A high contrast 12.6 keV Kr K{alpha} source has been demonstrated on the petawatt-class Titan laser facility. The contrast ratio (K{alpha} to continuum) is 65, with a competitive ultra short pulse laser to x-ray conversion efficiency of 10{sup -5}. Filtered shadowgraphy indicates that the Kr K{alpha} and K{beta} x-rays are emitted from a roughly 1 x 2 mm emission volume, making this source suitable for area backlighting and scattering. Spectral calculations indicate a typical bulk electron temperature of 50-70 eV (i.e. mean ionization state 13-16), based on the observed ratio of K{alpha} to K{beta}. Kr gas jets provide a debris-free high energy K{alpha} source for time-resolved diagnosis of dense matter.

Cellulose, a key component of the plant cell wall, comprises the most abundant source of organic carbon on the planet and its microbial degradation is of considerable biological and industrial importance. Indeed, the microbial degradation of cellulose and other plant structural polysaccharides is critical to the maintenance of the carbon cycle in terrestrial and marine microbial ecosystems, host invasion by several phytopathogens, and herbivore nutrition. While the enzymes that attack cellulose are already widely used in several biotechnology-based industries, the major future application of these biocatalysts is the conversion of plant biomass into bio-ethanol and other forms of energy. In that context, the 2007 Conference will present the latest breakthroughs in our understanding of the enzymology, structural biology and (meta)genomics underpinning the conversion of plant structural polysaccharides into fermentable sugars, both in natural and engineered processes. There is also an increased emphasis on the roles of other carbohydrate active enzymes in plant biomass conversion. The themes for the scientific sessions include: (1) crystallographic and biochemical analyses of enzyme structure and function; (2) molecular mechanisms underpinning enzyme catalysis, processivity and specificity; (3) functional and comparative analyses of carbohydrate binding modules and enzyme-substrate interactions; (4) directed evolution for the development of catalytically …

We study dependence of jet quenching on matter density, using 'tomography' of the fireball provided by RHIC data on azimuthal anisotropy v{sub 2} of high p{sub t} hadron yield at different centralities. Slicing the fireball into shells with constant (entropy) density, we derive a 'layer-wise geometrical limit' v{sub 2}{sup max} which is indeed above the data v{sub 2} < v{sub x}{sup max}. Interestingly, the limit is reached only if quenching is dominated by shells with the entropy density exactly in the near-T{sub c} region. We show two models that simultaneously describe the high p{sub t} v{sub 2} and R{sub AA} data and conclude that such a description can be achieved only if the jet quenching is few times stronger in the near-T{sub c} region relative to QGP at T > T{sub c}. One possible reason for that may be recent indications that the near-T{sub c} region is a magnetic plasma of relatively light color-magnetic monopoles.

The synthesis, crystal structure, solution stability and photophysical properties of an aryl group bridging two 1-hydroxypyridin-2-one units complexed to Eu(III) are reported. The results show that this backbone unit increases the rigidity of the ensuing complex, and also the conjugation of the ligand. As a result of the latter, the singlet absorption energy is decreased, along with the energy of the lowest excited triplet state. The resulting efficiency of sensitization for the Eu(III) ion is influenced by these phenomena, yielding an overall quantum yield of 6.2% in aqueous solution. The kinetic parameters arising from the luminescence data reveal an enhanced non-radiative decay rate for this compound when compared to previously reported aliphatic bridges.

The Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture is a new industry open standard for electronics instrument modules and shelves being evaluated for the International Linear Collider (ILC). It is the first industrial standard designed for High Availability (HA). ILC availability simulations have shown clearly that the capabilities of ATCA are needed in order to achieve acceptable integrated luminosity. The ATCA architecture looks attractive for beam instruments and detector applications as well. This paper provides an overview of ongoing R&D including application of HA principles to power electronics systems.

Two high-pressure bioassay vessels failed at the Savannah River Site during a microwave heating process for biosample testing. Improper installation of the thermal shield in the first failure caused the vessel to burst during microwave heating. The second vessel failure is attributed to overpressurization during a test run. Vessel failure appeared to initiate in the mold parting line, the thinnest cross-section of the octagonal vessel. No material flaws were found in the vessel that would impair its structural performance. Content weight should be minimized to reduce operating temperature and pressure. Outer vessel life is dependent on actual temperature exposure. Since thermal aging of the vessels can be detrimental to their performance, it was recommended that the vessels be used for a limited number of cycles to be determined by additional testing.

