Calculations are presented for two shots in the W7AS stellarator which differ only in the magnitude of the current in the divertor control coil, but have very different values of experimentally attainable β (<β> ≈ 2.7% versus <β> ≈ 1.8%). Equilibrium calculations find that a region of chaotic magnetic field line trajectories fills approximately the outer 1/3 of the cross-section in each of these configurations. The field lines in the stochastic region are calculated to behave as if the flux surfaces are broken only locally near the outer midplane and are preserved elsewhere. The calculated magnetic field line diffusion coefficients in the stochastic regions for the two shots are consistent with the observed differences in the attainable β, and are also consistent with the differences in the reconstructed pressure profiles.

Hanford has played a pivotal role in the United States' defense for more than 60 years, beginning with the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. During its history, the Hanford Site has had nine reactors producing plutonium for the United States' nuclear weapons program. All the reactors were located next to the Columbia River and all had associated low-level radioactive and hazardous waste releases. Site cleanup, which formally began in 1989 with the signing of the Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order, also known as the Tri-Party Agreement, involves more than 1,600 waste sites and burial grounds, and the demolition of more than 1,500buildings and structures, Cleanup is scheduled to be complete by 2035. Regulatory oversight of the cleanup is being performed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington State Department of Ecology(Ecology) under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) and the Revised Code of Washington, 'Hazardous Waste Management.' Cleanup of the waste sites and demolition of the many buildings and structures generates large volumes of contaminated soil, equipment, demolition debris, and other wastes that must be disposed of in a secure manner to prevent further environmental degradation. From a risk perspective, it is …

Article and gallery of photographs from the gala premiere for the "Balenciaga and His Legacy: Haute Couture from the Texas Fashion Collection" exhibit held at the Meadows Museum in Dallas.

Differences in synchrotron radiation beamline shielding design between the facilities of 3 GeV class and 8 GeV class are discussed with regard to SLAC SSRL and SPring-8 beamlines. Requirements of beamline shielding as well as the accelerator shielding depend on the stored electron energy, and here some factors in beamline shielding depending on the stored energy in particular, are clarified, namely the effect of build up, the effect of double scattering of photons at branch beamlines, and the spread of gas bremsstrahlung.

We measure CP-violating asymmetries of neutral charmed mesons in the modes D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -}K{sup +} and D{sup 0} {yields} {pi}{sup -}{pi}{sup +} with the highest precision to date by using D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -}{pi}{sup +} decays to correct detector asymmetries. An analysis of 385.8 fb{sup -}1 of data collected with the BaBar detector yields values of a{sup KK}{sub CP} = (0.00 {+-} 0.34 (stat.) {+-} 0.13 (syst.))% and a{sup {pi}{pi}}{sub CP} = (-0.24 {+-} 0.52 (stat.) {+-} 0.22 (syst.))%, which agree with Standard Model predictions.

The actinobacteria Kineococcus radiotolerans is highly resistant to ionizing radiation, desiccation, and oxidative stress; though the underlying biochemical mechanisms are unknown. The purpose of this study was to explore a possible linkage between the uptake of transition metals and extreme resistance to ionizing radiation and oxidative stress. The effects of 6 different divalent cationic metals on growth were examined in the absence of ionizing radiation. None of the metals tested were stimulatory, though cobalt was inhibitory to growth. In contrast, copper supplementation dramatically increased cell growth during chronic irradiation. K. radiotolerans exhibited specific uptake and intracellular accumulation of copper compared to only a weak response to both iron and manganese supplementation. Copper accumulation sensitized cells to hydrogen peroxide. Acute irradiation induced DNA damage was similar between the copper-loaded culture as the age-synchronized no copper control culture, though low molecular weight DNA was more persistent during post-irradiation recovery in the Cu-loaded culture. Still, the estimated times for genome restoration differed by only 1 hr between treatments. While we cannot discount the possibility that copper fulfills an unexpectedly important biochemical role in a radioactive environment; K. radiotolerans has a high capacity for intracellular copper sequestration, and presumably efficiently coordinated oxidative stress defenses …

