Using a well characterized 1.06 μm 150 ps glass laser pulse the damage characteristics for diamond turned, diamond turned/ polished, and polished copper and silver mirrors less than 5 cm diameter were studied. Although most samples were tested with a normal angle of incidence, some were tested at 45$sup 0$ with different linear polarization showing an increase in damage threshold for S polarization. Different damage mechanisms observed will be discussed. Laser damage is related to residual surface influences of the fabrication process. First attempts to polish diamond turned surfaces resulted in a significant decrease in laser damage threshold. The importance of including the heat of fusion in the one dimensional heat analysis of the theoretical damage threshold and how close the samples came to the theoretical damage threshold is discussed. (auth)

Article on 5,10,15,20-tetrakis(4-methoxyphenyl)-porphyrinato] zinc dichloromethane disolvate.

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The 2009 Gordon Conference on Microbial Population Biology will cover a diverse range of cutting edge issues in the microbial sciences and beyond. Firmly founded in evolutionary biology and with a strongly integrative approach, past Conferences have covered a range of topics from the dynamics and genetics of adaptation to the evolution of mutation rate, community ecology, evolutionary genomics, altruism, and epidemiology. The 2009 Conference is no exception, and will include sessions on the evolution of infectious diseases, social evolution, the evolution of symbioses, experimental evolution, adaptive landscapes, community dynamics, and the evolution of protein structure and function. While genomic approaches continue to make inroads, broadening our knowledge and encompassing new questions, the conference will also emphasize the use of experimental approaches to test hypotheses decisively. As in the past, this Conference provides young scientists and graduate students opportunities to present their work in poster format and exchange ideas with leading investigators from a broad spectrum of disciplines. This meeting is never dull: some of the most significant and contentious issues in biology have been thrashed out here. The 2009 meeting will be no exception.

This article calculates Abraham model solute descriptors using published solubility data for 4,5-dihydroxyanthraquinone-2-carboxylic acid dissolved in several organic solvents of varying polarity and hydrogen-bonding character.

The Futures Lab group at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago are designing, building, and evaluating a new type of interactive computing environment that couples in a deep way the concepts of direct manipulation found in virtual reality with the richness and variety of interactive devices found in ubiquitous computing. This environment provides the interactivity and collaboration support of teleimmersive environments with the exibility and availability of desktop collaboration tools. The authors call these environments ActiveSpaces. An ActiveSpace is a physical domain that has been augmented with multiscale multiscreen displays, environment-specific and device-specific sensors, body and object trackers, human-input and instrument-input interfaces, streaming audio and video capture devices, and force feedback devices--and has then been connected to other such spaces via the Grid.

Gated, microchannel-plate-based (MCP) framing cameras have been deployed worldwide for 0.2 - 9 keV x-ray imaging and spectroscopy of transient plasma phenomena. For a variety of spectroscopic and imaging applications, the angular sensitivity of MCPs must be known for correctly interpreting the data. We present systematic measurements of angular sensitivity at discrete relevant photon energies and arbitrary MCP gain. The results can been accurately predicted by using a simple 2D approximation to the 3D MCP geometry and by averaging over all possible photon ray paths.

Traditional techniques for performance analysis provide a means for extracting and analyzing raw performance information from applications. Users then reason about and compare this raw performance data to their performance expectations for important application constructs. This comparison can be tedious, difficult, and error-prone for the scale and complexity of today's architectures and software systems. To address this situation, we present a methodology and prototype that allows users to assert performance expectations explicitly in their source code using performance assertions. As the application executes, each performance assertion in the application collects data implicitly to verify the assertion. By allowing the user to specify a performance expectation with individual code segments, the runtime system can jettison raw data for measurements that pass their expectation, while reacting to failures with a variety of responses. We present several compelling uses of performance assertions with our operational prototype including raising a performance exception, validating a performance model, and adapting an algorithm to an architecture empirically at runtime.