Here we examine Fe speciation within Fe-encrusted biofilms formed during 2-month seafloor incubations of sulfide mineral assemblages at the Main Endeavor Segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge. The biofilms were distributed heterogeneously across the surface of the incubated sulfide and composed primarily of particles with a twisted stalk morphology resembling those produced by some aerobic Fe-oxidizing microorganisms. Our objectives were to determine the form of biofilm-associated Fe, and identify the sulfide minerals associated with microbial growth. We used micro-focused synchrotron-radiation X-ray fluorescence mapping (mu XRF), X-ray absorption spectroscopy (mu EXAFS), and X-ray diffraction (mu XRD) in conjunction with focused ion beam (FIB) sectioning, and highresolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). The chemical and mineralogical composition of an Fe-encrusted biofilm was queried at different spatial scales, and the spatial relationship between primary sulfide and secondary oxyhydroxide minerals was resolved. The Fe-encrusted biofilms formed preferentially at pyrrhotite-rich (Fe1-xS, 0<_ x<_ 0.2) regions of the incubated chimney sulfide. At the nanometer spatial scale, particles within the biofilm exhibiting lattice fringing and diffraction patterns consistent with 2-line ferrihydrite were identified infrequently. At the micron spatial scale, Fe mu EXAFS spectroscopy and mu XRD measurements indicate that the dominant form of biofilm Fe is a …

In this paper we describe set-up, calibration, and testing of the F-Area Analytical Labs active well neutron coincidence counter(HV-221000-NDA-X-1-DK-AWCC-1)in SRNL for use in HB-Line to enable assay of 3013EU/Pu metal product. The instrument was required within a three-month window for availability upon receipt of LANL Category IV uranium oxide samples into the SRS HB-Line facility. We describe calibration of the instrument in the SRNL nuclear nondestructive assay facility in the range 10-400 g HEU for qualification and installation in HB-Line for assay of the initial suite of product samples.

New and advanced methodologies have been developed to characterize the nano and microstructure of cement paste and concrete exposed to aggressive environments. High resolution full-field soft X-ray imaging in the water window is providing new insight on the nano scale of the cement hydration process, which leads to a nano-optimization of cement-based systems. Hard X-ray microtomography images on ice inside cement paste and cracking caused by the alkali-silica reaction (ASR) enables three-dimensional structural identification. The potential of neutron diffraction to determine reactive aggregates by measuring their residual strains and preferred orientation is studied. Results of experiments using these tools will be shown on this paper.

In the context of constructing one-loop amplitudes using a unitarity bootstrap approach we discuss a general systematic procedure for obtaining the coefficients of the scalar bubble and triangle integral functions of one-loop amplitudes. Coefficients are extracted after examining the behavior of the cut integrand as the unconstrained parameters of a specifically chosen parameterization of the cut loop momentum approach infinity. Measurements of new physics at the forthcoming experimental program at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will require a precise understanding of processes at next-to-leading order (NLO). This places increased demands for the computation of new one-loop amplitudes. This in turn has spurred recent developments towards improved calculational techniques. Direct calculations using Feynman diagrams are in general inefficient. Developments of more efficient techniques have usually centered around unitarity techniques [1], where tree amplitudes are effectively 'glued' together to form loops. The most straightforward application of this method, in which the cut loop momentum is in D = 4, allows for the computation of 'cut-constructible' terms only, i.e. (poly)logarithmic containing terms and any related constants. QCD amplitudes contain, in addition to such terms, rational pieces which cannot be derived using such cuts. These 'missing' rational parts can be extracted using cut loop …

Article discussing correlation and prediction of partition coefficients from the gas phase and from water to alkan-1-ols.

CH2M HILL Hanford Group, Inc. (the Hanford Tank Farm Operations contractor) and the Department of Energy's Office of River Protection have just completed the first phase of the Hanford Single-Shell Tank RCRA Corrective Action Program. The focus of this first phase was to characterize the nature and extent of past Hanford single-shell tank releases and to characterize the resulting fate and transport of the released contaminants. Most of these plumes are below 20 meters, with some reaching groundwater (at 60 to 120 meters below ground surface [bgs]).

High-level nuclear waste produced from fuel reprocessing operations at the Savannah River Site (SRS) requires pretreatment to remove Cs-137, Sr-90 and alpha-emitting radionuclides (i.e., actinides) prior to disposal onsite as low level waste. Separation processes planned at SRS include sorption of Sr-90 and alpha-emitting radionuclides onto monosodium titanate (MST) and caustic side solvent extraction, for Cs-137 removal. The MST and separated Cs-137 will be encapsulated into a borosilicate glass waste form for eventual entombment at the federal repository. The predominant alpha-emitting radionuclides in the highly alkaline waste solutions include plutonium isotopes Pu-238, Pu-239 and Pu-240. This paper describes recent results to produce an improved sodium titanate material that exhibits increased removal kinetics and capacity for Sr-90 and alpha-emitting radionuclides compared to the baseline MST material.

