Water fluxes in unsaturated, fractured rock involve the physical processes occurring at fracture-matrix interfaces within fracture networks. Modeling these water fluxes using a discrete fracture network model is a complicated effort. Existing preprocessors for TOUGH2 are not suitable to generate grids for fracture networks with various orientations and inclinations. There are several 3-D discrete-fracture-network simulators for flow and transport, but most of them do not capture fracture-matrix interaction. We have developed a new 3-D discrete-fracture-network mesh generator, FRACMESH, to provide TOUGH2 with information about the fracture network configuration and fracture-matrix interactions. FRACMESH transforms a discrete fracture network into a 3 dimensional uniform mesh, in which fractures are considered as elements with unique rock material properties and connected to surrounding matrix elements. Using FRACMESH, individual fractures may have uniform or random aperture distributions to consider heterogeneity. Fracture element volumes and interfacial areas are calculated from fracture geometry within individual elements. By using FRACMESH and TOUGH2, fractures with various inclinations and orientations, and fracture-matrix interaction, can be incorporated. In this paper, results of flow and transport simulations in a fractured rock block utilizing FRACMESH are presented.

The Antares laser will require that about 100 high-precision NaCl windows of 18-in. diameter be produced, maintained, and repaired. To aid the industry in achieving the required production rates, a polishing development program was undertaken by LASL's Laser Division in collaboration with the Air Force and International Laser Systems. The design and initial shakedown of the polishing machine is described. Preliminary results indicate the machine's design is sound, its operation is generally simple, and it should be capable of finishing 18-in. NaCl to better than lambda/2 visible and 20-10 surface. Shakedown work with glass has demonstrated 0-0 surface, complete absence of edge roll, and lambda/16 over 12 in., and lambda/6 over 19 in.

None

There were 90 papers presented at the Conference in the category of Technology and Power Plants accounting for about 25% of the total number of contributions. As was the case at the previous meeting, a large number of papers dealt with the ITER-Engineering Design Activity (EDA) and ITER technology R&D. In the author's opinion, the rapid progress made during the ITER EDA extension on the completion of the new ITER-FEAT design and its physics and technology R&D validation stands out as the highlight of the meeting. Steady progress is being made on several other technology fronts as well. The results point towards emerging research trends in the following areas: steady-state operation with advanced performance and the increasingly important role of enabling technologies in achieving this goal, advanced, high-performance, environmentally attractive materials for the fusion energy goal, reactor and near-term applications studies that exploit advances both in the physics and technology fronts for lower cost of electricity and improved safety and environmental features, and socioeconomic studies that are helping to promote the attractive features of fusion and its public acceptance. The remaining sections of this paper are organized along the lines of these major themes; namely, ITER EDA Design, ITER Technology …

Marine microbes include representatives from all three kingdoms of life and collectively carry out virtually all forms of metabolisms found on the planet. Because of this metabolic and genetic diversity, these microbes mediate many of the reactions making up global biogeochemical cycles which govern the flow of energy and material in the biosphere. The goal of this conference is to bring together approaches and concepts from studies of microbial evolution, genomics, ecology, and oceanography in order to gain new insights into marine microbes and their biogeochemical functions. The integration of scales, from genes to global cycles, will result in a better understanding of marine microbes and of their contribution to the carbon cycle and other biogeochemical processes.

The 2011 Gordon Research Conference on Radiation and Climate will present cutting-edge research on outstanding issues in climate change, particularly those in which the interactions between clouds, aerosols, and precipitation play a major role. The Conference will feature a broad range of topics, including grand challenges in atmospheric radiation and climate, cloud and water vapor feedbacks, aerosol-cloud-precipitation-climate interactions across scales, new approaches for remote sensing and in-situ observations of clouds, aerosols and precipitation, and multi-scale modeling challenges. The invited speakers will present the most important recent advances and future challenges in these areas. The Conference will bring together a collection of leading investigators who are at the forefront of their field, and will provide opportunities for scientists, especially junior scientists and graduate students, to present their work in poster format and exchange ideas with leaders in the field. The collegial atmosphere of this Conference, with programmed discussion sessions as well as opportunities for informal gatherings in the afternoons and evenings, provides an avenue for scientists from different disciplines to brainstorm and promotes cross-disciplinary collaborations in the various research areas represented.

The Gordon Research Conference on BATTERIES was held at Four Points Sheraton / Holiday Inn Express, Ventura, California, March 4-9, 2012. The Conference was well-attended with 176 participants. Gordon Research Conferences does not permit publication of meeting proceedings.

Chairman William Ogle said the overall purpose of the meeting was to consider how the US government, and the Division of Geothermal Energy in particular, might apply its geothermal effort more effectively. Given the present situation, how does Uncle Sam make the best possible effort? On this theme, there are 4 main subquestions: (1) what government support is needed? (2) how can we improve cooperation between industry, the national laboratories, universities, and industries, and does it matter? (3) how do we transfer technology to industry? (4) What should the technical aims be for the next year or so?

