Thesis written by a student in the UNT Honors College discussing the support and involvement of banks in Community Economic Development.

Thesis written by a student in the UNT Honors College discussing different types of opinions within the United States Supreme Court, with an emphasis on the history and practice of concurrences.

An implicit version of the Smooth Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) code SPHINX has been written and is working. In conjunction with the SPHINX code the new implicit code models fluids and solids under a wide range of conditions. SPH codes are Lagrangian, meshless and use particles to model the fluids and solids. The implicit code makes use of the Krylov iterative techniques for solving large linear-systems and a Newton-Raphson method for non-linear corrections. It uses numerical derivatives to construct the Jacobian matrix. It uses sparse techniques to save on memory storage and to reduce the amount of computation. It is believed that this is the first implicit SPH code to use Newton-Krylov techniques, and is also the first implicit SPH code to model solids. A description of SPH and the techniques used in the implicit code are presented. Then, the results of a number of tests cases are discussed, which include a shock tube problem, a Rayleigh-Taylor problem, a breaking dam problem, and a single jet of gas problem. The results are shown to be in very good agreement with analytic solutions, experimental results, and the explicit SPHINX code. In the case of the single jet of gas case it has …

The author performs image reconstruction for a novel Positron Emission Tomography camera that is optimized for breast cancer imaging. This work addresses for the first time, the problem of fully-3D, tomographic reconstruction using a septa-less, stationary, (i.e. no rotation or linear motion), and rectangular camera whose Field of View (FOV) encompasses the entire volume enclosed by detector modules capable of measuring Depth of Interaction (DOI) information. The camera is rectangular in shape in order to accommodate breasts of varying sizes while allowing for soft compression of the breast during the scan. This non-standard geometry of the camera exacerbates two problems: (a) radial elongation due to crystal penetration and (b) reconstructing images from irregularly sampled data. Packing considerations also give rise to regions in projection space that are not sampled which lead to missing information. The author presents new Fourier Methods based image reconstruction algorithms that incorporate DOI information and accommodate the irregular sampling of the camera in a consistent manner by defining lines of responses (LORs) between the measured interaction points instead of rebinning the events into predefined crystal face LORs which is the only other method to handle DOI information proposed thus far. The new procedures maximize the use …

After implantation of As, As + Be, and As + Ga into GaN and annealing for short durations at temperatures as high as 1500 C, the GaN films remained highly resistive. It was apparent from c-RBS studies that although implantation damage did not create an amorphous layer in the GaN film, annealing at 1500 C did not provide enough energy to completely recover the radiation damage. Disorder recovered significantly after annealing at temperatures up to 1500 C, but not completely. From SIMS analysis, oxygen contamination in the AIN capping layer causes oxygen diffusion into the GaN film above 1400 C. The sapphire substrate (A1203) also decomposed and oxygen penetrated into the backside of the GaN layer above 1400 C. To prevent donor-like oxygen impurities from the capping layer and the substrate from contaminating the GaN film and compensating acceptors, post-implantation annealing should be done at temperatures below 1500 C. Oxygen in the cap could be reduced by growing the AIN cap on the GaN layer after the GaN growth run or by depositing the AIN layer in a ultra high vacuum (UHV) system post-growth to minimize residual oxygen and water contamination. With longer annealing times at 1400 C or at …

An accelerator-based experiment was performed using the CEBAF accelerator of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility to investigate a predicted sensitivity of the beam polarization to the vertical betatron orbit in the recirculation arcs. This is the first measurement of any such effect at CEBAF, and provides information about the polarized beam delivery performance of the accelerator. A brief description of the accelerator is given, followed by the experimental methods used and the relevant issues involved in measuring a small ({approximately} 10{sup {minus}2}) change in the beam polarization. Results of measurements of the polarization sensitivity parameters and the machine energy by polarization transport techniques are presented. The parameters were obtained by measurement of the strength of the effect as a function of orbit amplitude and spin orientation, to confirm the predicted coupling between the spin orientation and the quadrupole fields in the beam transport system. This experiment included characterizing the injector spin manipulation system and 5 MeV Mott polarimeter, modeling of the polarization transport of the accelerator, installation of magnets to create a modulated orbit perturbation in a single recirculation arc, and detailed studies of the Hall C Moeller polarimeter.

We present the results of a search in p{bar p} collisions at {radical}s = 1.8 TeV for anomalous production of events containing a photon with large transverse energy and a lepton (e or {mu}) with large transverse energy, using 86 pb{sup -1} of data collected at the Collider Detector at Fermilab during the 1994-95 collider run at the Fermilab Tevatron. The presence of large missing transverse energy (E{sub T}), additional photons, or additional leptons in these events is also analyzed. The results are consistent with standard model expectations, with the possible exception of photon-lepton events with large E{sub T}, for which the probability of a statistical fluctuation of the standard model expectation up to and above the observed level is 0.7%.