We describe a camera to record coherent scattering patterns with a soft-X-ray free-electron laser. The camera consists of a laterally-graded multilayer mirror which reflects the diffraction pattern onto a CCD detector. The mirror acts as a bandpass filter both for wavelength and angle, which isolates the desired scattering pattern from non-sample scattering or incoherent emission from the sample. The mirror also solves the particular problem of the extreme intensity of the FEL pulses, which are focused to greater than 10{sup 14} W/cm{sup 2}. The strong undiffracted pulse passes through a hole in the mirror and propagates on to a beam dump at a distance behind the instrument rather than interacting with a beamstop placed near the CCD. The camera concept is extendable for the full range of the fundamental wavelength of the FLASH FEL (i.e. between 6 nm and 60 nm) and into the water window. We have fabricated and tested various multilayer mirrors for wavelengths of 32 nm, 16 nm, 13.5 nm, and 4.5 nm. At the shorter wavelengths mirror roughness must be minimized to reduce scattering from the mirror. We have recorded over 30,000 diffraction patterns at the FLASH free-electron laser with no observable mirror damage or degradation …

Luminosity measurements at the high luminosity points of the LHC are very challenging due to the extremely high radiation levels in the order of 180 MGy/yr. They have designed an ionization chamber that uses a flowing inorganic gas mixture and a combination of metals and ceramics. With such a choice, an additional challenge is achieving the necessary speed to be able to resolve bunch-by-bunch luminosity data. They present the design, analysis and experimental results of the early demonstration tests of this device.

Characterizing chemical changes within single cells is important for determining fundamental mechanisms of biological processes that will lead to new biological insights and improved disease understanding. Imaging biological systems with mass spectrometry (MS) has gained popularity in recent years as a method for creating precise chemical maps of biological samples. In order to obtain high-quality mass spectral images that provide relevant molecular information about individual cells, samples must be prepared so that salts and other cell-culture components are removed from the cell surface and the cell contents are rendered accessible to the desorption beam. We have designed a cellular preparation protocol for imaging MS that preserves the cellular contents for investigation and removes the majority of the interfering species from the extracellular matrix. Using this method, we obtain excellent imaging results and reproducibility in three diverse cell types: MCF7 human breast cancer cells, Madin-Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cells, and NIH/3T3 mouse fibroblasts. This preparation technique allows routine imaging MS analysis of cultured cells, allowing for any number of experiments aimed at furthering scientific understanding of molecular processes within individual cells.

Characterizing and classifying molecular variation within biological samples is critical for determining fundamental mechanisms of biological processes that will lead to new insights including improved disease understanding. Towards these ends, time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) was used to examine increasingly complex samples of biological relevance, including monosaccharide isomers, pure proteins, complex protein mixtures, and mouse embryo tissues. The complex mass spectral data sets produced were analyzed using five common statistical and chemometric multivariate analysis techniques: principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA), soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), and decision tree analysis by recursive partitioning. PCA was found to be a valuable first step in multivariate analysis, providing insight both into the relative groupings of samples and into the molecular basis for those groupings. For the monosaccharides, pure proteins and protein mixture samples, all of LDA, PLSDA, and SIMCA were found to produce excellent classification given a sufficient number of compound variables calculated. For the mouse embryo tissues, however, SIMCA did not produce as accurate a classification. The decision tree analysis was found to be the least successful for all the data sets, providing neither as accurate a classification nor chemical …

We review different routes for the generation of nanoporous metallic foams and films exhibiting well-defined pore size and short-range order. Dealloying and templating allows the generation of both two- and three-dimensional structures which promise a well defined plasmonic response determined by material constituents and porosity. Viewed in the context of metamaterials, the ease of fabrication of samples covering macroscopic dimensions is highly promising, and suggests more in-depth investigations of the plasmonic and photonic properties of this material system for photonic applications.

This article discusses strong tantalum-to-boron dative interactions in (silox)3Ta(BH3) and (silox)3Ta(ɳ2-B,CI-BCI2Ph) (silox = tBu3SiO)1.

Available methods for developing and screening small drug-like molecules able to knockout toxins or pathogenic microorganisms have some limitations. In order to be useful, these new methods must provide high-throughput analysis and identify specific binders in a short period of time. To meet this need, we are developing an approach that uses living cells to generate libraries of small biomolecules, which are then screened inside the cell for activity. Our group is using this new, combined approach to find highly specific ligands capable of disabling anthrax Lethal Factor (LF) as proof of principle. Key to our approach is the development of a method for the biosynthesis of libraries of cyclic peptides, and an efficient screening process that can be carried out inside the cell.