The total photo-absorption cross section of {sup 4}He is evaluated microscopically using two- (NN) and three-nucleon (NNN) interactions based upon chiral effective field theory ({chi}EFT). The calculation is performed using the Lorentz integral transform method along with the ab initio no-core shell model approach. An important feature of the present study is the consistency of the NN and NNN interactions and also, through the Siegert theorem, of the two- and three-body current operators. This is due to the application of the {chi}EFT framework. The inclusion of the NNN interaction produces a suppression of the peak height and enhancement of the tail of the cross section. We compare to calculations obtained using other interactions and to representative experiments. The rather confused experimental situation in the giant resonance region prevents discrimination among different interaction models.

This article presents cumulative and differential number-count measurements for the recently completed 4 Ms Chandra Deep Field-South survey.

In today's world, the use of parallel programming and architectures is essential for simulating practical problems in engineering and related disciplines. Remarkable progress in CPU architecture (multi- and many-core, SMT, transactional memory, virtualization support, etc.), system scalability, and interconnect technology continues to provide new opportunities, as well as new challenges for both system architects and software developers. These trends are paralleled by progress in parallel algorithms, simulation techniques, and software integration from multiple disciplines. In its 6th year ParSim continues to build a bridge between computer science and the application disciplines and to help with fostering cooperations between the different fields. In contrast to traditional conferences, emphasis is put on the presentation of up-to-date results with a shorter turn-around time. This offers the unique opportunity to present new aspects in this dynamic field and discuss them with a wide, interdisciplinary audience. The EuroPVM/MPI conference series, as one of the prime events in parallel computation, serves as an ideal surrounding for ParSim. This combination enables the participants to present and discuss their work within the scope of both the session and the host conference. This year, ten papers with authors in ten countries were submitted to ParSim, and after a quick …

An electron-nucleus (e-A) collider with center-of-mass energy in excess of 50 GeV per electron-nucleon collision will allow the physics community to obtain unprecedented new knowledge of the partonic structure of nuclei. If reliable information is to be extracted on these partonic densities, it is essential to realize that with our current level of understanding of QCD, momentum transfers to the struck partons greater than 1 GeV/c are necessary. This requirement puts a priority on high center-of-mass energy if partonic densities are to be measured over a wide range. Comparing the partonic structure of the free nucleon to that of bound nucleons and measuring the systematic changes in that structure as a function of nucleon number (A) will provide deeper insight into the origins and dynamics of nuclear binding. In addition, e-A collisions will allow the exploration of partonic densities appreciably higher than is accessible in e-p collisions. An e-A collider will allow one to measure the gluonic structure functions of nuclei down to x {approx} 10{sup -3}, information valuable in its own right and essential to a quantitative understanding of highly relativistic A-A collisions. The time-space evolution of partons can only be investigated by studying the modifications of hard collisions …

This article describes the use of a gas chromatographic headspace analysis method to experimentally determine gas-to-liquid partition coefficients and infinite dilution activity coefficients for 29 liquid organic solutes dissolved in triethylene glycol at 298.15 K.

By analyzing the pulse to pulse intensity fluctuations of the radiation emitted by a charge particle in the incoherent part of the spectrum, it is possible to extract information about the spatial distribution of the beam. At the Advanced Light Source (ALS) of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, we have developed and successfully tested a simple scheme based on this principle that allows for the absolute measurement of the rms bunch length. A description of the method and the experimental results are presented.

In this paper we report absolute intensities of vacuum ultraviolet and near ultraviolet emission lines (4.8 eV to 18 eV ) for aluminum etching discharges in an inductively coupled plasma reactor. We report line intensities as a function of wafer type, pressure, gas mixture and rf excitation level. IrI a standard aluminum etching mixture containing C12 and BC13 almost all the light emitted at energies exceeding 8.8 eV was due to neutral atomic chlorine. Optical trapping of the WV radiation in the discharge complicates calculations of VUV fluxes to the wafer. However, we see total photon fluxes to the wailer at energies above 8.8 eV on the order of 4 x 1014 photons/cm2sec with anon- reactive wafer and 0.7 x 10 `4 photons/cm2sec with a reactive wtier. The maj ority of the radiation observed was between 8.9 and 9.3 eV. At these energies, the photons have enough energy to create electron-hole pairs in Si02, but may penetrate up to a micron into the Si02 before being absorbed. Relevance of these measurements to vacuum-W photon-induced darnage of Si02 during etching is discussed.

