Article reporting that PAK2, a member of the Rho family of GTPase-dependent kinases, regulates isometric tension development and myosin II RLC phosphorylation in saponin permeabilized endothelial monolayers. The results demonstrate that PAK2 can directly phosphorylate MLCK, inhibiting its activity and limiting the development of isometric tension.

The technique of in-situ wide angle diffraction has been used to study materials such as Si and Cu. We have extended our studies of shocked single crystal materials to include Fe (001) that is shock compressed by direct laser irradiation using the OMEGA and Janus lasers. A series of experiments was conducted in Fe at pressures above the Hugoniot Elastic Limit. Transient x-ray was used to record the response of multiple lattice planes simultaneously. This technique of wide-angle diffraction provides information on the lattice response both parallel and oblique to the shock propagation direction. In these experiments, compressions of up to 14% in the (002) planes were observed. Details on the experiments and analysis of the dynamic lattice compression will be presented.

Geophysical models are increasingly recognized as an important component of regional calibrations for seismic monitoring. The models can be used to predict geophysical measurements, such as body wave travel times, and can be derived from direct regional studies or even by geophysical analogy. While empirical measurements of these geophysical parameters might be preferred, in aseismic regions or regions without seismic stations, this data might not exist. In these cases, models represent a 'best guess' of the seismic properties in a region, which improves on global models such as the PREM (Preliminary Reference Earth Model) or the IASPEI (International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's Interior) models. The model-based predictions can also serve as a useful background for the empirical measurements by removing trends in the data. To this end, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has developed the WENA model for Western Eurasia and North Africa. This model is constructed using a regionalization of several dozen lithospheric (crust and uppermost mantle) models, combined with the Laske sediment model and 3SMAC upper mantle. We have evaluated this model using a number of data sets, including travel times, surface waves, receiver functions, and waveform analysis. Similarly, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) …

The use of fs lasers to directly write photonic structures inside a glass has great potential as a fabrication method for three-dimensional all-optical integrated components. The ability to use this technique with different glass compositions--specifically tailored for a specific photonics application--is critical to its successful exploitation. Consequently, it is important to understand how glass composition effects waveguide fabrication with fs laser pulses and how different glasses are structurally modified after exposure to fs laser pulses. We have used confocal laser spectroscopy to monitor the changes in glass structure that are associated with waveguide fabrication. Using a low power continuous wave (cw) Ar laser as excitation source we have measured both Raman and fluorescence spectra of the modified regions. Raman spectroscopy provides us with information on the network structure, whereas fluorescence measurements reveal the presence of optically active point defects in the glass. In this paper we review our work on fs-laser fabrication and characterization of photonic structures in glass and discuss the effect of glass composition on processing parameters and structural modification.

We present the design and parameters of an energy recovery linac (ERL) facility, which is under construction in the Collider-Accelerator Department at BNL. This R&D facility has the goal of demonstrating CW operation of an ERL with an average beam current in the range of 0.1-1 ampere and with very high efficiency of energy recovery. The possibility of a future upgrade to a two-pass ERL is also being considered. The heart of the facility is a 5-cell 703.75 MHz super-conducting RF linac with strong Higher Order Mode (HOM) damping. The flexible lattice of the ERL provides a test-bed for exploring issues of transverse and longitudinal instabilities and diagnostics of intense CW electron beams. This ERL is also perfectly suited for a far-IR FEL. We present the status and plans for construction and commissioning of this facility.

Space debris constitutes a significant hazard to low earth orbit satellites and particularly to manned spacecraft. A quite small velocity decrease from vaporization impulses is enough to lower the perigee of the debris sufficiently for atmospheric drag to de-orbit the debris. A short pulse (picosecond) laser version of the Orion concept can accomplish this task in several years of operation. The ''Mercury'' short pulse Yb:S-FAP laser being developed at LLNL for laser fusion is appropriate for this task.

Next generation ERL light-sources, high-energy electron coolers, high-power Free-Electron Lasers, powerful Compton X-ray sources and many other accelerators were made possible by the emerging technology of high-power, high-brightness electron beams. In order to get the anticipated performance level of ampere-class currents, many technological barriers are yet to be broken. BNL's Collider-Accelerator Department is pursuing some of these technologies for its electron cooling of RHIC application, as well as a possible future electron-hadron collider. We will describe work on CW, high-current and high-brightness electron beams. This will include a description of a superconducting, laser-photocathode RF gun and an accelerator cavity capable of producing low emittance (about 1 micron rms normalized) one nano-Coulomb bunches at currents of the order of one ampere average.

