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The authors present updated measurements of time-dependent CP asymmetries in fully-reconstructed neutral B decays to several CP eigenstates containing a charmonium meson. The measurements use a data sample of (383 {+-} 4) x 10{sup 6} {Upsilon}(4S) {yields} B{bar B} decays collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II B factory. They determine sin2{beta} = 0.714 {+-} 0.032(stat) {+-} 0.018(syst) and |{lambda}| = 0.952 {+-} 0.022(stat) {+-} 0.017(syst).

The authors perform the first three-dimensional measurement of the amplitudes of B {yields} {psi}(2S)K* and B {yields} {chi}{sub c1}K* decays and update the previous measurement B {yields} J/{psi}K*. They use a data sample collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II storage ring, corresponding to 232 million B{bar B} pairs. The longitudinal polarization of decays involving a J{sup PC} = 1{sup ++} {chi}{sub c1} meson is found to be larger than that with a 1{sup --} J/{psi} or {psi}(2S) meson. No direct CP-violating charge asymmetry is observed.

The authors measure the absolute branching fraction for D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -} {pi}{sup +} using partial reconstruction of {bar B}{sup 0} {yields} D*{sup +}X{ell}{sup -}{bar {nu}}{sub {ell}} decays, in which only the charged lepton and the pion from the decay D*{sup +} {yields} D{sup 0}{pi}{sup +} are used. Based on a data sample of 230 million B{bar B} pairs collected at the {Upsilon}(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy B Factory at SLAC, they obtain {Beta}(D{sup 0} {yields} K{sup -}{pi}{sup +}) = (4.007 {+-} 0.037 {+-} 0.070)%, where the first error is statistical and the second error is systematic.

Vascular stents are small tubular scaffolds used in the treatment of arterial stenosis (narrowing of the vessel). Most vascular stents are metallic and are deployed either by balloon expansion or by self-expansion. A shape memory polymer (SMP) stent may enhance flexibility, compliance, and drug elution compared to its current metallic counterparts. The purpose of this study was to describe the fabrication of a laser-activated SMP stent and demonstrate photothermal expansion of the stent in an in vitro artery model. A novel SMP stent was fabricated from thermoplastic polyurethane. A solid SMP tube formed by dip coating a stainless steel pin was laser-etched to create the mesh pattern of the finished stent. The stent was crimped over a fiber-optic cylindrical light diffuser coupled to an infrared diode laser. Photothermal actuation of the stent was performed in a water-filled mock artery. At a physiological flow rate, the stent did not fully expand at the maximum laser power (8.6 W) due to convective cooling. However, under zero flow, simulating the technique of endovascular flow occlusion, complete laser actuation was achieved in the mock artery at a laser power of {approx}8 W. We have shown the design and fabrication of an SMP stent and …

Permanent Magnet Motors with either sinusoidal back emf (permanent magnet synchronous motor [PMSM]) or trapezoidal back emf (brushless dc motor [BDCM]) do not have the ability to alter the air gap flux density (field weakening). Since the back emf increases with speed, the system must be designed to operate with the voltage obtained at its highest speed. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Research Center (PEEMRC) has developed a dual mode inverter controller (DMIC) that overcomes this disadvantage. This report summarizes the results of tests to verify its operation. The standard PEEMRC 75 kW hard-switched inverter was modified to implement the field weakening procedure (silicon controlled rectifier enabled phase advance). A 49.5 hp motor rated at 2800 rpm was derated to a base of 400 rpm and 7.5 hp. The load developed by a Kahn Industries hydraulic dynamometer, was measured with a MCRT9-02TS Himmelstein and Company torque meter. At the base conditions a current of 212 amperes produced the 7.5 hp. Tests were run at 400, 1215, and 2424 rpm. In each run, the current was no greater than 214 amperes. The horsepower obtained in the three runs were 7.5, 9.3, and 8.12. These results verified …