We study the evolution and saturation of the gluondistribution function in the quark-gluon plasma as probed by apropagating parton and its effect on the computation of jet quenching ortransport parameter $\hat q $. For thermal partons, the saturation scale$Q2_s$ is found to be proportional to the Debye screening mass $\mu_D2$.For hard probes, evolution at small $x=Q2_s/6ET$ leads to jet energydependence of hat q. We study this dependence for both a conformal gaugetheory in weak and strong coupling limit and for (pure gluon) QCD. Theenergy dependence can be used to extract the shear viscosity $\eta$ ofthe medium since $\eta$ can be related to the transport parameter forthermal partons in a transport description. We also derive upper boundson the transport parameter for both energetic and thermal partons. Thelater leads to a lower bound on shear viscosity-to-entropy density ratiowhich is consistent with the conjectured lower bound $\eta/s\geq 1/4\pi$.Implications on the study of jet quenching at RHIC and LHC and the bulkproperties of the dense matter are discussed.

Along with methane, methanol and methylated amines represent important biogenic atmospheric constituents; thus, not only methanotrophs but also nonmethanotrophic methylotrophs play a significant role in global carbon cycling. The complete genome of a model obligate methanol and methylamine utilizer, Methylobacillus flagellatus (strain KT) was sequenced. The genome is represented by a single circular chromosome of approximately 3 Mbp, potentially encoding a total of 2,766 proteins. Based on genome analysis as well as the results from previous genetic and mutational analyses, methylotrophy is enabled by methanol and methylamine dehydrogenases and their specific electron transport chain components, the tetrahydromethanopterin-linked formaldehyde oxidation pathway and the assimilatory and dissimilatory ribulose monophosphate cycles, and by a formate dehydrogenase. Some of the methylotrophy genes are present in more than one (identical or nonidentical) copy. The obligate dependence on single-carbon compounds appears to be due to the incomplete tricarboxylic acid cycle, as no genes potentially encoding alpha-ketoglutarate, malate, or succinate dehydrogenases are identifiable. The genome of M. flagellatus was compared in terms of methylotrophy functions to the previously sequenced genomes of three methylotrophs, Methylobacterium extorquens (an alphaproteobacterium, 7 Mbp), Methylibium petroleiphilum (a betaproteobacterium, 4 Mbp), and Methylococcus capsulatus (a gammaproteobacterium, 3.3 Mbp). Strikingly, metabolically and/or phylogenetically, the …

We report on design studies for a seeded FEL light source that is responsive to the scientific needs of the future. The FEL process increases radiation flux by several orders of magnitude above existing incoherent sources, and offers the additional enhancements attainable by optical manipulations of the electron beam: control of the temporal duration and bandwidth of the coherent output, reduced gain length in the FEL, utilization of harmonics to attain shorter wavelengths, and precise synchronization of the x-ray pulse with seed laser systems. We describe an FEL facility concept based on a high repetition rate RF photocathode gun, that would allow simultaneous operation of multiple independent FEL's, each producing high average brightness, tunable over the VUV-soft x-ray range, and each with individual performance characteristics determined by the configuration of the FEL. SASE, enhanced-SASE (ESASE), seeded, harmonic generation, and other configurations making use of optical manipulations of the electron beam may be employed, providing a wide range of photon beam properties to meet varied user demands.

Clear evidence for symplectic symmetry in low-lying states of {sup 12}C and {sup 16}O is reported. Eigenstates of {sup 12}C and {sup 16}O, determined within the framework of the no-core shell model using the JISP16 NN realistic interaction, typically project at the 85-90% level onto a few of the most deformed symplectic basis states that span only a small fraction of the full model space. The results are nearly independent of whether the bare or renormalized effective interactions are used in the analysis. The outcome confirms Elliott's SU(3) model which underpins the symplectic scheme, and above all, points to the relevance of a symplectic no-core shell model that can reproduce experimental B(E2) values without effective charges as well as deformed spatial modes associated with clustering phenomena in nuclei.

Currently, most of our thinking about the defects responsible for initiating laser damage considers them as featureless absorbers. However, an increasing body of evidence, particularly involving multi-wavelength irradiation, suggests electronic structure of damage initiators is important in determining both initiation and conditioning behaviors in KDP. The effective absorption coefficient of energy under multi-wavelength irradiation cannot be accounted for by a structureless absorber, but is consistent with an initiator with a multi-level structure. We outline the evidence and assess the ability of such a simple multi-level model to explain these and other experimentally observed behaviors.

