A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Congress granted financial regulators flexibility to establish their own compensation systems and required certain agencies to seek to maintain comparability with each other in pay and benefits to help the agencies overcome impediments to recruiting and retaining employees and avoid competing for the same employees. In response to a request, this report reviews (1) how the performance-based pay systems of 10 financial regulators are aligned with six key practices for effective performance management systems, (2) the actions these agencies have taken to assess and implement comparability in pay and benefits, and (3) the extent to which employees in selected occupations have moved between or left any of the agencies. GAO analyzed agency guidance and policies, agency data on performance ratings and pay increases, agency pay and benefits surveys, data from the Central Personnel Data File, and interviewed agency officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since 2005, the United Nations (UN) has been attempting to reform its management processes, in part to help ensure that resources are used effectively and efficiently. Some of these reforms focus on improving oversight and accountability at the United Nations. In this report, GAO examines the extent to which selected UN organizations' (1) internal audit offices have implemented professional standards for performing audits and investigations, (2) evaluation offices have implemented UN evaluation standards, and (3) governing bodies are provided with information about the results of UN oversight practices. GAO obtained and analyzed international standards and relevant documents from six of the largest UN organizations, and also met with U.S. and UN officials."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. Coast Guard's Deepwater program was designed to replace aging vessels and aircraft and information capabilities with new and upgraded assets and equipment. GAO's prior work raised concerns about the Coast Guard's efforts to upgrade or acquire assets on schedule and manage the Deepwater prime contractor. This report responds to congressional direction contained in a conference report accompanying the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fiscal year 2007 appropriations bill. GAO addressed two objectives: (1) What is the status of key Deepwater assets and how is the Coast Guard addressing any asset-related challenges that have been encountered? (2) What is the status of the Coast Guard's overall management of the Deepwater contract? GAO's work is based on reports, memorandums, and data on the plans and management of the Deepwater program and interviews with key officials. GAO is not making any new recommendations. DHS and the Coast Guard reviewed a draft of this report and concurred with our findings."

Incoherent electron effects could seriously limit the beam lifetime in proton or ion storage rings, such as LHC, SPS, or RHIC, or blow up the vertical emittance of positron beams, e.g., at the B factories or in linear-collider damping rings. Different approaches to modeling these effects each have their own merits and drawbacks. We describe several simulation codes which simplify the descriptions of the beam-electron interaction and of the accelerator structure in various different ways, and present results for a toy model of the SPS. In addition, we present evidence that for positron beams the interplay of incoherent electron-cloud effects and synchrotron radiation can lead to a significant increase in vertical equilibrium emittance. The magnitude of a few incoherent e+e- scattering processes is also estimated. Options for future code development are reviewed.

I present a summary of topics relevant to the electron-cloud build-up and dissipation that were presented at the International Workshop on Electron-Cloud Effects 'ECLOUD 07' (Daegu, S. Korea, April 9-12, 2007). This summary is not meant to be a comprehensive review of the talks. Rather, I focus on those developments that I found, in my personal opinion, especially interesting. The contributions, all excellent, are posted in http://chep.knu.ac.kr/ecloud07/.

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One of the areas of fundamental beam physics that have served as the rationale for recent research on UMER is the study of the generation and evolution of beam halos. Recent experiments and simulations have identified imperfections in the source geometry, particularly in the region near the emitter edge, as a significant potential source of halo particles. The edge-generated halo particles, both in the experiments and the simulations are found to pass through the center of the beam a short distance downstream of the anode plane. Understanding the detailed evolution of these particle orbits is therefore important to designing any aperture to remove the beam halo.

Finding a different way is the goal of the Data-Intensive Computing for Complex Biological Systems (Biopilot) project—a joint research effort between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. The two national laboratories, both of whom are world leaders in computing and computational sciences, are teaming to support areas of biological research in urgent need of data-intensive computing capabilities.

Three DOT 6M 30-gallon drums are scheduled to be shipped from the Idaho Nuclear Technology Engineering Center (INTEC) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to L-Area at the Savannah River Site (SRS). These three drums contain radioactive materials that resulted from the material recovery effort following a small explosion that had occurred in the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant (ICPP) hot chemistry laboratory (HCL). In support of the shipment and subsequent storage of the three DOT 6M drums, an evaluation of the potential for molecular hydrogen production in the drums has been completed and documented herein. The potential sources of hydrogen evaluated in the current report include radiolytic decomposition of polymeric materials in the DOT 6M drums No.3031 and No.3598 and the radiolytic decomposition of water in drum No.20102. No other potential sources have been identified based upon reported drum contents and packaging configuration. A parametric approach was used to evaluate the maximum quantity of molecular hydrogen that can be expected to evolve in two DOT 6M 30-gallon drums in support of receipt and subsequent interim storage prior to canyon processing. These drums are two of three drums scheduled for shipment from INTEC to SRS as part of the decommissioning effort …

