objectively choose the optimal form of regularization given a selection of regularizations. We consider and compare quantitatively three different forms of regularization previously described in the literature for source inversions in gravitational lensing: zeroth-order, gradient and curvature. We use simulated data with the exact lens potential to demonstrate the method. We find that the preferred form of regularization depends on the nature of the source distribution.

Atomic physics of high-Z, heavy ions is very different from that encountered in low-Z or medium-Z ions. The reason is the ultra strong nuclear field found only in the heaviest ions. The highest-Z atomic systems available to physical investigation, the actinides, therefore, offer rich new physics that cannot be studied any other way. This ranges from new dominating forces in electron-ion collisions to tests of fundamental theories. A measurement of the two-loop Lamb shift in uranium is by many considered to be the ''holy grail'' of high-field QED tests of atomic systems. Such measurements have been attempted at heavy-ion accelerator facilities but have yet to succeed because of the difficulty to make measurements with the required accuracy. Also, electron collisions behave very differently in such tightly bound systems. The magnetic interaction between the ion and the incoming free electron (the so-called generalized Breit interaction) is essentially non-existent in collisions involving low and medium-Z ions. This interaction is therefore missing in essentially all electron collision codes. But in heavy, highly charged ions like uranium, the generalized Breit interaction readily is the dominant force, changing electron collision cross sections by a factor of two. This has never been experimentally observed. In fact, …

For decades, ground-based astronomy has consisted mostly of a lone astronomer earning the right to train a powerful telescope for a few nights on an extremely small patch of sky. If the astronomer is fortunate, a celestial discovery will be shared many months later with colleagues through a journal article or private correspondence. Lawrence Livermore is a major partner in a new telescope project that promises to forever change that scenario--and all of astronomy--by taking advantage of advanced optical manufacturing techniques, digital imaging, supercomputer data processing, and the Internet. The ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), scheduled for completion in 2012, will provide, for the first time, digital imaging of objects, including changing events, in deep space across the entire sky. Data from LSST's Reprinted from Science & Technology Review, November 2005 UCRL-TR-218446 observation will catch a transient event. Furthermore, such an instrument would take many years to map the entire sky. Current all-sky maps made with smaller telescopes are limited in depth (faintness) and detail. LSST will overcome these drawbacks by mapping the entire sky deeply, rapidly, and continuously with a 10-square-degree field of view. What's more, when the telescope detects an object of interest, such as an exploding …

An experiment is planned to study the performance of dielectric Cerenkov wakefield accelerating structures at extremely high gradients in the GV/m range. This new UCLA/SLAC/USC collaboration will take advantage of the unique SLAC FFTB electron beam and its demonstrated ultra-short pulse lengths and high currents (e.g., {delta}{sub z} = 20 {micro}m at Q = 3 nC). The electron beam will be focused down and sent through varying lengths of fused silica capillary tubing with two different sizes: ID = 200 {micro}m/OD = 325 {micro}m and ID = 100 {micro}m/OD = 325 {micro}m. The pulse length of the electron beam will be varied in order to alter the accelerating gradient and probe the breakdown threshold of the dielectric structures. In addition to breakdown studies, we plan to collect and measure coherent Cerenkov radiation emitted from the capillary tube to gain information about the strength of the accelerating fields.

To gain a clearer understanding of orientation and grain deformation of crystalline materials, x-ray powder diffraction has played an integral role in extracting three-dimensional structural information from one-dimensional diffraction patterns. Powder diffraction models identical geometry to the intersection of a normal right cone with a plane. The purpose of this paper is to develop a general expression defining the conic sections based on the geometry of a powder diffraction experiment. Applying the derived formulation of a diffraction arc to experimental data will give insight to the molecular and structural properties of the sample in question. Instead of using complex three-dimensional Euclidian geometry, we define the problem solving technique with a simpler two-dimensional transformation approach to arrive at the final equation describing the conic sections. Using the diffraction geometry parameters, we can use this equation to calibrate the diffractometer from the diffraction pattern of a known reference material, or to determine the crystalline lattice structure of the compound.

The purpose of this design analysis and calculation is to determine the demand for domestic cold water and to size the supply main for the Shop Building No.5006 in accordance with the Uniform Plumbing Code (UPC) (Section 4.4.1) and the U.S. Department of Energy, Order 6430.1A-1540 (Section 4.4.2).

End-to-End fault and performance problems detection in wide area production networks is becoming increasingly hard as the complexity of the paths, the diversity of the performance, and dependency on the network increase. Several monitoring infrastructures are built to monitor different network metrics and collect monitoring information from thousands of hosts around the globe. Typically there are hundreds to thousands of time-series plots of network metrics which need to be looked at to identify network performance problems or anomalous variations in the traffic. Furthermore, most commercial products rely on a comparison with user configured static thresholds and often require access to SNMP-MIB information, to which a typical end-user does not usually have access. In our paper we propose new techniques to detect network performance problems proactively in close to realtime and we do not rely on static thresholds and SNMP-MIB information. We describe and compare the use of several different algorithms that we have implemented to detect persistent network problems using anomalous variations analysis in real end-to-end Internet performance measurements. We also provide methods and/or guidance for how to set the user settable parameters. The measurements are based on active probes running on 40 production network paths with bottlenecks varying from …

For the parameters envisaged in possible afterburner stages[1] of a plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA), the self-fields of the particle beam can be intense enough to tunnel ionize some neutral gases. Tunnel ionization has been investigated as a way for the beam itself to create the plasma, and the wakes generated may differ from those generated in pre-ionized plasmas[2],[3]. However, it is not practical to model the whole stage of PWFA with afterburner parameters using the models described in [2] and [3]. Here we describe the addition of a tunnel ionization package using the ADK model into QuickPIC, a highly efficient quasi-static particle in cell (PIC) code which can model a PWFA with afterburner parameters. Comparison between results from OSIRIS (a full PIC code with ionization) and from QuickPIC with the ionization package shows good agreement. Preliminary results using parameters relevant to the E164X experiment and the upcoming E167 experiment at SLAC are shown.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

The National Museum of the Pacific War presents an interview with William Brown. Brown was drafted into the Army Air Forces in 1942. He completed airplane mechanic school in Wichita Falls, Texas at Sheppard Field. His first assignment was at Tyndall Field, Florida working on the B-26 line as an engineer and mechanic. In 1943 or 1944 Brown was assigned to the 43rd Bomb Group and sent to New Guinea and served as a flight engineer, assisting the pilot in flight, including transferring gasoline and keeping the logbook. He describes living conditions in New Guinea. After Brown was discharged from the Army Air Forces he worked for Exxon for 30 years.

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.