Some useful information has been obtained regarding the potential use of the echelle spectrometer system for Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) monitoring applications, despite the AOTF-computer operational problems during the Sandia site-test. Currently, the use of the echelle spectrometer with the LIBS system is not suitable for trace-level analyte detection. This is due, in part, to the lower light throughput of the echelle spectrometer system compared to the SpectraPro-275. The low duty cycle of the LIBS system, which results from the use of a low-repetition-rate (but low-cost and portable) laser, also limits the detection sensitivity achievable using a high-resolution spectrometer. At high analyte concentrations, the echelle spectrometer is able to resolve spectral interferences including the Cd-As line pair at 228.8-nm and other LIBS emission features not resolved using the SpectraPro-275. A definite positive result obtained is the determination that at the high resolution of the echelle spectrometer, time-gating of the CCD detector is not necessary to discriminate analyte spectral signals from the LIBS background emission. The cost of the gated CCD and associated electronics is a significant portion of the cost of the Sandia LIBS system. Incorporation of a low-cost version of the echelle spectrometer for process monitoring applications not requiring …

The growth of laser development & technology has been remarkable. Unfortunately, a number of traps or obstacles to laser safety have also developed with that growth. The goal of this article is to highlight those traps, in the hope that an aware laser user will avoid them. These traps have been the cause or contributing factor of many a preventable laser accident.

As retail choice states reach the end of their transitional, rate-cap periods, state regulators must decide what type of default supply service to provide to customers that have not switched to a competitive retail supplier. In a growing number of states, regulators have adopted real-time pricing (RTP) as the default service for large commercial and industrial (C&I) customers. Although this trend is driven chiefly by policy objectives related to retail competition, default service RTP may have the added benefit of stimulating demand response. To evaluate the potential role of RTP as a means to both ends--retail market development and demand response--we conducted a comprehensive review of experience with default RTP in the U.S. and examined the emergence of RTP as a product offering by competitive retail suppliers. Across the ten utilities with default RTP in place in 2005, between 5% and 35% of the applicable load remained on the rate. Based on interviews with competitive retailers, we find evidence to suggest that a comparable amount of load in these states has switched to hourly pricing arrangements with competitive retailers. Many customers on default or competitive hourly pricing are paying prices indexed to the real-time spot market, and thus have no …

Electrical conductivities of fluid oxygen were measured between 30 and 80 GPa at a few 1000 K. These conditions were achieved with a reverberating shock wave technique. The measured conductivities were several orders of magnitude lower than measured previously on the single shock Hugoniot because of lower temperatures achieved under shock reverberation. Extrapolation of these data suggests that the minimum metallic conductivity of a metal will be reached near 100 GPa.

The recently developed on-shell bootstrap for computing one-loop amplitudes in non-supersymmetric theories such as QCD combines the unitarity method with loop-level on-shell recursion. For generic helicity configurations, the recursion relations may involve undetermined contributions from non-standard complex singularities or from large values of the shift parameter. Here we develop a strategy for sidestepping difficulties through use of pairs of recursion relations. To illustrate the strategy, we present sets of recursion relations needed for obtaining n-gluon amplitudes in QCD. We give a recursive solution for the one-loop n-gluon QCD amplitudes with three or four color-adjacent gluons of negative helicity and the remaining ones of positive helicity. We provide an explicit analytic formula for the QCD amplitude A{sub 6;1}(1{sup -}, 2{sup -}, 3{sup -}, 4{sup +}, 5{sup +}, 6{sup +}), as well as numerical results for A{sub 7;1}(1{sup -}, 2{sup -}, 3{sup -}, 4{sup +}, 5{sup +}, 6{sup +}, 7{sup +}), A{sub 8;1}(1{sup -}, 2{sup -}, 3{sup -}, 4{sup +}, 5{sup +}, 6{sup +}, 7{sup +}, 8{sup +}), and A{sub 8;1}(1{sup -}, 2{sup -}, 3{sup -}, 4{sup -}, 5{sup +}, 6{sup +}, 7{sup +}, 8{sup +}). We expect the on-shell bootstrap approach to have widespread applications to phenomenological studies at colliders.

We review on-shell methods for computing multi-parton scattering amplitudes in perturbative QCD, utilizing their unitarity and factorization properties. We focus on aspects which are useful for the construction of one-loop amplitudes needed for phenomenological studies at the Large Hadron Collider.