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The application of four gas-turbine, modular helium cooled reactors and an accelerator unit (GT/AD-MHR) has been proposed for burning transuranics recycled from LWR waste. The recycled LWR discharged transuranics encapsulated in TRISO coated particles are first loaded into the outer thermal spectrum zone of the GT/AD-MHR for burning in the critical mode for about three years. Previously burned fuel is in a central fast zone. In the fourth year, the same unit is configured as an accelerator-driven system, containing a centrally located spallation target. The three-year, thermal-zone burned fuel and the inner fast-zone fuel from the critical mode operation are used in this subcritical cycle, and remain in their respective zones. At the end of this one-year subcritical irradiation, the outer thermal-zone fuel is reconstituted and used as fast-zone fuel in another critical mode operation. As the fuel in the fast-zone has reached its end of life it is discharged, with very low transuranics content. The critical mode operation is staggered, and each GT/AD-MGR unit undergoes the subcritical burn in one out of four year. The physics performance of the GT/AD-MHR has been evaluated using independent deterministic and Monte Carlo codes and the results of the study are presented in …

Fermilab collider Run IIa requires 36 proton bunches with intensities 270E9ppb and 36 antiproton bunches with intensities 40-70E9ppb[1]. Currently the proton bunches are produced by coalescing 5-7 53MHz bunches into one 53MHz bunch and repeating this process a total of 36 times. It is necessary to coalesce each group of 5-7 bunches (called a ''batch'') on independent cycles mainly because of beam loading. The beam loading requirements that would allow us to coalesce 4 proton batches at a time are presented.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is developing a ceramic form for immobilizing excess US plutonium. The process used to produce the ceramic form is similar to the fabrication process used in the production of MOX fuel. In producing the ceramic form, the uranium and plutonium oxides are first milled to less than 20 microns. The milled actinide powder then goes through a mixing-blending step where the ceramic precursors, made from a mixture of calcined TiO₂, Ca(OH)₂, HfO₂ and Gd0₃, are blended with the milled actinides. A subsequent granulation step ensures that the powder will flow freely into the press and die set. The pressed ceramic material is then sintered. The process parameters for the ceramic fabrication steps to make the ceramic form are less demanding than equivalent processing steps for MOX fuel fabrication. As an example, the pressing pressure for MOX is in excess of 137.0 MPa, whereas the pressing pressure for the ceramic form is only 13.8 MPa. This translates into less die wear for the ceramic material pressing. Similarly, the sintering temperatures and times are also different. MOX is sintered at 1,700°C in 4% H₂ for a 24 hour cycle. The ceramic form is sintered at 1350°C in argon …

In this paper, the adaptive optics (AO) system at Keck Observatory is characterized. The AO system is described in detail. The physical parameters of the lenslets, CCD and deformable mirror, the calibration procedures and the signal processing algorithms are explained. Results of sky performance tests are presented: the AO system is shown to deliver images with an average Strehl ratio of up to 0.37 at 1.59 {micro}m using a bright guide star. An error budget that is consistent with the observed image quality is presented.

A hydroxy-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB)/isophorone diisocyanate (IPDI) elastomer is commonly used as propellant binder material. The thermal degradation of the binder is believed to be an important parameter governing the performance of the propellant. The aging of these binders can be monitored by mechanical property measurements such as modulus or tensile elongation. These techniques, however, are not easily adapted to binder agents that are dispersed throughout a propellant. In this paper the authors investigated solid state NMR relaxation times as a means to predict the mechanical properties of the binder as a function of aging time. {sup 1}H spin-lattice and spin-spin relaxation times were found to be insensitive to the degree of thermal degradation of the elastomer. Apparently these relaxation times depend on localized motions that are only weakly correlated with mechanical properties. A strong correlation was found between the {sup 13}C cross-polarization (CP) NMR time constant, T{sub cp}, and the tensile elongation at break of the elastomer as a function of aging time. A ramped-amplitude CP experiment was shown to be less sensitive to imperfections in setting critical instrumental parameters for this mobile material.

Continuum strong QCD is the application of models and continuum quantum field theory to the study of phenomena in hadronic physics, which includes; e.g., the spectrum of QCD bound states and their interactions. Herein the author provides a Dyson-Schwinger equation perspective, focusing on qualitative aspects of confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in cold, sparse QCD, and also elucidating consequences of the axial-vector Ward-Takahashi identity and features of the heavy-quark limit.

The degradation of luminescence in phenylenevinylene polymers is due to exciton diffusion to quenching defects. The microscopic structure of these defects is identified by in-situ vibrational spectroscopy. The authors present evidence that the defect quenching is due to charge transfer by studies on model phenylenevinylene oligomer. In the absence of defect quenchers, the authors have achieved nearly exponential photoluminescence decay with observed lifetimes > 1 ns and a fourfold increase in electroluminescence. They have also utilized picosecond laser spectroscopy to study the formation yield of emissive excitons in the polymer PPVs with different morphology. They have found that increasing polymer chain separation would greatly increases the luminescent efficiency due to avoiding the interchain excitons (exciplexes). Clarification of the nature of photophysics of conjugated polymers suggests avenues for improvement in fabrication of emissive polymers and electroluminescent polymers devices.