Relationships between intrinsic mechanical hardness and atomic-scale properties are reviewed, Hardness scales closely and linearly with shear modulus for a given class of material (covalent, ionic or metallic). A two-parameter fit and a Peierls-stress model produce a more universal scaling relationship, but no model can explain differences in hardness between the transition metal carbides and nitrides. Calculations of ''ideal strength'' (defined by the limit of elastic stability of a perfect crystal) are proposed. The ideal shear strengths of fcc aluminum and copper are calculated using ab initio techniques and allowing for structural relaxation of all five strain components other than the imposed strain. The strengths of Al and Cu are similar (8-9% of the shear modulus), but the geometry of the relaxations in Al and Cu is very different. The relaxations are consistent with experimentally measured third-order elastic constants. The general thermodynamic conditions of elastic stability that set the upper limits of mechanical strength are derived. The conditions of stability are shown for cubic (hydrostatic), tetragonal (tensile) and monoclinic (shear) distortions of a cubic crystal. The implications of this stability analysis to first-principles calculations of ideal strength are discussed, and a method to detect instabilities orthogonal to the direction of …

Baryon stopping and particle production in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 GeV/nucleon are studied as a function of the collision centrality using new proton, antiproton, charged kaon and charged pion production data measured with the NA49 experiment at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). Stopping, which is measured by the shift in rapidity of net protons or baryons from the initial beam rapidity, increases in more central collisions. This is expected from a geometrical picture of the collisions. The stopping data are quantitatively compared to models incorporating various mechanisms for stopping. In general, microscopic transport calculations which incorporate current theoretical models of baryon stopping or use phenomenological extrapolations from simpler systems overestimate the dependence of stopping on centrality. Approximately, the yield of produced pions scales with the number of nucleons participating in the collision. A small increase in yield beyond this scaling, accompanied by a small suppression in the yield of the fastest pions, reflects the variation in stopping with centrality. Consistent with the observations from central collisions of light and heavy nuclei at the SPS, the transverse momentum distributions of all particles are observed to become harder with increasing centrality. This effect is most pronounced for the heaviest particles. This …

The current congestion control mechanism used in TCP has difficulty reaching full utilization on high speed links, particularly on wide-area connections. For example, the packet drop rate needed to fill a Gigabit pipe using the present TCP protocol is below the currently achievable fiber optic error rates. HighSpeed TCP was recently proposed as a modification of TCP's congestion control mechanism to allow it to achieve reasonable performance in high speed wide-area links. In this research, simulation results showing the performance of HighSpeed TCP and the impact of its use on the present implementation of TCP are presented. Network conditions including different degrees of congestion, different levels of loss rate, different degrees of bursty traffic and two distinct router queue management policies were simulated. The performance and fairness of HighSpeed TCP were compared to the existing TCP and solutions for bulk-data transfer using parallel streams.

Protein phosphorylation is a general mechanism for signal transduction as well as regulation of cellular function. Unlike phosphorylation in eukaryotic systems that uses Ser/Thr for the sites of modification, two-component signal transduction systems, which are prevalent in bacteria, archea, and lower eukaryotes, use an aspartate as the site of phosphorylation. Two-component systems comprise a histidine kinase and a receiver domain. The conformational change of the receiver domain upon phosphorylation leads to signal transfer to the downstream target, a process that had not been understood well at the molecular level. The transient nature of the phospho-Asp bond had made structural studies difficult. The discovery of an excellent analogue for acylphosphate, BeF{sub 3}{sup -}, enabled structural study of activated receiver domains. The structure of activated Chemotaxis protein Y (CheY) was determined both by NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography. These structures revealed the molecular basis of the conformational change that is coupled to phosphorylation. Phosphorylation of the conserved Asp residue in the active site allows hydrogen bonding of the T87 O{gamma} to phospho-aspartate, which in turn leads to the rotation of Y106 into the ''in'' position (termed Y-T coupling). The structure of activated CheY complexed with the 16 N-terminal residues of FliM (N16-FliM), …

A review of orbifold geometry is given, followed by a review of the construction of four-dimensional heterotic string models by compactification on a six-dimensional Z{sub 3} orbifold. Particular attention is given to the details of the transition from a classical theory to a first-quantized theory. Subsequently, a discussion is given of the systematic enumeration of all standard-like three generation models subject to certain limiting conditions. it is found that the complete set is described by 192 models, with only five possibilities for the hidden sector gauge group. It is argued that only four of the hidden sector gauge groups are viable for dynamical supersymmetry breaking, leaving only 175 promising models in the class. General features of the spectra of matter states in all 175 models are discussed. Twenty patterns of representations are found to occur. Accommodation of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) spectrum is addressed. States beyond those contains in the MSSM and nonstandard hypercharge normalization are shown to be generic, though some models do allow for the usual hypercharge normalization found in SU(5) embeddings of the Standard Model gauge group. Only one of the twenty patterns of representations, comprising seven of the 175 models, is found to be …

