Results are presented on event-by-event fluctuations of transverse momenta p{sub T} in central Pb+Pb interactions at 20A, 30A, 40A, 80A, and 158A GeV. The analysis was performed for charged particles at forward center-of-mass rapidity (1.1 < y*{sub {pi}} < 2.6). Three fluctuation measures were studied: the distribution of average transverse momentum M(p{sub T}) in the event, the {phi}{sub p{sub T}} fluctuation measure, and two-particle transverse momentum correlations. Fluctuations of p{sub T} are small and show no significant energy dependence in the energy range of the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron. Results are compared with QCD-inspired predictions for the critical point, and with the UrQMD model. Transverse momentum fluctuations, similar to multiplicity fluctuations, do not show the increase expected for freeze-out near the critical point of QCD.

For guiding optimal design and interpretation of in-situ treatments that strongly perturb subsurface systems, knowledge about the spatial and temporal patterns of mass transport and reaction intensities are important. Here, a procedure was developed and applied to time-lapse concentrations of a conservative tracer (bromide), an injected amendment (acetate) and reactive species (iron(II), uranium(VI) and sulfate) associated with two field scale biostimulation experiments, which were conducted successively at the same field location over two years. The procedure is based on a temporal moment analysis approach that relies on a streamtube approximation. The study shows that biostimulated reactions can be considerably influenced by subsurface hydrological and geochemical heterogeneities: the delivery of bromide and acetate and the intensity of the sulfate reduction is interpreted to be predominantly driven by the hydrological heterogeneity, while the intensity of the iron reduction is interpreted to be primarily controlled by the geochemical heterogeneity. The intensity of the uranium(VI) reduction appears to be impacted by both the hydrological and geochemical heterogeneity. Finally, the study documents the existence of feedbacks between hydrological heterogeneity and remediation-induced biogeochemical transformations at the field scale, particularly the development of precipitates that may cause clogging and flow rerouting.

'Study the past--what is past is prologue'. These words appear as the motto on a pair of statues at the National Archives Building in Washington DC. They are also the opening sentence in the preface of a document written in August of 1956 entitled 'A Summary of Accidents and Incidents Involving Radiation in Atomic Energy Activities--June 1945 thru December 1955'. This document, one of several written by D.F. Hayes of the Safety and Fire Protection Branch, Division of Organization and Personnel, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Washington DC, and many others are often forgotten even though they contain valuable glovebox fire protection lessons for us today.

Installations of PV systems have been expanding at a rapid pace in recent years. In the United States, the market for PV is driven by national, state, and local government incentives, including upfront cash rebates, production-based incentives, requirements that electricity suppliers purchase a certain amount of solar energy, and Federal and state tax benefits. These programs are, in part, motivated by the popular appeal of solar energy and by the positive attributes of PV - e.g., modest environmental impacts, avoidance of fuel price risks, coincidence with peak electrical demand, and the location of PV at the point of use. Given the relatively high cost of PV, however, a key goal of these policies is to encourage cost reductions over time. Therefore, as policy incentives have become more significant and as PV deployment has accelerated, so too has the desire to track the installed cost of PV systems over time, by system characteristics, by system location, and by component. A new Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report, 'Tracking the Sun: The Installed Cost of Photovoltaics in the U.S. from 1998-2007', helps to fill this need by summarizing trends in the installed cost (i.e., the cost paid by the system owner) of grid-connected …

Large-scale storage of carbon dioxide in saline aquifers may cause considerable pressure perturbation and brine migration in deep rock formations, which may have a significant influence on the regional groundwater system. With the help of parallel computing techniques, we conducted a comprehensive, large-scale numerical simulation of CO{sub 2} geologic storage that predicts not only CO{sub 2} migration, but also its impact on regional groundwater flow. As a case study, a hypothetical industrial-scale CO{sub 2} injection in Tokyo Bay, which is surrounded by the most heavily industrialized area in Japan, was considered, and the impact of CO{sub 2} injection on near-surface aquifers was investigated, assuming relatively high seal-layer permeability (higher than 10 microdarcy). A regional hydrogeological model with an area of about 60 km x 70 km around Tokyo Bay was discretized into about 10 million gridblocks. To solve the high-resolution model efficiently, we used a parallelized multiphase flow simulator TOUGH2-MP/ECO2N on a world-class high performance supercomputer in Japan, the Earth Simulator. In this simulation, CO{sub 2} was injected into a storage aquifer at about 1 km depth under Tokyo Bay from 10 wells, at a total rate of 10 million tons/year for 100 years. Through the model, we can examine …

The 'true muonium' ({mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -}) and 'true tauonium' ({tau}{sup +}{tau}{sup -}) bound states are not only the heaviest, but also the most compact pure QED systems. The rapid weak decay of the {tau} makes the observation of true tauonium difficult. However, as we show, the production and study of true muonium is possible at modern electron-positron colliders.