The authors designed, implemented and tested cryogenic RF filters with zero DC resistance, based on wires with a superconducting core inside a resistive sheath. The superconducting core allows low frequency currents to pass with negligible dissipation. Signals above the cutoff frequency are dissipated in the resistive part due to their small skin depth. The filters consist of twisted wire pairs shielded with copper tape. Above approximately 1 GHz, the attenuation is exponential in {radical}{omega}, as typical for skin depth based RF filters. By using additional capacitors of 10 nF per line, an attenuation of at least 45 dB above 10 MHz can be obtained. Thus, one single filter stage kept at mixing chamber temperature in a dilution refrigerator is sufficient to attenuate room temperature black body radiation to levels corresponding to 10 mK above about 10 MHz.

Aerosol direct (DE), indirect (IE), and black carbon-snow albedo (BAE) effects on climate between 1890 and 1995 are compared using equilibrium aerosol-climate simulations in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies General Circulation Model coupled to a mixed layer ocean. Pairs of control(1890)-perturbation(1995) with successive aerosol effects allow isolation of each effect. The experiments are conducted both with and without concurrent changes in greenhouse gases (GHG's). A new scheme allowing dependence of snow albedo on black carbon snow concentration is introduced. The fixed GHG experiments global surface air temperature (SAT) changed -0.2, -1.0 and +0.2 C from the DE, IE, and BAE. Ice and snow cover increased 1.0% from the IE and decreased 0.3% from the BAE. These changes were a factor of 4 larger in the Arctic. Global cloud cover increased by 0.5% from the IE. Net aerosol cooling effects are about half as large as the GHG warming, and their combined climate effects are smaller than the sum of their individual effects. Increasing GHG's did not affect the IE impact on cloud cover, however they decreased aerosol effects on SAT by 20% and on snow/ice cover by 50%; they also obscure the BAE on snow/ice cover. Arctic snow, ice, …

The U.S. Department of Energy's Office (DOE) of River Protection (ORP) has a continuing program for chemical optimization to better characterize corrosion behavior of High-Level Waste (HLW). The DOE controls the chemistry in its HLW to minimize the propensity of localized corrosion, such as pitting, and stress corrosion cracking (SCC) in nitrate-containing solutions. By improving the control of localized corrosion and SCC, the ORP can increase the life of the Double-Shell Tank (DST) carbon steel structural components and reduce overall mission costs. The carbon steel tanks at the Hanford Site are critical to the mission of safely managing stored HLW until it can be treated for disposal. The DOE has historically used additions of sodium hydroxide to retard corrosion processes in HLW tanks. This also increases the amount of waste to be treated. The reactions with carbon dioxide from the air and solid chemical species in the tank continually deplete the hydroxide ion concentration, which then requires continued additions. The DOE can reduce overall costs for caustic addition and treatment of waste, and more effectively utilize waste storage capacity by minimizing these chemical additions. Hydroxide addition is a means to control localized and stress corrosion cracking in carbon steel by …

The applications of resonant soft X-ray emission spectroscopy on a variety of carbon systems have yielded characteristic fingerprints. With high-resolution monochromatized synchrotron radiation excitation, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering has emerged as a new source of information about electronic structure and excitation dynamics. Photon-in/photon-out soft-X-ray spectroscopy is used to study the electronic properties of fundamental materials, nanostructure, and complex hydrides and will offer potential in-depth understanding of chemisorption and/or physisorption mechanisms of hydrogen adsorption/desorption capacity and kinetics.

Highly enantioselective catalytic intramolecular ortho-alkylation of aromatic imines containing alkenyl groups tethered at the meta position relative to the imine directing group has been achieved using [RhCl(coe){sub 2}]{sub 2} and chiral phosphoramidite ligands. Cyclization of substrates containing 1,1- and 1,2-disubstituted as well as trisubstituted alkenes were achieved with enantioselectivities >90% ee for each substrate class. Cyclization of substrates with Z-alkene isomers proceeded much more efficiently than substrates with E-alkene isomers. This further enabled the highly stereoselective intramolecular alkylation of certain substrates containing Z/E-alkene mixtures via a Rh-catalyzed alkene isomerization with preferential cyclization of the Z-isomer.

