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The Gordon Research Conference on 'Molecular and Ionic Clusters' focuses on clusters, which are the initial molecular species found in gases when condensation begins to occur. Condensation can take place solely from molecules interacting with each other, mostly at low temperatures, or when molecules condense around charged particles (electrons, protons, metal cations, molecular ions), producing ion molecule clusters. These clusters provide models for solvation, allow a pristine look at geometric as well as electronic structures of molecular complexes or matter in general, their interaction with radiation, their reactivity, their thermodynamic properties and, in particular, the related dynamics. This conference focuses on new ways to make clusters composed of different kinds of molecules, new experimental techniques to investigate the properties of the clusters and new theoretical methods with which to calculate the structures, dynamical motions and energetics of the clusters. Some of the main experimental methods employed include molecular beams, mass spectrometry, laser spectroscopy (from infrared to XUV; in the frequency as well as the time domain) and photoelectron spectroscopy. Techniques include laser absorption spectroscopy, laser induced fluorescence, resonance enhanced photoionization, mass-selected photodissociation, photofragment imaging, ZEKE photoelectron spectroscopy, etc. From the theoretical side, this conference highlights work on potential surfaces and …

The Texas Panhandle is regarded as the 'Cattle Feeding Capital of the World', producing 42% of the fed beef cattle in the United States within a 200-mile radius of Amarillo generating more than 5 million tons of feedlot manure/year. Apart from feedlots, the Bosque River Region in Erath County, just north of Waco, Texas with about 110,000 dairy cattle in over 250 dairies, produces 1.8 million tons of manure biomass (excreted plus bedding) per year. While the feedlot manure has been used extensively for irrigated and dry land crop production, most dairies, as well as other concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO's), the dairy farms utilize large lagoon areas to store wet animal biomass. Water runoff from these lagoons has been held responsible for the increased concentration of phosphorus and other contaminates in the Bosque River which drains into Lake Waco - the primary source of potable water for Waco's 108,500 people. The concentrated animal feeding operations may lead to land, water, and air pollution if waste handling systems and storage and treatment structures are not properly managed. Manure-based biomass (MBB) has the potential to be a source of green energy at large coal-fired power plants and on smaller-scale combustion systems …

Since the completion of the sequencing of the human genome, the JGI has rapidly expanded its scientific goals in several DOE mission-relevant areas. At the JGI-HAGSC, we have kept pace with this rapid expansion of projects with our focus on assessing, assembling, improving and finishing eukaryotic whole genome shotgun (WGS) projects for which the shotgun sequence is generated at the Production Genomic Facility (JGI-PGF). We follow this by combining the draft WGS with genomic resources generated at JGI-HAGSC or in collaborator laboratories (including BAC end sequences, genetic maps and FLcDNA sequences) to produce an improved draft sequence. For eukaryotic genomes important to the DOE mission, we then add further information from directed experiments to produce reference genomic sequences that are publicly available for any scientific researcher. Also, we have continued our program for producing BAC-based finished sequence, both for adding information to JGI genome projects and for small BAC-based sequencing projects proposed through any of the JGI sequencing programs. We have now built our computational expertise in WGS assembly and analysis and have moved eukaryotic genome assembly from the JGI-PGF to JGI-HAGSC. We have concentrated our assembly development work on large plant genomes and complex fungal and algal genomes.

I investigate the origin of the observed correlation between a gamma-ray burst's {nu}F{sub {nu}} spectral peak E{sub pk} and its isotropic equivalent energy E{sub iso} through the use of a population synthesis code to model the prompt gamma-ray emission from GRBs. By using prescriptions for the distribution of prompt spectral parameters as well as the population's luminosity function and co-moving rate density, I generate a simulated population of GRBs and examine how bursts of varying spectral properties and redshift would appear to a gamma-ray detector here on Earth. I find that a strong observed correlation can be produced between the source frame Epk and Eiso for the detected population despite the existence of only a weak and broad correlation in the original simulated population. The energy dependance of a gamma-ray detector's flux-limited detection threshold acts to produce a correlation between the source frame E{sub pk} and E{sub iso} for low luminosity GRBs, producing the left boundary of the observed correlation. Conversely, very luminous GRBs are found at higher redshifts than their low luminosity counterparts due to the standard Malquest bias, causing bursts in the low E{sub pk}, high E{sub iso} regime to go undetected because their E{sub pk} values would …