The influence of the metal cluster size and the identity of the support on the reactivity of gold based catalysts have been studied in the CO oxidation reaction. To overcome the structural complexity of the supported catalysts, gold nanoparticles synthesized from colloidal chemistry with precisely controlled size have been used. Those particles were supported over SiO{sub 2} and TiO{sub 2} and their catalytic activity was measured in a flow reactor. The reaction rate was dependent on the particle size and the support, suggesting two reaction pathways in the CO oxidation reaction. In parallel, ambient pressure photoelectron spectroscopy (APPS) has been performed under reaction conditions using bidimensional model catalysts prepared upon supporting the Au nanoparticles over planar polycrystalline SiO{sub 2} and TiO{sub 2} thin films by means of the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) technique to mimic the characteristic of the powder samples. In this way, the catalytically active surface was characterized under true reaction conditions, revealing that during CO oxidation gold remains in the metallic state.

Numerical modeling results and field data indicate that some contrasting subsurface objects (such as tunnels, caves, pipes, filled pits, and fluid-filled fractures) are capable of generating durable resonant oscillations after trapping seismic energy. These oscillations consist of surface types of circumferential waves that repeatedly propagate around the object. The resonant emission of such trapped energy occurs primarily in the form of shear body waves that can be detected by remotely placed receivers. Resonant emission reveals itself in the form of sharp resonant peaks for the late parts of the records, when all strong direct and primary reflected waves are gone. These peaks were observed in field data for a buried barrel filled with water, in 2D finite-difference modeling results, and in the exact canonical solution for a fluid-filled sphere. A computed animation for the diffraction of a plane wave upon a low-velocity elastic sphere confirms the generation of resonances by durable surface waves. Resonant emission has characteristic quasi-hyperbolic traveltime patterns on shot gathers. The inversion of these patterns can be performed in the frequency domain after muting the strong direct and primary scattered waves. Subsurface objects can be detected and imaged at a single resonance frequency without an accurate knowledge …

Different microbial species are thought to occupy distinct ecological niches, subjecting each species to unique selective constraints, which may leave a recognizable signal in their genomes. Thus, it may be possible to extract insight into the genetic basis of ecological differences among lineages by identifying unusual patterns of substitutions in orthologous gene or protein sequences. We use the ratio of substitutions in slow versus fast-evolving sites (nucleotides in DNA, or amino acids in protein sequence) to quantify deviations from the typical pattern of selective constraint observed across bacterial lineages. We propose that elevated S:F in one branch (an excess of slow-site substitutions) can indicate a functionally-relevant change, due to either positive selection or relaxed evolutionary constraint. In a genome-wide comparative study of gamma-proteobacterial proteins, we find that cell-surface proteins involved with motility and secretion functions often have high S:F ratios, while information-processing genes do not. Change in evolutionary constraints in some species is evidenced by increased S:F ratios within functionally-related sets of genes (e.g., energy production in Pseudomonas fluorescens), while other species apparently evolve mostly by drift (e.g., uniformly elevated S:F across most genes in Buchnera spp.). Overall, S:F reveals several species-specific, protein-level changes with potential functional/ecological importance. As microbial …

