Percussion ensembles concert presented at the UNT College of Music Voertman Hall and Music Commons.

Since 1987 the U.S. has focused research and development activities relevant to the disposal of commercial used nuclear fuel and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) owned spent nuclear fuel and high level waste on the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. At the same time, the U.S. successfully deployed a deep geologic disposal facility for defense-related transuranic waste in bedded salt at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In 2009 the DOE established the Used Fuel Disposition Campaign (UFDC) within the Office of Nuclear Energy. The Mission of the UFDC is to identify alternatives and conduct scientific research and technology development to enable storage, transportation and disposal of used nuclear fuel and wastes generated by existing and future nuclear fuel cycles. The U.S. national laboratories have participated on these programs and has conducted research and development related to these issues to a limited extent. However, a comprehensive research and development (R&D) program investigating a variety of geologic media has not been a part of the U.S. waste management program since the mid 1980s. Such a comprehensive R&D program is being developed in the UFDC with a goal of meeting the UFDC Grand Challenge to provide a sound technical basis for absolute …

In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs boson generates elementary particle masses. Current theoretical and experimental constraints lead to a Higgs boson mass between 114.4 and 158 GeV with 95% confidence level. Moreover, Tevatron has recently excluded the mass ranges between 100 and 109 GeV, 158 and 175 GeV with 95% confidence level. These results gives a clear indication to search for a Higgs boson at low mass. The D0 detector is located near Chicago, at the Tevatron, a proton-antiproton collider with an energy in the center of mass of 1.96 TeV. The topic of this thesis is the search for a Higgs boson in association with a Z boson. This channel is sensitive to low mass Higgs boson (<135 GeV) which has a branching ratio H {yields} bb varies between 50% and 90% in this mass range. The decay channel ZH {yields} {nu}{bar {nu}}b{bar b} studied has in the final state 2 heavy-flavor jets and some missing transverse energy due to escaping neutrinos. The heavy-flavor jets identification ('b-tagging') is done with a new algorithm (SLTNN) developped specifically for semi-leptonic decay of b quarks. The Higgs boson search analysis was performed with 3 fb{sup -1} of data. The …