Actinide materials present an extreme scientific challenge to the materials research community. The complex electronic structures of actinide materials result in many unusual and unique properties that have yet to be fully understood. The difficulties in handling, preparing, and characterizing actinide materials has frequently precluded investigations and has the limited the detailed understanding of these relevant, complex materials. However, modern experiments with actinide materials have the potential to provide key, fundamental information about many long-standing issues concerning actinide materials. This workshop focused on the scientific and technical challenges posed by actinide materials and the potential that synchrotron radiation approaches available at the ALS can contribute to improving the fundamental understanding of actinides materials. Fundamental experimental approaches and results, as well as theoretical modeling and computational simulations, were part of the workshop program.

A wavelet-neural network signal processing method has demonstrated approximately tenfold improvement over traditional signal-processing methods for the detection limit of various nitrogen and phosphorus compounds from the output of a thermionic detector attached to a gas chromatograph. A blind test was conducted to validate the lower detection limit. All fourteen of the compound spikes were detected when above the estimated threshold, including all three within a factor of two above the threshold. In addition, two of six spikes were detected at levels of 1/2 the concentration of the nominal threshold. Another two of the six would have been detected correctly if we had allowed human intervention to examine the processed data. One apparent false positive in five nulls was traced to a solvent impurity, whose presence was subsequently identified by analyzing a solvent aliquot evaporated to 1% residual volume, while the other four nulls were properly classified. We view this signal processing method as broadly applicable in analytical chemistry, and we advocate that advanced signal processing methods should be applied as directly as possible to the raw detector output so that less discriminating preprocessing and post-processing does not throw away valuable signal.