We develop a state-space Bayesian framework to combine time-lapse geophysical data with other types of information for quantitative estimation of biogeochemical parameters during bioremediation. We consider characteristics of end-products of biogeochemical transformations as state vectors, which evolve under constraints of local environments through evolution equations, and consider time-lapse geophysical data as available observations, which could be linked to the state vectors through petrophysical models. We estimate the state vectors and their associated unknown parameters over time using Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods. To demonstrate the use of the state-space approach, we apply it to complex resistivity data collected during laboratory column biostimulation experiments that were poised to precipitate iron and zinc sulfides during sulfate reduction. We develop a petrophysical model based on sphere-shaped cells to link the sulfide precipitate properties to the time-lapse geophysical attributes and estimate volume fraction of the sulfide precipitates, fraction of the dispersed, sulfide-encrusted cells, mean radius of the aggregated clusters, and permeability over the course of the experiments. Results of the case study suggest that the developed state-space approach permits the use of geophysical datasets for providing quantitative estimates of end-product characteristics and hydrological feedbacks associated with biogeochemical transformations. Although tested here on laboratory …

Membrane-bound macromolecules are responsible for structural support and mediation of cell-cell adhesion in tissues. Quantitative analysis of these macromolecules provides morphological indices for damage or loss of tissue, for example as a result of exogenous stimuli. From an optical point of view, a membrane signal may have nonuniform intensity around the cell boundary, be punctate or diffused, and may even be perceptual at certain locations along the boundary. In this paper, a method for the detection and grouping of punctate, diffuse curvilinear signals is proposed. Our work builds upon the tensor voting and the iterative voting frameworks to propose an efficient method to detect and refine perceptually interesting curvilinear structures in images. The novelty of our method lies on the idea of iteratively tuning the tensor voting fields, which allows the concentration of the votes only over areas of interest. We validate the utility of our system with synthetic and annotated real data. The effectiveness of the tunable tensor voting is demonstrated on complex phenotypic signals that are representative of membrane-bound macromolecular structures.

We validated one year of Global Forecast System (GFS) predictions of surface meteorological variables (wind speed, air temperature, dewpoint temperature, air pressure) over the entire planet for forecasts extending from zero hours into the future (an analysis) to 36 hours. Approximately 12,000 surface stations world-wide were included in this analysis. Root-Mean-Square- Errors (RMSE) increased as the forecast period increased from zero to 36 hours, but the initial RMSE were almost as large as the 36 hour forecast RMSE for all variables. Typical RMSE were 3 C for air temperature, 2-3mb for sea-level pressure, 3.5 C for dewpoint temperature and 2.5 m/s for wind speed. Approximately 20-40% of the GFS errors can be attributed to a lack of resolution of local features. We attribute the large initial RMSE for the zero hour forecasts to the inability of the GFS to resolve local terrain features that often dominate local weather conditions, e.g., mountain- valley circulations and sea and land breezes. Since the horizontal resolution of the GFS (about 1{sup o} of latitude and longitude) prevents it from simulating these locally-driven circulations, its performance will not improve until model resolution increases by a factor of 10 or more (from about 100 km to …

The paper presents a comparison of hydrologic issues and technical approaches used in deep-well injection and disposal of liquid wastes, and those issues and approaches associated with injection and storage of CO{sub 2} in deep brine formations. These comparisons have been discussed in nine areas: (1) Injection well integrity; (2) Abandoned well problems; (3) Buoyancy effects; (4) Multiphase flow effects; (5) Heterogeneity and flow channeling; (6) Multilayer isolation effects; (7) Caprock effectiveness and hydrogeomechanics; (8) Site characterization and monitoring; and (9) Effects of CO{sub 2} storage on groundwater resources There are considerable similarities, as well as significant differences. Scientifically and technically, these two fields can learn much from each other. The discussions presented in this paper should help to focus on the key scientific issues facing deep injection of fluids. A substantial but by no means exhaustive reference list has been provided for further studies into the subject.

We will provide an overview of the physics which can be addressed by studying fluctuations and correlations in heavy ion collisions. Observables, which have been discussed in the literature will be briefly reviewed and put in context with experiment and information from Lattice QCD. Special attention will be given to the QCD critical point and the first order co-existence region.

The 'Criticality HazOp' technique, as developed at Hanford's Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), has allowed for efficiencies enabling shortening of the time necessary to complete new or revised criticality safety evaluation reports (CSERs). For example, in the last half of 2007 at PFP, CSER revisions undergoing the 'Criticality HazOp' process were completed at a higher rate than previously achievable. The efficiencies gained through use of the 'Criticality HazOp' process come from the preliminary narrowing of potential scenarios for the Criticality analyst to fully evaluate in preparation of the new or revised CSER, and from the use of a systematized 'Criticality HazOp' group assessment of the relevant conditions to show which few parameter/condition/deviation combinations actually require analytical effort. The 'Criticality HazOp' has not only provided efficiencies of time, but has brought to criticality safety evaluation revisions the benefits of a structured hazard evaluation method and the enhanced insight that may be gained from direct involvement of a team in the process. In addition, involved personnel have gained a higher degree of confidence and understanding of the resulting CSER product.