The PORFLOW software package is a comprehensive mathematical model for simulation of multi-phase fluid flow, heat transfer and mass transport in variably saturated porous and fractured media. PORFLOW can simulate transient or steady-state problems in Cartesian or cylindrical geometry. The porous medium may be anisotropic and heterogeneous and may contain discrete fractures or boreholes with the porous matrix. The theoretical models within the code provide a unified treatment of concepts relevant to fluid flow and transport. The main features of PORFLOW that are relevant to Performance Assessment modeling at the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) include variably saturated flow and transport of parent and progeny radionuclides. This document involves testing a relevant sample of problems in PORFLOW and comparing the outcome of the simulations to analytical solutions or other commercial codes. The testing consists of the following four groups. Group 1: Groundwater Flow; Group 2: Contaminant Transport; Group 3: Numerical Dispersion; and Group 4: Keyword Commands.

The Pulse-Line Ion Accelerator (PLIA) is a helical distributed transmission line. A rising pulse applied to the upstream end appears as a moving spatial voltage ramp, on which an ion pulse can be accelerated. This is a promising approach to acceleration and longitudinal compression of an ion beam at high line charge density. In most of the studies carried out to date, using both a simple code for longitudinal beam dynamics and the Warp PIC code, a circuit model for the wave behavior was employed; in Warp, the helix I and V are source terms in elliptic equations for E and B. However, it appears possible to obtain improved fidelity using a ''sheath helix'' model in the quasi-static limit. Here we describe an algorithmic approach that may be used to effect such a solution.

A compact Dielectric Wall Accelerator (DWA), with field gradient up to 100 MW/m is being developed to accelerate proton bunches for use in cancer therapy treatment. The injector must create a proton pulse up to several hundred picoseconds, which is then shaped and accelerated with energies up to 250 MeV. The Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code LSP is used to model several aspects of this design. First, we use LSP to obtain the voltage waveform in the A-K gap that will produce a proton bunch with the requisite charge. We then model pulse compression and shaping in the section between the A-K gap and the DWA. We finally use LSP to model the beam transport through the DWA.

The paper discusses the main constraints and boundary conditions and describes the baseline configuration of the International Linear Collider (ILC) cryogenic system. The cryogenic layout, architecture and the cooling principle are presented. The paper addresses a plan for study and development required to demonstrate and improve the performance, to reduce cost and to attain the desired reliability.

The MuCool Experiment has been continuing to take data with805 and 201 MHz cavities in the MuCool Test Area. The system uses rfpower sources from the Fermilab Linac. Although the experimental programisprimarily aimed at the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE), wehave been studying the dependence of rf limits on frequency, cavitymaterial, high magnetic fields, gas pressure, coatings, etc. with thegeneral aim of understanding the basic mechanisms involved. The 201 MHzcavity, essentially a prototype for the MICE experiment, was made usingcleaning techniques similar to those employed for superconductingcavities and operates at its design field with very littleconditioning.

A new gate drive for high-voltage, high-power IGBTs has been developed for the SLAC NLC (Next Linear Collider) Solid State Induction Modulator. This paper describes the design and implementation of a driver that allows an IGBT module rated at 800A/3300V to switch up to 3000A at 2200V in 3{micro}S with a rate of current rise of more than 10000A/{micro}S, while still being short circuit protected. Issues regarding fast turn on, high de-saturation voltage detection, and low short circuit peak current will be presented. A novel approach is also used to counter the effect of unequal current sharing between parallel chips inside most high-power IGBT modules. It effectively reduces the collector-emitter peak current, and thus protects the IGBT from being destroyed during soft short circuit conditions at high di/dt.

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Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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At large distances the electromagnetic field of a wire is the same as the field produced by a bunch. Such a longrange beam-beam wire compensator was proposed for the LHC, and single beam tests with wire compensators were successfully done in the SPS. RHIC offers the possibility to test the compensation scheme with colliding beams. We report on measurements of beam losses as a function of transverse separation in RHIC at 100GeV, and comparisons with simulations. We present a design for a long-range wire compensator in RHIC.

We demonstrate the possibility of studying weakly interacting new particles in weak boson fusion, using the example of supersymmetric same-sign charginos. This signal can establish the existence of Majorana neutralinos and give access to their electroweak couplings. It can be observed over (supersymmetric) QCD backgrounds provided the charginos are light and not too close to the squark mass. We finally show how same-sign fermion production can be distinguished from samesign scalars or vectors arising in other models of new physics.