The fascinating shapes and hierarchical designs of biomineralized structures have long been an inspiration to materials scientists because of the potential they suggest for biomolecular control over synthesis of crystalline materials. One prevailing view is that mineral-associated macromolecules are responsible for initiating and stabilizing non-equilibrium crystal polymorphs and morphologies through interactions between anionic moieties and cations in solution or at mineral surfaces. Indeed, numerous studies have demonstrated that bio-organic additives can dramatically alter crystal shapes and growth-rates in vitro. However, previous molecular-scale studies revealing mechanisms of growth modification focused on small molecules such as amino acids or peptides and always observed growth inhibition. In contrast, studies using full proteins were non-quantitative and underlying sources of growth modification were ill-defined. Here we investigate interactions between proteins isolated from abalone shell nacre and growing surfaces of calcite. We find that these proteins significantly accelerate the molecular-scale kinetics and, though much larger than atomic steps, alter growth morphology through step-specific interactions that lower their free energies. We propose that these proteins act as surfactants to promote ion attachment at calcite surfaces.

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) ended its second year of operation in January 2002 with five weeks of polarized proton collisions. Polarized protons were successfully injected in both RHIC rings and maintained polarization during acceleration up to 100 GeV per ring using two Siberian snakes in each ring. This is the first time that polarized protons have been accelerated to 100 GeV. The machine performance and accomplishments during the polarized proton run will be reviewed. The plans for the next polarized proton run will be outlined.

None

This slide-show discusses weapons dismantlement and disposal, issues related to classified waste and their solutions.

Those working with alternating-gradient (A-G) systems look for simple, accurate ways to analyze A-G performance for matched beams. The useful K-V equations are easily solved in the smooth approximation. This approximate solution becomes quite inaccurate for applications with large focusing fields and phase advances. Results of efforts to improve the accuracy have tended to be indirect or complex. Their generalizations presented previously gave better accuracy in a simple explicit format. However, the method used to derive their results (expansion in powers of a small parameter) was complex and hard to follow; also, reference 7 only gave low-order correction formulas. The present paper uses a straightforward iteration method and obtains equations of higher order than shown in their previous paper.

Experiments and calculations were conducted with a 0.13 mm fine wire thermocouple within a naturally-aspirated Gill radiation shield to assess and improve the accuracy of air temperature measurements without the use of mechanical aspiration, wind speed or radiation measurements. It was found that this thermocouple measured the air temperature with root-mean-square errors of 0.35 K within the Gill shield without correction. A linear temperature correction was evaluated based on the difference between the interior plate and thermocouple temperatures. This correction was found to be relatively insensitive to shield design and yielded an error of 0.16 K for combined day and night observations. The correction was reliable in the daytime when the wind speed usually exceeds 1 m s{sup -1} but occasionally performed poorly at night during very light winds. Inspection of the standard deviation in the thermocouple wire temperature identified these periods but did not unambiguously locate the most serious events. However, estimates of sensor accuracy during these periods is complicated by the much larger sampling volume of the mechanically-aspirated sensor compared with the naturally-aspirated sensor and the presence of significant near surface temperature gradients. The root-mean-square errors therefore are upper limits to the aspiration error since they include intrinsic …

To examine the forces of acid-base adhesive interactions at the molecular level, we utilize the scanning probe Interracial Force Microscope (IFM). Unlike cantilever-based atomic force microscopes, the EM is a non-compliant, mechanically stable probe that provides a complete adhesive profile without jump-to-contact. In this way, we are able to quantitatively measure the work of adhesion and bond energies at well-defined, nanometer-scale single asperity contacts. In particular, we will discuss the displacement-controlled adhesive forces between self-assembled monolayer of functionalized alkanethiols strongly bound to a gold substrate and a similarly functionalized tip. We also discuss a method utilizing decoupled lateral and normal force sensors to simultaneously observe the onset of both friction and chemical bond formation. Measurements show that friction can be directly attributed to bond formation and rupture well before repulsive contact.

An acousto-optical measurement method is described which was used to conduct proof of principle experiments for a novel acoustic pulse system. The pulse theory, the Localized Wave pulse, is discussed and the system explained and described. The results of the experiments confirm the Localized Wave theory.

The authors examined the ability of a halophilic bacterium (WIPP 1A) isolated from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) site to accumulate uranium in order to determine the potential for biocolloid facilitated actinide transport. The bacterial cell surface functional groups involved in the complexation of the actinide were determined by titration. Uranium, added as uranyl nitrate, was removed from solution at pH 5 by cells but at pH 7 and 9 very little uranium was removed due to its limited solubility. Although present as soluble species, uranyl citrate at pH 5, 7, and 9, and uranyl carbonate at pH 9 were not removed by the bacterium because they were not bioavailable due to their neutral or negative charge. Addition of uranyl EDTA to brine at pH 5, 7, and 9 resulted in the immediate precipitation of U. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) analysis revealed that uranium was not only associated with the cell surface but also accumulated intracellularly as uranium-enriched granules. Extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) analysis of the bacterial cells indicated the bulk sample contained more than one uranium phase. Nevertheless these results show the potential for the formation of actinide bearing bacterial …