The Texas Panhandle is regarded as the 'Cattle Feeding Capital of the World', producing 42% of the fed beef cattle in the United States within a 200-mile radius of Amarillo generating more than 5 million tons of feedlot manure/year. Apart from feedlots, the Bosque River Region in Erath County, just north of Waco, Texas with about 110,000 dairy cattle in over 250 dairies, produces 1.8 million tons of manure biomass (excreted plus bedding) per year. While the feedlot manure has been used extensively for irrigated and dry land crop production, most dairies, as well as other concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO's), the dairy farms utilize large lagoon areas to store wet animal biomass. Water runoff from these lagoons has been held responsible for the increased concentration of phosphorus and other contaminates in the Bosque River which drains into Lake Waco - the primary source of potable water for Waco's 108,500 people. The concentrated animal feeding operations may lead to land, water, and air pollution if waste handling systems and storage and treatment structures are not properly managed. Manure-based biomass (MBB) has the potential to be a source of green energy at large coal-fired power plants and on smaller-scale combustion systems …

We have an ongoing research program for characterization of superconductor composite strands, the principal output of which is sensitive measurements of critical current Ic over a broad range of the essential parameters: longitudinal strain ε, temperature T, and magnetic field B. This features a new apparatus for integrated measurement of Ic(ε,T,B) on the same, long-conductor sample without remounting.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has recently questioned the appropriate value for tritium deposition velocity used in the MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System Ver. 2 (Chanin and Young 1998) code when estimating bounding dose (95th percentile) for safety analysis (DNFSB 2011). The purpose of this paper is to provide appropriate, defensible values of the tritium deposition velocity for use in Savannah River Site (SRS) safety analyses. To accomplish this, consideration must be given to the re-emission of tritium after deposition. Approximately 85% of the surface area of the SRS is forested. The majority of the forests are pine plantations, 68%. The remaining forest area is 6% mixed pine and hardwood and 26% swamp hardwood. Most of the path from potential release points to the site boundary is through forested land. A search of published studies indicate daylight, tritiated water (HTO) vapor deposition velocities in forest vegetation can range from 0.07 to 2.8 cm/s. Analysis of the results of studies done on an SRS pine plantation and climatological data from the SRS meteorological network indicate that the average deposition velocity during daylight periods is around 0.42 cm/s. The minimum deposition velocity was determined to be about 0.1 cm/s, which …

Laser welding and post weld laser treatment of modified 9Cr-1MoVNb steels (Grade P91) were performed in this preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of using laser welding process as a potential alternative to arc welding methods for solving the Type IV cracking problem in P91 steel welds. The mechanical and metallurgical testing of the pulsed Nd:YAG laser-welded samples shows the following conclusions: (1) both bead-on-plate and circumferential butt welds made by a pulsed Nd:YAG laser show good welds that are free of microcracks and porosity. The narrow heat affected zone has a homogeneous grain structure without conventional soft hardness zone where the Type IV cracking occurs in conventional arc welds. (2) The laser weld tests also show that the same laser welder has the potential to be used as a multi-function tool for weld surface remelting, glazing or post weld tempering to reduce the weld surface defects and to increase the cracking resistance and toughness of the welds. (3) The Vicker hardness of laser welds in the weld and heat affected zone was 420-500 HV with peak hardness in the HAZ compared to 240 HV of base metal. Post weld laser treatment was able to slightly reduce the peak hardness …

In this paper, a linac simulation code written in Fortran90 is presented and several simulation examples are given. This code is optimized to implement linac alignment and steering algorithms, and evaluate the accelerator errors such as RF phase and acceleration gradient, quadrupole and BPM misalignment. It can track a single particle or a bunch of particles through normal linear accelerator elements such as quadrupole, RF cavity, dipole corrector and drift space. One-to-one steering algorithm and a global alignment (steering) algorithm are implemented in this code.

The objective of this study is to quantify the graphite particle phase in nodular ductile iron (NDI). This study provides the basis for initializing microstructure in direct numerical simulations, as part of developing microstructure-fracture response models. The work presented here is a subset of a PhD dissertation on spall fracture in NDI. NDI is an ideal material for studying the influence of microstructure on ductile fracture because it contains a readily identifiable second-phase particle population, embedded in a ductile metallic matrix, which serves as primary void nucleation sites. Nucleated voids grow and coalesce under continued tensile loading, as part of the micromechanisms of ductile fracture, and lead to macroscopic failure. For this study, we used 2D optical microscopy and quantitative metallography relationships to characterize the volume fraction, size distribution, nearest-neighbor distance, and other higher-order metrics of the graphite particle phase. We found that the volume fraction was {Phi} = 0.115, the average particle diameter was d{sub avg} = 25.9 {mu}m, the Weibull shape and scaling parameters were {beta} = 1.8 and {eta} = 29.1 {mu}m, respectively, the (first) nearest neighbor distance was L{sub nn} = 32.4 {mu}m, the exponential coefficients for volume fraction fluctuations was A{sub {Phi}} = 1.89 and …