The realization of tunable, ultrashort pulse x-ray sources promises to open new venues of science and to shed new light on long-standing problems in condensed matter physics and chemistry. Fundamentally new information can now be accessed. Used in a pump-probe spectroscopy, ultrashort x-ray pulses provide a means to monitor atomic rearrangement and changes in electronic structure in condensed-matter and chemical systems on the physically-limiting time-scales of atomic motion. This opens the way for the study of fast structural dynamics and the role they play in phase transitions, chemical reactions and the emergence of exotic properties in materials with strongly interacting degrees of freedom. The ultrashort pulse x-ray source developed at the Advanced Light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is based on electron slicing in storage rings, and generates {approx}100 femtosecond pulses of synchrotron radiation spanning wavelengths from the far-infrared to the hard x-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The tunability of the source allows for the adaptation of a broad range of static x-ray spectroscopies to useful pump-probe measurements. Initial experiments are attempted on transition metal complexes that exhibit relatively large structural changes upon photo-excitation and which have excited-state evolution determined by strongly interacting structural, electronic and magnetic degrees …

Scientific computing makes use of very large, multidimensional numerical arrays - typically, gigabytes to terabytes in size - much larger than can fit on even the largest single compute node. Such arrays must be distributed across a "cluster" of nodes. Global Arrays is a cluster-based software system from Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that enables an efficient, portable, and parallel shared-memory programming interface to manipulate these arrays. Written in and for the C and FORTRAN programming languages, it takes advantage of high-performance cluster interconnections to allow any node in the cluster to access data on any other node very rapidly. The "numpy" module is the de facto standard for numerical calculation in the Python programming language, a language whose use is growing rapidly in the scientific and engineering communities. numpy provides a powerful N-dimensional array class as well as other scientific computing capabilities. However, like the majority of the core Python modules, numpy is inherently serial. Our system, GAiN (Global Arrays in NumPy), is a parallel extension to Python that accesses Global Arrays through numpy. This allows parallel processing and/or larger problem sizes to be harnessed almost transparently within new or existing numpy programs.

The work exposed in this thesis deals with the search for electroweak production of top quark (single top) in proton-antiproton collisions at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV. This production mode has not been observed yet. Analyzed data have been collected during the Run II of the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. These data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 370 pb{sup -1}. In the Standard Model, the decay of a top quark always produce a high momentum bottom quark. Therefore bottom quark jets identification plays a major role in this analysis. The large lifetime of b hadrons and the subsequent large impact parameters relative to the interaction vertex of charged particle tracks are used to tag bottom quark jets. Impact parameters of tracks attached to a jet are converted into the probability for the jet to originate from the primary vertex. This algorithm has a 45% tagging efficiency for a 0.5% mistag rate. Two processes (s and t channels) dominate single top production with slightly different final states. The searched signature consists in 2 to 4 jets with at least one bottom quark jet, one charged lepton (electron or muon) and missing energy accounting for a neutrino. This final …

The first analysis of diffractively produced Z bosons in the muon decay channel is presented, using data taken by the D0 detector at the Tevatron at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 109 pb{sup -1}. The diffractive sample is defined using the fractional momentum loss {zeta} of the intact proton or antiproton measured using the calorimeter and muon detector systems. In a sample of 10791 (Z/{gamma})* {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} events, 24 diffractive candidate events are found with {zeta} < 0.02. The first work towards measuring the cross section times branching ratio for diffractive production of (Z/{gamma})* {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} is presented for the kinematic region {zeta} < 0.02. The first work towards measuring the cross section times branching ratio for diffractive production of (Z/{gamma})* {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} is presented for the kinematic region {zeta} < 0.02. The systematic uncertainties are not yet sufficiently understood to present the cross section result. In addition, the first measurement of the efficiency of the Run II D0 Luminosity Monitor is presented, which is used in all cross section measurements. The efficiency is: {var_epsilon}{sub LM} = (90.9 {+-} 1.8)%.

The following work presents a preliminary measurement of the inclusive jet cross section for jet transverse momenta from 61 to 620 GeV in the rapidity range 0.1 < |Y| < 0.7. The result is based on 218 pb{sup -1} of data collected by the CDF detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab. The data are consistent with NLO pQCD predictions based on the CTEQ6.1 parton distribution functions.