We report the deflagration behavior of PBX 9501 at pressures up to 300 MPa and temperatures of 150-180 C where the sample has been held at the test temperature for several hours before ignition. The purpose is to determine the effect on the deflagration behavior of material damage caused by prolonged exposure to high temperature. This conditioning is similar to that experienced by an explosive while it being heated to eventual explosion. The results are made more complicated by the presence of a significant thermal gradient along the sample during the temperature ramp and soak. Three major conclusions are: the presence of nitroplasticizer makes PBX 9501 more thermally sensitive than LX-04 with an inert Viton binder; the deflagration behavior of PBX 9501 is more extreme and more inconsistent than that of LX-04; and something in PBX 9501 causes thermal damage to 'heal' as the deflagration proceeds, resulting in a decelerating deflagration front as it travels along the sample.

Studies of submicron dust using Mie scattering from Nd:YAG lasers and video data of micron to sub-millimeter sized dust on DIII-D tokamak have provided the first data of dust sources and transport during tokamak discharges. During normal operation on DIII-D dust observation rates are low, a few events per discharge or less. The net carbon content of the dust corresponds to a carbon atom density a few orders of magnitude below the core impurity density. Statistical analysis of Mie data collected over months of operation reveal correlation of increased dust rate with increased heating power and impulsive wall loading due to edge localized modes (ELMs) and disruptions. Generation of significant amounts of dust by disruptions is confirmed by the camera data. However, dust production by disruptions alone is insufficient to account for estimated in-vessel dust inventory in DIII-D. After an extended entry vent, thousands of dust particles are observed by cameras in the first 2-3 plasma discharges. Individual particles moving at velocities up to {approx}300 m/s, breakup of larger particles into pieces, and collisions of particles with walls are observed. After {approx}70 discharges, dust levels are reduced to a few events per discharge. In order to calibrate diagnostics and benchmark …

The electronic contribution to friction at semiconductor surfaces was investigated by using a Pt-coated tip with 50nm radius in an atomic force microscope sliding against an n-type GaAs(100) substrate. The GaAs surface was covered by an approximately 1 nm thick oxide layer. Charge accumulation or depletion was induced by the application of forward or reverse bias voltages. We observed a substantial increase in friction force in accumulation (forward bias) with respect to depletion (reverse bias). We propose a model based on the force exerted by the trapped charges that quantitatively explains the experimental observations of excess friction.

The structural approach to joint inversion, entailing common boundaries or gradients, offers a flexible way to invert diverse types of surface-based and/or crosshole geophysical data. The cross-gradients function has been introduced as a means to construct models in which spatial changes in two models are parallel or anti-parallel. Inversion methods that use such structural constraints also provide estimates of non-linear and non-unique field-scale relationships between model parameters. Here, we invert jointly crosshole radar and seismic traveltimes for structurally similar models using an iterative non-linear traveltime tomography algorithm. Application of the inversion scheme to synthetic data demonstrates that it better resolves lithological boundaries than the individual inversions. Tests of the scheme on observed radar and seismic data acquired within a shallow aquifer illustrate that the resultant models have improved correlations with flowmeter data than with models based on individual inversions. The highest correlation with the flowmeter data is obtained when the joint inversion is combined with a stochastic regularization operator, where the vertical integral scale is estimated from the flowmeter data. Point-spread functions shows that the most significant resolution improvements of the joint inversion is in the horizontal direction.

Sparse parallel factorization is among the most complicated and irregular algorithms to analyze and optimize. Performance depends both on system characteristics such as the floating point rate, the memory hierarchy, and the interconnect performance, as well as input matrix characteristics such as such as the number and location of nonzeros. We present LUsim, a simulation framework for modeling the performance of sparse LU factorization. Our framework uses micro-benchmarks to calibrate the parameters of machine characteristics and additional tools to facilitate real-time performance modeling. We are using LUsim to analyze an existing parallel sparse LU factorization code, and to explore a latency tolerant variant. We developed and validated a model of the factorization in SuperLU_DIST, then we modeled and implemented a new variant of slud, replacing a blocking collective communication phase with a non-blocking asynchronous point-to-point one. Our strategy realized a mean improvement of 11percent over a suite of test matrices.