The High Energy and Nuclear Physics Data Access GrandChallenge project has developed an optimizing storage access softwaresystem that was prototyped at RHIC. It is currently undergoingintegration with the STAR experiment in preparation for data taking thatstarts in mid-2000. The behavior and lessons learned in the RHIC MockData Challenge exercises are described as well as the observedperformance under conditions designed to characterize scalability. Up to250 simultaneous queries were tested and up to 10 million events across 7event components were involved in these queries. The system coordinatesthe staging of "bundles" of files from the HPSS tape system, so that allthe needed components of each event are in disk cache when accessed bythe application software. The caching policy algorithm for thecoordinated bundle staging is described in the paper. The initialprototype implementation interfaced to the Objectivity/DB. In this latestversion, it evolved to work with arbitrary files and use CORBA interfacesto the tag database and file catalog services. The interface to the tagdatabase and the MySQL-based file catalog services used by STAR aredescribed along with the planned usage scenarios.

This is the tenth Quarterly Technical Report for DOE Cooperative Agreement No: DE-FC26-00NT41047. The goal of the project is to develop and demonstrate a computational workbench for simulating the performance of Vision 21 Power Plant Systems. Within the last quarter, good progress has been made on all aspects of the project. Calculations for a full Vision 21 plant configuration have been performed for two gasifier types. An improved process model for simulating entrained flow gasifiers has been implemented into the workbench. Model development has focused on: a pre-processor module to compute global gasification parameters from standard fuel properties and intrinsic rate information; a membrane based water gas shift; and reactors to oxidize fuel cell exhaust gas. The data visualization capabilities of the workbench have been extended by implementing the VTK visualization software that supports advanced visualization methods, including inexpensive Virtual Reality techniques. The ease-of-use, functionality and plug-and-play features of the workbench were highlighted through demonstrations of the workbench at a DOE sponsored coal utilization conference. A white paper has been completed that contains recommendations on the use of component architectures, model interface protocols and software frameworks for developing a Vision 21 plant simulator.

Kondo coupling of f and conduction electrons is a common feature of f-electron intermetallics. Similar effects should occur in carbon ring systems (metallocenes). Evidence for Kondo coupling in Ce(C{sub 8}H{sub 8}){sub 2} (cerocene) and the ytterbocene Cp*{sub 2}Yb(bipy) is reported from magnetic susceptibility and L{sub III}-edge x-ray absorption spectroscopy. These well-defined systems provide a new way to study the Kondo effect on the nanoscale, should generate insight into the Anderson Lattice problem, and indicate the importance of this often-ignored contribution to bonding in organometallics.

The exit from mitosis is the last critical decision a cell has to make during a division cycle. A complex regulatory system has evolved to evaluate the success of mitotic events and control this decision. Whereas outstanding genetic work in yeast has led to rapid discovery of a large number of interacting genes involved in the control of mitotic exit, it has also become increasingly difficult to comprehend the logic and mechanistic features embedded in the complex molecular network. Our view is that this difficulty stems in part from the attempt to explain mitotic exit control using concepts from traditional top-down engineering design, and that exciting new results from evolutionary engineering design applied to networks and electronic circuits may lend better insights. We focus on four particularly intriguing features of the mitotic exit control system: the two-stepped release of Cdc14; the self-activating nature of Tem1 GTPase; the spatial sensor associated with the spindle pole body; and the extensive redundancy in the mitotic exit network. We attempt to examine these design features from the perspective of evolutionary design and complex system engineering.

This project was initially targeted to the making of coke for blast furnaces by using proprietary technology of Calderon in a phased approach, and Phase I was successfully completed. The project was then re-directed to the making of iron units. U.S. Steel teamed up with Calderon for a joint effort which will last 30 months to produce directly reduced iron with the potential of converting it into molten iron or steel consistent with the Roadmap recommendations of 1998 prepared by the Steel Industry in cooperation with the Department of Energy. The work performed to-date is encouraging by virtue that product was produced with the lowest cost raw material (ore concentrate), and the energy source being exclusively coal. The product was melted and cast. The equipment has been debugged and preparations are taking place towards the integration of the process to produce directly molten iron and/or molten steel. Also it is planned to conclude the 72 hours test at reasonably continuous steady state during next quarter.