A combined fit is performed to the BaBar and Belle measurements of the e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} {phi}{pi}{sup +}{pi}{sup -} and {phi}f{sub 0}(980) cross sections for center-of-mass energy between threshold and 3.0 GeV. The resonance parameters of the {phi}(1680) and Y(2175) are determined. The mass is (1681{sub -12}{sup +10}) MeV/c{sup 2} and the width is (221{sub -24}{sup +34}) MeV/c{sup 2} for the {phi}(1680), and the mass is (2117{sub -49}{sup +59}) MeV/c{sup 2} and the width is (164{sub -80}{sup +69}) MeV/c{sup 2} for the Y(2175). These information will shed light on the understanding of the nature of the excited {phi} and Y states observed in e{sup +}e{sup -} annihilation.

Starch is a desirable plant product for both food and biofuel. Leaf starch is ideal for use in biofuels because it does not compete with grain starch, which is used for food. Starch is accumulated in plant leaves during the day and broken down at night. If we can manipulate leaf starch breakdown it may be possible to design a plant that provides both grain starch for food and leaf starch for biofuel. The pathway of leaf starch breakdown was not known when this work started. Preliminary evidence had shown that maltose was the primary product of leaf starch breakdown (Weise, Weber & Sharkey, 2004) and that it was metabolized by a disproportionating enzyme called amylomaltase but given the initials DPE2 (Lu & Sharkey, 2004). In this work we showed that only one form of maltose was metabolically active (Weise et al., 2005a) and that maltose was located in two different places when the amylomaltase was knocked out but only inside the chloroplast when the maltose transporter was knocked out (Lu et al., 2006a). This allowed us to estimate the energetics of maltose export and to show that maltose export is more efficient than glucose export (Weise et al., 2005b). …

We derive a simple relation between the Mellin amplitude for AdS/CFT correlation functions and the bulk S-Matrix in the flat spacetime limit, proving a conjecture of Penedones. As a consequence of the Operator Product Expansion, the Mellin amplitude for any unitary CFT must be a meromorphic function with simple poles on the real axis. This provides a powerful and suggestive handle on the locality vis-a-vis analyticity properties of the S-Matrix. We begin to explore analyticity by showing how the familiar poles and branch cuts of scattering amplitudes arise from the holographic description. For this purpose we compute examples of Mellin amplitudes corresponding to 1-loop and 2-loop Witten diagrams in AdS. We also examine the flat spacetime limit of conformal blocks, implicitly relating the S-Matrix program to the Bootstrap program for CFTs. We use this connection to show how the existence of small black holes in AdS leads to a universal prediction for the conformal block decomposition of the dual CFT.

The photoluminescence of diamondoids in the solid state is examined. All of the diamondoids are found to photoluminesce readily with initial excitation wavelengths ranging from 233 nm to 240 nm (5.3 eV). These excitation energies are more than 1 eV lower than any previously studied saturated hydrocarbon material. The emission is found to be heavily shifted from the absorption, with emission wavelengths of roughly 295 nm (4.2 eV) in all cases. In the dissolved state, however, no uorescence is observed for excitation wavelengths as short as 200 nm. We also discuss predictions and measurements of the quantum yield. Our predictions indicate that the maximum yield may be as high as 25%. Our measurement of one species, diamantane, gives a yield of 11%, the highest ever reported for a saturated hydrocarbon, even though it was likely not at the optimal excitation wavelength.

This report describes the work completed by NexTech Materials, Ltd. during a three-year project to validate an electrolyte-supported planar solid oxide fuel cell design, termed the FlexCell, for coal-based, megawatt-scale power generation systems. This project was focused on the fabrication and testing of electrolyte-supported FlexCells with yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) as the electrolyte material. YSZ based FlexCells were made with sizes ranging from 100 to 500 cm2. Single-cell testing was performed to confirm high electrochemical performance, both with diluted hydrogen and simulated coal gas as fuels. Finite element analysis modeling was performed at The Ohio State University was performed to establish FlexCell architectures with optimum mechanical robustness. A manufacturing cost analysis was completed, which confirmed that manufacturing costs of less than $50/kW are achievable at high volumes (500 MW/year).