A novel method for determining the equation-of-state (EOS) along the release isentrope in an isochoric (constant volume) heated plasma is presented. The sensitivity of this approach is demonstrated using two different equation-of-state models for a solid density, 10 eV expanding Al plasma. Determining the material EOS data is validated to pressures near 80 Mbar, much higher than current isentropic compression experiments allow. Limitations at high temperature (T{sub e} {ge} 100 eV) due to the formation of a radiative conduction layer near the rarefaction interface are also illustrated.

A new polarized hydrogen jet target was used to provide improved beam polarization measurements during the second polarized proton m in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The luminescence produced by beam-hydrogen excitations was also used to test the feasibility of a new beam profile monitor for RFPIC based on the detection of the emitted light. Lenses, a view-port and a sensitive CCD camera were added to the system to record the optical signals from the interaction chamber. The first very promising results are reported here. The same system with an additional optical spectrometer or optical filter system may be used in the future to detect impurities in the jet, such as oxygen molecules, which affect the accuracy of the polarization measurements.

High-energy ion colliders (hadron colliders operating with ions other than protons) are premier research tools for nuclear physics. The collision energy and high luminosity are important design and operations considerations. The experiments also expect flexibility with frequent changes in the collision energy, detector fields, and ion species, including asymmetric collisions. For the creation, acceleration, and storage of bright intense ion beams limits are set by space charge, charge exchange, and intrabeam scattering effects. The latter leads to luminosity lifetimes of only a few hours for intense heavy ions beams. Currently, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at BNL is the only operating high-energy ion collider. Later this decade the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), under construction at CERN, will also run with heavy ions.

To study collisions between polarized electrons and heavy ions or polarized protons at high energy, adding a 10 GeV electron storage ring to the existing RHIC facility is currently under consideration. To achieve high luminosities of several 10{sup 33} cm{sup -2} sec{sup -1} range, a vertical beam-beam tuneshift parameter of {zeta}{sub y} = 0.08 is required for the electron beam. Simulation studies are being performed to study the feasibility of this high tuneshift parameter and explore the potential for even higher tuneshifts. Recent results of these studies are presented.

This paper presents the status of General Atomics Urban Maglev Program. The development provides an innovative approach for low speed transportation suitable for very challenging urban environments. Permanent magnets arranged in a 'Halbach' array configuration produce a relatively stiff magnetic suspension operating with an air gap of 25 mm. The project has progressed from design and prototype hardware testing, to the construction of a 120-meter full-scale test track, located in San Diego, California. Dynamic testing of the levitation, propulsion and guidance systems is being performed.

The requirement for low beam loss is very important both to protect the beam component, and to make the hands-on maintenance possible. In this report, the design considerations to achieving high intensity and low loss will be presented. We start by specifying the beam loss limit at every physical process followed by the proper design and parameters for realizing the required goals. The process considered in this paper include the emittance growth in the linac, the H{sup -} injection, the transition crossing, the coherent instabilities and the extraction losses.

Jets from radio galaxies can have dramatic effects on the medium through which they propagate. We review observational evidence for jet-induced star formation in low ('FR-I') and high ('FR-II') luminosity radio galaxies, at low and high redshifts respectively. We then discuss numerical simulations which are aimed to explain a jet-induced starburst ('Minkowski's Object') in the nearby FR-I type radio galaxy NGC 541. We conclude that jets can induce star formation in moderately dense (10 cm{sup -3}), warm (10{sup 4} K) gas; that this may be more common in the dense environments of forming, active galaxies; and that this may provide a mechanism for 'positive' feedback from AGN in the galaxy formation process.

One problem in similarity-based object retrieval (SBOR) is how to define and estimate the similarity between two objects. In this paper we present a shape similarity measure based on thin-plate splines, and compare its performance with several other measures used in SBOR. We evaluate the methods on both artificial and real images.