Migration of individuals between populations may increase the selection pressure. This has the desirable consequence of speeding up convergence, but it may result in an excessively rapid loss of variation that may cause the search to fail. This paper investigates the effects of migration on the distribution of fitness. It considers arbitrary migration rates and topologies with different number of neighbors, and it compares algorithms that are configured to have the same selection intensity. The results suggest that migration preserves more diversity as the number of neighbors of a deme increases.

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Current modeling of the southeastern portion of the Nevada Test Site (NTS) with a refined U.S. Geological Survey Death Valley regional groundwater flow system model shows that impacts from pumping by proposed Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) and Vidler Water Company (VWC) wells can be substantial over 75 years of operation. Results suggest that significant drawdown at proposed well sites will occur with depths of drawdown ranging from 8 m to nearly 1,600 m. The areal extent of 0.5 m of drawdown is also significant, impacting Mercury Valley, Amargosa, Indian Springs, Three Lakes, and Frenchman Flat basins. Drawdown will impact Army No.1 Water Well in Mercury Valley by lowering water levels 2.1 m but will not impact other NTS production wells. It is also predicted that flowpaths from detonation sites within the NTS will be altered with the potential to move material out of the NTS. Impacts to both springs and regions of groundwater evapotranspiration (modeled as MODFLOW drain cells) appear very minimal, with an estimated 0.2-percent reduction in flow to these regions. This amounts to a loss of more that 55,000 m3/year (45 acre-ft/year), or more than 4,000,000 m3 (3,400 acre-ft) during 75 years of groundwater withdrawal by pumping …

X-ray free-electron lasers will produce pulses of x-rays that are 10 orders of magnitude brighter than today's undulator sources at synchrotrons. This may enable atomic resolution imaging of single macromolecules.

In the next-generation linear colliders, the low-energy e{sup +}e{sup -} pairs created during the collision of high-energy e{sup +}e{sup -} beams would cause potential deleterious background problems to the detectors. At low collider energies, the pairs are made essentially by the incoherent process, where the pair is created by the interaction of beamstrahlung photons on the individual particles in the oncoming beam. This problem was first identified by Zolotarev, et al[1]. At energies where the beamstrahlung parameter {Upsilon} lies approximately in the range 0.6 {approx}< {Upsilon} {approx}< 100, pair creation from the beamstrahlung photons is dominated by a coherent process, first noted by Chen[2]. The seriousness of this pair creation problem lies in the transverse momenta that the pair particles carry when leaving the interaction point (IP) with large angles. One source of transverse momentum is from the kick by the field of the oncoming beam which results in an outcoming angle {theta} {proportional_to} 1/{radical}x, where x is the fractional energy of the particle relative to the initial beam particle energy[2,3]. As was shown in Ref. 131, there in fact exists an energy threshold for the coherent pairs, where x{sub th} {approx}> 1/2{Upsilon}. Thus within a tolerable exiting angle, there …

A key issue of solder joint reliability is joint failure due to thermomechanical fatigue (TMF). TMF is caused by different coefficients of thermal expansion (CTEs) of the materials in an electronic package, combined with changes in the ambient temperature. Different CTEs result in cyclical strain in the assembly, and this strain is concentrated almost entirely in the solder because it is the most deformable portion of the package. Since solder alloy is at a significant fraction of its melting point even at room temperature, the cyclical strain enhances mass diffusion and causes dramatic changes in the alloy microstructure over time. As the microstructure changes and becomes coarser, the solder alloy weakens and eventually microcracks nucleate and grow in the joint, leading to component failure. the failure of solder joints is difficult to detect due to the inert nature of the electrical system. If the system is not on for extended periods then failures can not be observed. Therefore it is important to develop an advanced predictive capability which allows scientists and engineers to predict solder degradation and identify reliability problems in aging electronics early.

We studied the problematic of uncertainties in the diffuse gamma radiation apparent in stacking analysis of EGRET data at low Galactic latitudes. Subsequently, we co-added maps of counts, exposure and diffuse background, and residuals, in varying numbers for different sub-categories of putatively and known source populations (like PSRs). Finally we tested for gamma-ray excess emission in those maps and attempt to quantify the systematic biases in such approach. Such kind of an analysis will help the classification processes of sources and source populations in the GLAST era.