Experimental results for the selective removal of strontium and cesium from simulated waste solutions with monosodium titanate and crystalline silicotitanate laden filter cartridges are presented. In these proof-of-principle tests, effective uptake of both strontium-85 and cesium-137 were observed using ion-exchangers in this filter cartridge configuration. At low salt simulant conditions, the instantaneous decontamination factor for strontium-85 with monosodium titanate impregnated filter membrane cartridges measured 26, representing 96% strontium-85 removal efficiency. On the other hand, the strontium-85 instantaneous decontamination factor with co-sintered active monosodium titanate cartridges measured 40 or 98% Sr-85 removal efficiency. Strontium-85 removal with the monosodium titanate impregnated membrane cartridges and crystalline silicotitanate impregnated membrane cartridges, placed in series arrangement, produced an instantaneous decontamination factor of 41 compared to an instantaneous decontamination factor of 368 for strontium-85 with co-sintered active monosodium titanate cartridges and co-sintered active crystalline silicotitanate cartridges placed in series. Overall, polyethylene co-sintered active titanates cartridges performed as well as titanate impregnated filter membrane cartridges in the uptake of strontium. At low ionic strength conditions, there was a significant uptake of cesium-137 with co-sintered crystalline silicotitanate cartridges. Tests results with crystalline silicotitanate impregnated membrane cartridges for cesium-137 decontamination are currently being re-evaluated. Based on these preliminary findings …

High-level waste (HLW) tanks 18-F and 19-F have been isolated from FTF facilities. To complete operational closure the tanks will be filled with grout for the purpose of: (1) physically stabilizing the tanks, (2) limiting/eliminating vertical pathways to residual waste, (3) entombing waste removal equipment, (4) discouraging future intrusion, and (5) providing an alkaline, chemical reducing environment within the closure boundary to control speciation and solubility of select radionuclides. This report documents the results of a four cubic yard bulk fill scale up test on the grout formulation recommended for filling Tanks 18-F and 19-F. Details of the scale up test are provided in a Test Plan. The work was authorized under a Technical Task Request (TTR), HLE-TTR-2011-008, and was performed according to Task Technical and Quality Assurance Plan (TTQAP), SRNL-RP-2011-00587. The bulk fill scale up test described in this report was intended to demonstrate proportioning, mixing, and transportation, of material produced in a full scale ready mix concrete batch plant. In addition, the material produced for the scale up test was characterized with respect to fresh properties, thermal properties, and compressive strength as a function of curing time.

We consider a comprehensive set of simplified models that contribute to final states with top and bottom quarks at the LHC. These simplified models are used to create minimal search strategies that ensure optimal coverage of new heavy flavor physics involving the pair production of color octets and triplets. We provide a set of benchmarks that are representative of model space, which can be used by experimentalists to perform their own optimization of search strategies. For data sets larger than 1 fb{sup -1}, same-sign dilepton and 3b search regions become very powerful. Expected sensitivities from existing and optimized searches are given.

We have made number of important discoveries along the major goals of the project, namely i) electrodeposition of germanium thin films from clusters, ii) synthesis of cluster-based surfactants with long hydrocarbon chains and micelles made of them, iii) grafting of Ge{sub 9}-clusters onto self assembled films of siloxanes attached to glass substrates, iv) doping of Ge{sub 9}-clusters, and v) expanding the clusters to ten-atom cages of Ge{sub 10}{sup 2-}.

Since the completion of the sequencing of the human genome, the JGI has rapidly expanded its scientific goals in several DOE mission-relevant areas. At the JGI-HAGSC, we have kept pace with this rapid expansion of projects with our focus on assessing, assembling, improving and finishing eukaryotic whole genome shotgun (WGS) projects for which the shotgun sequence is generated at the Production Genomic Facility (JGI-PGF). We follow this by combining the draft WGS with genomic resources generated at JGI-HAGSC or in collaborator laboratories (including BAC end sequences, genetic maps and FLcDNA sequences) to produce an improved draft sequence. For eukaryotic genomes important to the DOE mission, we then add further information from directed experiments to produce reference genomic sequences that are publicly available for any scientific researcher. Also, we have continued our program for producing BAC-based finished sequence, both for adding information to JGI genome projects and for small BAC-based sequencing projects proposed through any of the JGI sequencing programs. We have now built our computational expertise in WGS assembly and analysis and have moved eukaryotic genome assembly from the JGI-PGF to JGI-HAGSC. We have concentrated our assembly development work on large plant genomes and complex fungal and algal genomes.