We have measured the fraction of longitudinally polarized W bosons produced top-quark decays. The result of the analysis in single-lepton t{bar t} events is fully consistent with the Standard Model expectation. The 2{sigma} discrepancy in the dilepton analysis is suggestive of new phenomena. However, given the significance of the discrepancy, any claim of new physics based on this analysis is highly speculative. It is worth noting that another analysis of the kinematic properties of these data finds a similar discrepancy [63]. It will be interesting to see if this discrepancy persists as more data are collected during run II of the Tevatron. In order to make a stronger statement about the nature of the tWb coupling with this method, larger statistics are required. However alternative methods, particularly the matrix-element method developed at D0 [36, 35], should be especially powerful, even with limited statistics.

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Discovery of the top quark in 1995 at the Fermilab Tevatron collider concluded a long search following the 1977 discovery of bottom (b) quark [1] and represents another triumph of the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles. Top quark is one of the fundamental fermions in the Standard Model of electroweak interactions and is the weak-isospin partner of the bottom quark. A precise measurement of top pair production cross-section would be a test of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) prediction. Presently, Tevatron is the world's highest energy collider where protons (p) and anti-protons ({anti p}) collide at a centre of mass energy (ps) of 1.96 TeV. At Tevatron top (t) and anti-top ({anti t}) quarks are predominantly pair produced through strong interactions--quark annihilation ({approx_equal} 85%) and gluon fusion ({approx_equal} 15%). Due to the large mass of top quark, t or {anti t} decays ({approx} 10{sup -25} sec) before hadronization and in SM framework, it decays to a W boson and a b quark with {approx} 100% branching ratio (BR). The subsequent decay of W boson determines the major signatures of t{anti t} decay. If both W bosons (coming from t and {anti t} decays) decay into leptons (viz., ev{sub e}, {mu}{nu}{sub {mu}} …

We have studied the properties of a low emittance electron beam produced by laser pulses incident onto an rf gun photocathode. The experiments were carried out at the A0 photoinjector at Fermilab. Such beam studies are necessary for fixing the design of new Linear Colliders as well as for the development of Free Electron Lasers. An overview of the A0 photoinjector is given in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2 we describe the A0 photoinjector laser system. A stable laser system is imperative for reliable photoinjector operation. After the recent upgrade, we have been able to reach a new level of stability in the pulse-to-pulse fluctuations of the pulse amplitude, and of the temporal and transverse profiles. In Chapter 3 we present a study of transverse emittance versus the shape of the photo-cathode drive-laser pulse. For that purpose a special temporal profile laser shaping device called a pulse-stacker was developed. In Chapter 4 we discuss longitudinal beam dynamics studies using a two macro-particle bunch; this technique is helpful in analyzing pulse compression in the magnetic chicane, as well as velocity bunching effects in the rf-gun and the 9-cell accelerating cavity. In Chapter 5 we introduce a proposal for laser acceleration of …

During the last decades, particle physicists have studied the tiniest building blocks of matter--the quarks and the leptons--and the forces between them in great detail. From these experiments, a theoretical framework has been built that describes the observed results with high precision. The achievement of this theory, which is referred to as the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, was the elaboration of a unified description of the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces in the framework of quantum gauge-field theories. Moreover, the Standard Model combines the weak and electromagnetic forces in a single electroweak gauge theory. The fourth force which is realized in nature, gravity, is too weak to be observable in laboratory experiments carried out in high-energy particle physics and is not part of the Standard Model. Although the Standard Model has proven highly successful in correlating a huge amount of experimental results, a key ingredient is as yet untested: the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking. Currently, the only viable ansatz that is compatible with observation is the Higgs mechanism. It predicts the existence of a scalar particle, called the Higgs boson, and the couplings to the fundamental Standard Model particles, however not its mass. An upper limit on …

Search engines, such as Google, assign scores to news articles based on their relevancy to a query. However, not all relevant articles for the query may be interesting to a user. For example, if the article is old or yields little new information, the article would be uninteresting. Relevancy scores do not take into account what makes an article interesting, which would vary from user to user. Although methods such as collaborative filtering have been shown to be effective in recommendation systems, in a limited user environment there are not enough users that would make collaborative filtering effective. I present a general framework for defining and measuring the ''interestingness'' of articles, called iScore, incorporating user-feedback including tracking multiple topics of interest as well as finding interesting entities or phrases in a complex relationship network. I propose and have shown the validity of the following: 1. Filtering based on only topic relevancy is insufficient for identifying interesting articles. 2. No single feature can characterize the interestingness of an article for a user. It is the combination of multiple features that yields higher quality results. For each user, these features have different degrees of usefulness for predicting interestingness. 3. Through user-feedback, a …