Paleooceanographic evidence has been used to postulate that methane from oceanic hydrates may have had a significant role in regulating global climate, implicating global oceanic deposits of methane gas hydrate as the main culprit in instances of rapid climate change that have occurred in the past. However, the behavior of contemporary oceanic methane hydrate deposits subjected to rapid temperature changes, like those predicted under future climate change scenarios, is poorly understood. To determine the fate of the carbon stored in these hydrates, we performed simulations of oceanic gas hydrate accumulations subjected to temperature changes at the seafloor and assessed the potential for methane release into the ocean. Our modeling analysis considered the properties of benthic sediments, the saturation and distribution of the hydrates, the ocean depth, the initial seafloor temperature, and for the first time, estimated the effect of benthic biogeochemical activity. The results show that shallow deposits--such as those found in arctic regions or in the Gulf of Mexico--can undergo rapid dissociation and produce significant methane fluxes of 2 to 13 mol/yr/m{sup 2} over a period of decades, and release up to 1,100 mol of methane per m{sup 2} of seafloor in a century. These fluxes may exceed the …

Finite element method was used to analyze the three-point bend experimental data of A533B-1 pressure vessel steel obtained by Sherry, Lidbury, and Beardsmore [1] from -160 to -45 C within the ductile-brittle transition regime. As many researchers have shown, the failure stress ({sigma}{sub f}) of the material could be approximated as a constant. The characteristic length, or the critical distance (r{sub c}) from the crack tip, at which {sigma}{sub f} is reached, is shown to be temperature dependent based on the crack tip stress field calculated by the finite element method. With the J-A{sub 2} two-parameter constraint theory in fracture mechanics, the fracture toughness (J{sub C} or K{sub JC}) can be expressed as a function of the constraint level (A{sub 2}) and the critical distance r{sub c}. This relationship is used to predict the fracture toughness of A533B-1 in the ductile-brittle transition regime with a constant {sigma}{sub f} and a set of temperature-dependent r{sub c}. It can be shown that the prediction agrees well with the test data for wide range of constraint levels from shallow cracks (a/W= 0.075) to deep cracks (a/W= 0.5), where a is the crack length and W is the specimen width.

The Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) has developed a new medium for storage of hydrogen and other gases. This involves fabrication of thin, Porous Walled, Hollow Glass Microspheres (PW-HGMs), with diameters generally in the range of 1 to several hundred microns. What is unique about the glass microballons is that porosity has been induced and controlled within the thin, one micron thick walls, on the scale of 10 to several thousand Angstroms. This porosity results in interesting properties including the ability to use these channels to fill the microballons with special absorbents and other materials, thus providing a contained environment even for reactive species. Gases can now enter the microspheres and be retained on the absorbents, resulting in solid-state and contained storage of even reactive species. Also, the porosity can be altered and controlled in various ways, and even used to filter mixed gas streams within a system. SRNL is involved in about a half dozen different programs involving these PW-HGMs and an overview of some of these activities and results emerging are presented.

Over the last several years we have predicted and observed plasmas with an index of refraction greater than one in the soft X-ray regime. These plasmas are usually a few times ionized and have ranged from low-Z carbon plasmas to mid-Z tin plasmas. Our main calculational tool has been the average atom code. We have recently observed C{sup 2+} plasmas with an index of refraction greater than one at a wavelength of 46.9 nm (26.44 eV). In this paper we compare the average atom method, AVATOMKG, against two more detailed methods, OPAL and CAK, for calculating the index of refraction for the carbon plasmas and discuss the different approximations used. We present experimental measurements of carbon plasmas that display this anomalous dispersion phenomenon. It is shown that the average atom calculation is a good approximation when the strongest lines dominate the dispersion. However, when weaker lines make a significant contribution, the more detailed calculations such as OPAL and CAK are essential. During the next decade X-ray free electron lasers and other X-ray sources will be available to probe a wider variety of plasmas at higher densities and shorter wavelengths so understanding the index of refraction in plasmas will be even …