The X-ray Spectrometer (XRS) instrument is a revolutionary non-dispersive spectrometer that will form the basis for the Astro-E2 observatory to be launched in 2005. We have recently installed a flight spare XRS microcalorimeter spectrometer at the EBIT-I and SuperEBIT facility at LLNL replacing the XRS from the earlier Astro-E mission and providing twice the resolving power. The XRS microcalorimeter is an x-ray detector that senses the heat deposited by the incident photon. It achieves a high energy resolution by operating at 0.06K and by carefully engineering the heat capacity and thermal conductance. The XRS/EBIT instrument has 32 pixels in a square geometry and achieves an energy resolution of 6 eV at 6 keV, with a bandpass from 0.1 to 12 keV (or more at higher operating temperature). The instrument allows detailed studies of the x-ray line emission of laboratory plasmas. The XRS/EBIT also provides an extensive calibration 'library' for the Astro-E2 observatory.

Pulsed power technology has been applied in particle accelerators and storage rings for over four decades. It is most commonly used in injection, extraction, beam manipulation, source, and focusing systems. These systems belong to the class of repetitive pulsed power. In this presentation, we review and discuss the history, present status, and future challenge of pulsed power applications in high intensity proton accelerators and storage rings.

Data coming from complex simulation models reach easily dimensions much greater than available computational resources. Visualization of such data still represents the most intuitive and effective tool for scientific inspection of simulated phenomena. To ease this process several techniques have been adopted mainly concerning the use of hierarchical multi-resolution representations. In this paper we present the implementation of a hierarchical indexing schema for multiresolution data tailored to overwork the computational power of distributed environments.

Irradiation embrittlement in nuclear reactor pressure vessel steels results from the formation of a high number density of nanometer sized copper rich precipitates and sub-nanometer defect-solute clusters. We present positron annihilation spectroscopy (PAS) results to characterize the compositions and magnetic character of these defects in model A533B reactor pressure vessel steels. The results confirm the presence of copper-rich precipitates after irradiation. The measured orbital electron momentum spectra indicate the precipitates are alloyed with Mn and Ni. The copper precipitates larger than R {approx} 1.2 nm (from SANS measurements) are non-magnetic, which limits the possible Fe content of the precipitates to at most a few %. Notably, large vacancy clusters observed in neutron irradiated Fe-Cu alloys were not observed in the steels after irradiation.

Transformation superplasticity is a deformation mechanism induced by thermally-cycling a polymorphic material through the phase transformation range while simultaneously applying an external biasing stress. Unlike microstructural superplasticity, which requires a fine, equiaxed grain structure, this mechanism can be applied to coarse-grained alloys and composites. In this article, we review our research on transformation superplasticity of Ti-6Al-4V/TiB-whisker reinforced composites, during thermal cycling through the titanium {alpha}/{beta} transformation range. The composites exhibit Newtonian flow and superplastic extension under these conditions. We describe the constitutive behavior of composites containing 0, 5 and 10 vol% reinforcing whiskers, and consider the effects of load transfer from matrix to whisker on superplastic deformation using existing rheological models. Additionally, strain hardening due to gradual whisker alignment is observed, and rationalized in terms of increased load transfer for aligned whiskers.

The properties of highly charged ions and their interaction with electrons and atoms is being studied in-situ at the LLNL electron beam ion traps, EBIT-II and SuperEBIT. Spectroscopic measurements provide data on electron-ion and ion-atom interactions as well as accurate transition energies of lines relevant for understanding QED, nuclear magnetization, and the effects of relativity on complex, state-of-the-art atomic calculations.

The authors consider a scenario of having two identical Interaction Points (IPs) in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The strengths of beam-beam resonances strongly depend on the phase advance between these two IPs and therefore certain phase advances could improve beam life-time and luminosity. The authors compute the dynamic aperture (DA) as function of the phase advance between these IPs to find the optimum settings.The beam-beam interaction is treated in the weak-strong approximation and a non-linear model of the lattice is used. For the current RHIC proton working point (0.69.0.685) [1] the design lattice is found to have the optimum phase advance. However this is not the case for other working points.

The beam loss along the Spallation Neutron Source's accumulator ring is mainly located at the collimator region and injection region. This paper studied the electron cloud build-up at these two regions with the three-dimension program CLOUDLAND.

Horizontal beam orbit jitter at frequencies around 10 Hz has been observed in RHIC for several years. The distinct frequencies of this jitter have been found at superconducting low-beta quadrupole triplets around the ring, where they coincide with mechanical modes of the cold masses. Recently, we have identified liquid helium flow as the driving force of these oscillations.