An important milestone was passed this year when the fraction of the world's population living in cities exceeded 50%. This shift from the countryside to urban areas is certain to continue and, for many, the destination will be large cities. Already there are over 400 cities with populations greater than one million inhabitants and twenty cities with populations greater than ten million inhabitants. With a growing fraction of the population living in an urban environment, the unique aspects of an urban climate also rise in importance. These include features like air pollution and increased humidity. Another unique feature of the urban climate is the phenomenon of the urban heat island. The urban heat island phenomenon was first observed over one hundred years ago in northern latitude cities, where the city centers were slightly warmer than the suburbs. (Instantaneous communications probably played a role in its identification, much as it did for other weather-related events.) For these cities, a heat island was generally a positive effect because it resulted in reduced heating requirements during the winters. It was only in the 1960s, as air conditioning and heavy reliance on automobiles grew, that the negative impacts of heat islands became apparent. The …

None

Ion-induced beam instabilities and tune shifts are critical issues for the electron damping ring of the International Linear Collider (ILC). To avoid conventional ion trapping, a long gap is introduced in the electron beam by omitting a number of successive bunches out of a long train. However, the beam can still suffer from the fast ion instability, driven by ions that last only for a single passage of the electron bunches. Our study shows that the ion effects can be significantly mitigated by using multiple gaps, so that the stored beam consists of a number of relatively short bunch trains. The ion effects in the ILC damping rings are investigated using both analytical and numerical methods.

An understanding of processes affecting seepage into emplacement tunnels is needed for correctly predicting the performance of underground radioactive waste repositories. It has been previously estimated that the capillary and vaporization barriers in the unsaturated fractured rock of Yucca Mountain are enough to prevent seepage under present day infiltration conditions. It has also been thought that a substantially elevated infiltration flux will be required to cause seepage after the thermal period is over. While coupled thermal-hydrological-chemical (THC) changes in Yucca Mountain host rock due to repository heating has been previously investigated, those THC models did not incorporate elements of the seepage model. In this paper, we combine the THC processes in unsaturated fractured rock with the processes affecting seepage. We observe that the THC processes alter the hydrological properties of the fractured rock through mineral precipitation and dissolution. We show that such alteration in the hydrological properties of the rock often leads to local flow channeling. We conclude that such local flow channeling may result in seepage under certain conditions, even with nonelevated infiltration fluxes.

Numerical models of geologic storage of carbon dioxide (CO2)in brine-bearing formations use characteristic curves to represent theinteractions of non-wetting-phase CO2 and wetting-phase brine. When aproblem includes both injection of CO2 (a drainage process) and itssubsequent post-injection evolution (a combination of drainage andwetting), hysteretic characteristic curves are required to correctlycapture the behavior of the CO2 plume. In the hysteretic formulation,capillary pressure and relative permeability depend not only on thecurrent grid-block saturation, but also on the history of the saturationin the grid block. For a problem that involves only drainage or onlywetting, a non-hysteretic formulation, in which capillary pressure andrelative permeability depend only on the current value of the grid-blocksaturation, is adequate. For the hysteretic formulation to be robustcomputationally, care must be taken to ensure the differentiability ofthe characteristic curves both within and beyond the turning-pointsaturations where transitions between branches of the curves occur. Twoexample problems involving geologic CO2 storage are simulated withTOUGH2, a multiphase, multicomponent code for flow and transport codethrough geological media. Both non-hysteretic and hysteretic formulationsare used, to illustrate the applicability and limitations ofnon-hysteretic methods.The first application considers leakage of CO2from the storage formation to the ground surface, while the secondexamines the role of heterogeneity within the storageformation.

Fiducials imprinted on laser beams are used to perform video image based alignment of the beams in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In any laser beam alignment operation, a beam needs to be aligned to a reference location. Generally, the beam and reference fiducials are composed of separate beams, as a result only a single feature of each beam needs to be identified for determining the position of the beam or reference. However, it is possible to have the same beam image contain both the beam and reference fiducials. In such instances, it is essential to separately identify these features. In the absence of wavefront correction or when image quality is poor, the features of such beams may get distorted making it difficult to distinguish between different fiducials. Error checking and correction mechanism must be implemented to avoid misidentification of one type of feature as the other. This work presents the algorithm for multi-object detection and error correction implemented for such a beam line image in the NIF facility. Additionally, we show how when the original algorithm fails a secondary algorithm takes over and provides required location outputs.

Article on phase change enthalpies and entropies of liquid crystals.

The release of hazardous materials into the atmosphere can have a tremendous impact on dense populations. We propose an atmospheric event reconstruction framework that couples observed data and predictive computer-intensive dispersion models via Bayesian methodology. Due to the complexity of the model framework, a sampling-based approach is taken for posterior inference that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) strategies.

Precise gamma-ray thermal neutron capture cross sectionshave been measured at the Budapest Reactor for all elements withZ=1-83,92 except for He and Pm. These measurements and additional datafrom the literature been compiled to generate the Evaluated Gamma-rayActivation File (EGAF), which is disseminated by LBNL and the IAEA. Thesedata are nearly complete for most isotopes with Z<20 so the totalradiative thermal neutron capture cross sections can be determineddirectly from the decay scheme. For light isotopes agreement with therecommended values is generally satisfactory although large discrepanciesexist for 11B, 12,13C, 15N, 28,30Si, 34S, 37Cl, and 40,41K. Neutroncapture decay data for heavier isotopes are typically incomplete due tothe contribution of unresolved continuum transitions so only partialradiative thermal neutron capture cross sections can be determined. Thecontribution of the continuum to theneutron capture decay scheme arisesfrom a large number of unresolved levels and transitions and can becalculated by assuming that the fluctuations in level densities andtransition probabilities are statistical. We have calculated thecontinuum contribution to neutron capture decay for the palladiumisotopes with the Monte Carlo code DICEBOX. These calculations werenormalized to the experimental cross sections deexciting low excitationlevels to determine the total radiative thermal neutron capture crosssection. The resulting palladium cross sections values were determinedwith a precision …

Using a recently developed time domain numerical approach we calculate the short-range geometric wakefields of 3D collimators and compare with analytical models. We find, in the diffractive regime, that the transverse mode kick factor can be approximated from the change in field energy between the beam pipe and the collimator if the collimator is long, or using a ''field clipping'' estimate if it is short. For collimators of past and present measurements at SLAC, numerical, analytical, and measurement results are compared.

For a short bunch in an elliptical collimator we demonstrate that, as in a purely round collimator, the wake can be estimated from the primary fields of the beam alone. We obtain the wakes in the LCLS rectangular-to-round, undulator transitions using a hybrid method that includes indirect numerical (field) integration and an analytical potential energy term. For the LCLS 1 nC bunch charge configuration, we find the wake-induced energy change in the transitions to be small compared to that due to the resistance of the beam pipe walls.