InfiniBand (IB) is a popular network technology for modern high-performance computing systems. MPI implementations traditionally support IB using a reliable, connection-oriented (RC) transport. However, per-process resource usage that grows linearly with the number of processes, makes this approach prohibitive for large-scale systems. IB provides an alternative in the form of a connectionless unreliable datagram transport (UD), which allows for near-constant resource usage and initialization overhead as the process count increases. This paper describes a UD-based implementation for IB in Open MPI as a scalable alternative to existing RC-based schemes. We use the software reliability capabilities of Open MPI to provide the guaranteed delivery semantics required by MPI. Results show that UD not only requires fewer resources at scale, but also allows for shorter MPI startup times. A connectionless model also improves performance for applications that tend to send small messages to many different processes.

Retrieving ''suspect'' transuranic (TRU) waste from the Hanford Site's low-level waste burial grounds is a tall order, due to conditions that have changed as the work progresses. Project personnel developed several new methods for handling the waste that other retrieval operations may find useful. The Waste Retrieval Project is operated by Fluor Hanford, a prime contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy's Richland Operations Office since 1996.

'Designing in Safety' is a desired part of the development of any new potentially hazardous system, process, or facility. It is a required part of nuclear safety activities as specified in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Order 420.B, Facility Safety. This order addresses the design of nuclear related facilities developed under federal regulation IOCFR830, Nuclear Safety Management. IOCFR830 requires that safety basis documentation be provided to identify how nuclear safety is being adequately addressed as a condition for system operation (e.g., the safety basis). To support the development of the safety basis, a safety analysis is performed. Although the concept of developing a design that addresses 'Safety is simple, the execution can be complex and challenging. This paper addresses those complexities and challenges for the design activity of a system to treat sludge, a corrosion product of spent nuclear fuel, at DOE's Hanford Site in Washington State. The system being developed is referred to as the Sludge Treatment Project (STP). This paper describes the portion of the safety analysis that addresses the selection of design basis events using the experience gained from the STP and the development of design requirements for safety features associated with those events. Specifically, the …

For nearly 11 years, Fluor Hanford has been busy cleaning up the legacy of nuclear weapons production at one of the Department of Energy's (DOE'S) major sites in the United States. As prime nuclear waste cleanup contractor at the vast Hanford Site in southeastern Washington state, Fluor Hanford has changed the face of cleanup. Fluor beginning on October 1, 1996, Hanford Site cleanup was primarily a ''paper exercise.'' The Tri-Party Agreement, officially called the Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order - the edict governing cleanup among the DOE, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Washington state - was just seven years old. Milestones mandated in the agreement up until then had required mainly waste characterization, reporting, and planning, with actual waste remediation activities off in the future. Real work, accessing waste ''in the field'' - or more literally in huge underground tanks, decaying spent fuel POO{approx}{approx}S, groundwater, hundreds of contaminated facilities, solid waste burial grounds, and liquid waste disposal sites -began in earnest under Fluor Hanford. The fruits of labors initiated, completed and/or underway by Fluor Hanford can today be seen across the site. Spent nuclear fuel is buttoned up in secure, dry containers stored away from regional water …

Design and testing of the United States Navy’s next generation air particle detector (NGAPD) is presently underway. The NGAPD is intended for use in nuclear applications for the United States Navy and is being designed to detect airborne Co-60 with a reduction in false alarms and improved ease of use. Features being developed include gamma compensation, low maintenance, commercial off-the-shelf electronics, and spectrum simulation for quality assurance and functional testing applications. By supplying a spectrum simulator, the radon stripping algorithm can be running when a simulated anthropogenic source spectrum (e.g., from Co-60 or transuranics) is superimposed on the radon progeny spectrum. This will allow alarm levels to be tested when the air flow is running and the radon stripping algorithm is providing the instrument response output. Modern units evaluate source spectra with the air flow off and the radon spectrum absent thereby not testing the true system performance which comes out of the radon stripping algorithm. Testing results of the preliminary prototype show promise along with computer simulations of source spectra. Primary testing results taken to date include gamma compensation, thermal insults, vibration and spectrum simulation.

The initial stages of wet thermal oxidation of Si(100)-(2x1) have been investigated by in-situ ambient pressure x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (APXPS), including chemical-state resolution via Si 2p core-level spectra. Real-time growth rates of silicon dioxide have been monitored at 100 mTorr of water vapor. This pressure is considerably higher than in any prior study using XPS. Substrate temperatures have been varied between 250 and 500 C. Above a temperature of {approx} 400 C, two distinct regimes, a rapid and a quasi-saturated one, are identified and growth rates show a strong temperature dependence which cannot be explained by the conventional Deal-Grove model.