The Department of Energy's Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State was established in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project. Hanford's role was to produce weapons-grade nuclear material for defense, and by 1989, when the Site's mission changed from operations to cleanup, Hanford had produced more than 60 percent of the nation's plutonium. The legacy of Hanford's production years is enormous in terms of nuclear and hazardous waste, especially the 270 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater and the 5 million cubic yards of contaminated soil. Managing the contaminated soil and groundwater are particularly important because the Columbia River, the lifeblood of the northwest and the nation's eighth largest river, bounds the Site. Fluor Hanford's Soil & Groundwater Remediation Project (S&GRP) integrates all of the activities that deal with remediating and monitoring the groundwater across the Site. The S&GRP uses a detailed series of steps to record, track, and verify information. The Sample and Data Management (SDM) Process consists of 10 integrated steps that start with the data quality objectives process that establishes the mechanism for collecting the right information with the right people. The process ends with data quality assessment, which is used to ensure that all quantitative data …

A methodology for extracting neutron direct capture rates from Coulomb Dissociation data is developed and applied to the Coulomb dissociation of {sup 15}C on {sup 208}Pb at 68 MeV/nucleon. Full Continuum Discretized Coupled Channel calculations are performed and an asymptotic normalization coefficient is determined from a fit to the breakup data. Direct neutron capture calculations using the extracted asymptotic normalization coefficient provide (n, {gamma}) cross sections consistent with direct measurements. Our results show that the Coulomb Dissociation data can be reliably used for extracting the cross section for {sup 14}C(n,{gamma}){sup 15}C if the appropriate reaction theory is used. The resulting error bars are of comparable magnitude to those from the direct measurement.

We present the first measurements of the {rho}(770){sup 0}, K*(892), {Delta}(1232){sup ++}, {Sigma}(1385), and {Lambda}(1520) resonances in d+Au collisions at {radical}s{sub NN} = 200 GeV, reconstructed via their hadronic decay channels using the STAR detector at RHIC. The masses and widths of these resonances are studied as a function of transverse momentum (p{sub T}). We observe that the resonance spectra follow a generalized scaling law with the transverse mass (m{sub T}). The <p{sub T}> of resonances in minimum bias collisions is compared to the <p{sub T}> of {pi}, K, and {bar p}. The {rho}{sup 0}/{pi}{sup -}, K*/K{sup -}, {Delta}{sup ++}/p, {Sigma}(1385)/{Lambda}, and {Lambda}(1520)/{Lambda} ratios in d + Au collisions are compared to the measurements in minimum bias p + p interactions, where we observe that both measurements are comparable. The nuclear modification factors (R{sub dAu}) of the {rho}{sup 0}, K*, and {Sigma}* scale with the number of binary collisions (N{sub bin}) for p{sub T} > 1.2 GeV/c.

Although the Standard Model of elementary particles is well established, strong interactions are not yet fully under control. We believe QCD is the field theory capable of describing them, but we are not yet capable, in most of the cases, to make exact predictions. Systems that include heavy quark-antiquark pairs (quarkonia) are ideal and unique laboratories to probe both the high energy regimes of QCD, where an expansion in terms of the coupling constant is possible, and the low energy regimes, where non-perturbative effects dominate. In the last years this field is experiencing a rapid expansion with a wealth of new data coming in from diverse sources: data on quarkonium formation from dedicated experiments (BES at BEPC, KEDR at VEPP-4M CLEO-c at CESR), clear samples produced by high luminosity B-factories (PEP and KEKB), and very large samples produced from gluon-gluon fusion in p{bar p} annihilations at Tevatron (CDF and D0 experiments). In this review I will first summarize recent developments in the understanding of heavy quarkonium states which have a well established quark content. Next, the core of the paper will be spent to review the experimental evidences of new states that might be aggregations of more than just a …

Detailed models for hydrogen storage systems provide essential design information about flow and temperature distributions, as well as, the utilization of a hydrogen storage media. However, before constructing a detailed model it is necessary to know the geometry and length scales of the system, along with its heat transfer requirements, which depend on the limiting reaction kinetics. More fundamentally, before committing significant time and resources to the development of a detailed model, it is necessary to know whether a conceptual storage system design is viable. For this reason, a hierarchical system of models progressing from scoping models to detailed analyses was developed. This paper, which discusses the scoping models, is the first in a two part series that presents a collection of hierarchical models for the design and evaluation of hydrogen storage systems.

There is significant interest in hydrogen storage systems that employ a media which either adsorbs, absorbs or reacts with hydrogen in a nearly reversible manner. In any media based storage system the rate of hydrogen uptake and the system capacity is governed by a number of complex, coupled physical processes. To design and evaluate such storage systems, a comprehensive methodology was developed, consisting of a hierarchical sequence of models that range from scoping calculations to numerical models that couple reaction kinetics with heat and mass transfer for both the hydrogen charging and discharging phases. The scoping models were presented in Part I [1] of this two part series of papers. This paper describes a detailed numerical model that integrates the phenomena occurring when hydrogen is charged and discharged. A specific application of the methodology is made to a system using NaAlH{sub 4} as the storage media.