We present first principle molecular dynamics simulations for selected point defects on the (001) stoichiometric carbon terminated surface of cubic Silicon Carbide. In particular we investigated missing units and coordination defects. The results of our calculations are compared with recent experiments, in particular we discuss simulated STM images, which are in good agreement with measured ones.

Bacteria of the genus Deinococcus are extremely resistant to ionizing radiation (IR), ultraviolet light (UV) and desiccation. The mesophile Deinococcus radiodurans was the first member of this group whose genome was completely sequenced. Analysis of the genome sequence of D. radiodurans, however, failed to identify unique DNA repair systems. To further delineate the genes underlying the resistance phenotypes, we report the whole-genome sequence of a second Deinococcus species, the thermophile Deinococcus geothermalis, which at itsoptimal growth temperature is as resistant to IR, UV and desiccation as D. radiodurans, and a comparative analysis of the two Deinococcus genomes. Many D. radiodurans genes previously implicated in resistance, but for which no sensitive phenotype was observed upon disruption, are absent in D. geothermalis. In contrast, most D. radiodurans genes whose mutants displayed a radiation-sensitive phenotype in D. radiodurans are conserved in D. geothermalis. Supporting the existence of a Deinococcus radiation response regulon, a common palindromic DNA motif was identified in a conserved set of genes associated with resistance, and a dedicated transcriptional regulator was predicted. We present the case that these two species evolved essentially the same diverse set of gene families, and that the extreme stress-resistance phenotypes of the Deinococcus lineage emerged …

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Niobium coatings on copper cavities have been considered as a cost-efficient replacement of bulk niobium RF cavities, however, coatings made by magnetron sputtering have not quite lived up to high expectations due to Q-slope and other issues. High power impulse magnetron sputtering (HIPIMS) is a promising emerging coatings technology which combines magnetron sputtering with a pulsed power approach. The magnetron is turned into a metal plasma source by using very high peak power density of ~ 1 kW/cm{sup 2}. In this contribution, the cavity coatings concept with HIPIMS is explained. A system with two cylindrical, movable magnetrons was set up with custom magnetrons small enough to be inserted into 1.3 GHz cavities. Preliminary data on niobium HIPIMS plasma and the resulting coatings are presented. The HIPIMS approach has the potential to be extended to film systems beyond niobium, including other superconducting materials and/or multilayer systems.

This paper describes the design and preliminary testing of a cryogenic cooling loop that uses a thermomechanical pump to circulate superfluid liquid helium. The cooling loop test apparatus is designed to prove forced liquid helium flow concepts that will be used on the Astromag superconducting magnet facility.

Jet quenching in the matter created in high energy nucleus/nucleus collisions provides a tomographic tool to probe the medium properties. Recent experimental results from the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) on characterization of jet production via dihadron correlations at high transverse momentum are reviewed. Expectations from the dihadron measurements for the lower energy {radical}s{sub NN} = 62.4 GeV RHIC run are discussed.

From examination of only 4 deg{sup 2} of sky in the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey (NDWFS) region, we have identified the first radio-loud quasar at a redshift z > 6. The object, FIRST J1427385+331241, was discovered by matching the FLAMEX IR survey to FIRST survey radio sources with NDWFS counterparts. One candidate z > 6 quasar was found, and spectroscopy with the Keck II telescope confirmed its identification, yielding a redshift z = 6.12. The object is a Broad Absorption Line (BAL) quasar with an optical luminosity of M{sub B} {approx} -26.9 and a radio-to-optical flux ratio {approx} 60. Two Mg II absorptions systems are present at redshifts of z = 2.18 and z = 2.20. We briefly discuss the implications of this discovery for the high-redshift quasar population.

As evidenced by the popularity of MPI (Message Passing Interface), message passing is an effective programming technique for managing coarse-grained concurrency on distributed computers. Unfortunately, debugging message-passing applications can be difficult. Software complexity, data races, and scheduling dependencies can make programming errors challenging to locate with manual, interactive debugging techniques. This article describes Umpire, a new tool for detecting programming errors at runtime in message passing applications. Umpire monitors the MPI operations of an application by interposing itself between the application and the MPI runtime system using the MPI profiling layer. It, then, checks its MPI behavior for specific errors. The initial collection of programming errors includes deadlock detection, mismatched collective operations, and resource exhaustion. They present an evaluation that demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach.