We investigatethe reconstruction of high pT hadronically-decaying top quarksat the Large Hadron Collider. One of the main challenges in identifying energetictop quarks is that the decay products become increasingly collimated. This reducesthe efficacy of conventional reconstruction methods that exploit the topology of thetop quark decay chain. We focus on the cases where the decay products of the topquark are reconstructed as a single jet, a"top-jet." The most basic"top-tag" methodbased on jet mass measurement is considered in detail. To analyze the feasibility ofthe top-tagging method, both theoretical and experimental aspects of the large QCDjet background contribution are examined. Based on a factorization approach, wederive a simple analytic approximation for the shape of the QCD jet mass spectrum.We observe very good agreement with the Monte Carlo simulation. We consider high pT tt bar production in the Standard Model as an example, and show that our theoretical QCD jet mass distributions can efficiently characterize the background via sideband analyses. We show that with 25 fb-1 of data, our approach allows us to resolve top-jets with pT _> 1 TeV, from the QCD background, and about 1.5 TeV top-jets with 100 fb-1, without relying on b-tagging. To further improve the significancewe consider jet shapes …

Even though RHIC has two full Siberian snakes in each ring, there are various perturbations to the ideal case including orbit errors at the snakes, experiment solenoids, injection bumps, and interlaced horizontal-vertical bumps at the hydrogen jet polarimeter. These errors can cause depolarization by shifting the spin tune and tilting the stable spin direction away from vertical. Tilting of the stable spin axis can enhance horizontal depolarizing resonances. This paper presents preliminary results for some of these error scenarios, as well as their impact on the stable spin directions at STAR and PHENIX.

Continued advances in the design of ignition targets have stimulating new development paths for target fabrication, with potentially important simplifications for fielding cryogenic ignition targets for the National Ignition Facility. Including graded dopants in ablators as well as optimizing capsule and fuel layer dimensions increase implosion stability. This has led to developments of micron-scale fill tubes to fill and field the targets. Rapid progress has been made in development of the graded dopant layers in capsules as well as their characterization, in fabrication methods for micro-fill-tubes, and in fuel fill control with these fill tubes. Phase-contrast x-ray radiography has allowed characterization of fuel layers in beryllium targets. This target development program includes participation from General Atomics, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

We have measured a contrast of 6.5 {center_dot} 10{sup -8} from 10-25{lambda}/D in visible light on the Extreme Adaptive Optics testbed using a shaped pupil for diffraction suppression. The testbed was designed with a minimal number of high-quality optics to ensure low wavefront error and uses a phase shifting diffraction interferometer for metrology. This level of contrast is within the regime needed for imaging young Jupiter-like planets, a primary application of high-contrast imaging. We have concluded that wavefront error, not pupil quality, is the limiting error source for improved contrast in our system.

We present a hybrid fluid-particle algorithm to simulate flow and transport of DNA-laden fluids in microdevices. Relevant length scales in microfluidic systems range from characteristic channel sizes of millimeters to micron scale geometric variation (e.g., post arrays) to 10 nanometers for the length of a single rod in a bead-rod polymer representation of a biological material such as DNA. The method is based on a previous fluid-particle algorithm in which long molecules are represented as a chain of connected rods, but in which the physically unrealistic behavior of rod crossing occurred. We have extended this algorithm to include screened Coulombic forces between particles by implementing a Debye-Hueckel potential acting between rods. In the method an unsteady incompressible Newtonian fluid is discretized with a second-order finite difference method in the interior of the Cartesian grid domain; an embedded boundary volume-of-fluid formulation is used near boundaries. The bead-rod polymer model is fully coupled to the solvent through body forces representing hydrodynamic drag and stochastic thermal fluctuations. While intrapolymer interactions are modeled by a soft potential, polymer-structure interactions are treated as perfectly elastic collisions. We demonstrate this method on flow and transport of a polymer through a post array microchannel in 2D where …

In the U.S., the increasing financial support for customer-sited photovoltaic (PV) systems provided through publicly-funded incentive programs has heightened concerns about the long-term performance of these systems. Given the barriers that customers face to ensuring that their PV systems perform well, and the responsibility that PV incentive programs bear to ensure that public funds are prudently spent, these programs should, and often do, play a critical role in addressing PV system performance. To provide a point of reference for assessing the current state of the art, and to inform program design efforts going forward, we examine the approaches to encouraging PV system performance used by 32 prominent PV incentive programs in the U.S. We identify eight general strategies or groups of related strategies that these programs have used to address factors that affect performance, and describe key implementation details. Based on this review, we then offer recommendations for how PV incentive programs can be effectively designed to mitigate potential performance issues.

Aquifer microcosms were used to determine how ethanol and methyl-tert-butyl ether (MtBE) affect monoaromatic hydrocarbon degradation under different electron-accepting conditions commonly found in contaminated sites experiencing natural attenuation. Response variability was investigated by using aquifer material from four sites with different exposure history. The lag phase prior to BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes) and ethanol degradation was typically shorter in microcosms with previously contaminated aquifer material, although previous exposure did not always result in high degradation activity. Toluene was degraded in all aquifer materials and generally under a broader range of electron-accepting conditions compared to benzene, which was degraded only under aerobic conditions. MtBE was not degraded within 100 days under any condition, and it did not affect BTEX or ethanol degradation patterns. Ethanol was often degraded before BTEX compounds, and had a variable effect on BTEX degradation as a function of electron-accepting conditions and aquifer material source. An occasional enhancement of toluene degradation by ethanol occurred in denitrifying microcosms with unlimited nitrate; this may be attributable to the fortuitous growth of toluene-degrading bacteria during ethanol degradation. Nevertheless, experiments with flow-through aquifer columns showed that this beneficial effect could be eclipsed by an ethanol-driven depletion of electron acceptors, which …

A source evaluation case study is presented for observations of algae toxicity in an intermittent stream passing through the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near Livermore, California. A five-step procedure is discussed to determine the cause of water toxicity problems and to determine appropriate environmental management practices. Using this approach, an upstream electrical transfer station was identified as the probable source of herbicides causing the toxicity. In addition, an analytical solution for solute transport in overland flow was used to estimate the application level of 40 Kg/ha. Finally, this source investigation demonstrates that pesticides can impact stream water quality regardless of application within levels suggested on manufacturer labels. Environmental managers need to ensure that pesticides that could harm aquatic organisms (including algae) not be used within close proximity to streams or storm drainages and that application timing should be considered for environmental protection.

Currently, large physics simulations produce 3D fields whose individual surfaces, after conventional extraction processes, contain upwards of hundreds of millions of triangles. Detailed interactive viewing of these surfaces requires powerful compression to minimize storage, and fast view-dependent optimization of display triangulations to drive high-performance graphics hardware. In this work we provide an overview of an end-to-end multiresolution dataflow strategy whose goal is to increase efficiencies in practice by several orders of magnitude. Given recent advancements in subdivision-surface wavelet compression and view-dependent optimization, we present algorithms here that provide the ''glue'' that makes this strategy hold together. Shrink-wrapping converts highly detailed unstructured surfaces of arbitrary topology to the semi-structured form needed for wavelet compression. Remapping to triangle bintrees minimizes disturbing ''pops'' during real-time display-triangulation optimization and provides effective selective-transmission compression for out-of-core and remote access to these huge surfaces.

Cadmium manganese telluride (CMT) has high potential as a material for room-temperature nuclear-radiation detectors. We investigated indium-doped CMT crystals taken from the stable growth region of the ingot, and compared its characteristics with that from the last-to-freeze region. We employed different techniques, including synchrotron white-beam X-ray topography (SWBXT), current-voltage (I-V) measurements, and low-temperature photoluminescence spectra, and we also assessed their responses as detectors to irradiation exposure. The crystal from the stable growth region proved superior to that from the last-to-freeze region; it is a single-grain crystal, free of twins, and displayed a resistivity higher by two orders-of-magnitude. The segregation of indium dopant in the ingot might be responsible for its better resistivity. Furthermore, we recorded a good response in the detector fabricated from the crystal taken from the stable growth region; its ({mu}{tau}){sub e} value was 2.6 x 10{sup -3} cm{sup 2}/V, which is acceptable for thin detectors, including for applications in medicine.

The authors have succeeded in growing GaN1?xAsx alloys over a large composition range (0 < x < 0.8) by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy. The enhanced incorporation of As was achieved by growing the films with high As{sub 2} flux at low (as low as 100 C) growth temperatures, which is much below the normal GaN growth temperature range. Using x-ray and transmission electron microscopy, they found that the GaNAs alloys with high As content x > 0.17 are amorphous. Optical absorption measurements together with x-ray absorption and emission spectroscopy results reveal a continuous gradual decrease in band gap from -3.4 to < 1 eV with increasing As content. The energy gap reaches its minimum of -0.8 eV at x - 0.8. The composition dependence of the band gap of the crystalline GaN{sub 1?x}As{sub x} alloys follows the prediction of the band anticrossing model (BAC). However, our measured band gap of amorphous GaN{sub 1?x}As{sub x} with 0.3 < x < 0.8 are larger than that predicted by BAC. The results seem to indicate that for this composition range the amorphous GaN{sub 1?x}As{sub x} alloys have short-range ordering that resembles random crystalline GaN{sub 1?x}As{sub x} alloys. They have demonstrated the possibility of …

We discuss two recent calculations of higher-order QeD corrections to scattering of transversely polarized hadrons. A basic concept underlying much of the theoretical description of high-energy hadronic scattering is the factorization theorem, which states that large momentum-transfer reactions may be factorized into long-distance pieces that contain information on the structure of the nucleon in terms of its parton densities, and parts that are short-distance and describe the hard interactions of the partons. Two crucial points are that on the one hand the long-distance contributions are universal, i.e., they are the same in any inelastic reaction under consideration, and that on the other hand the short-distance pieces depend only on the large scales related to the large momentum transfer in the overall reaction and, therefore, may be evaluated using QCD perturbation theory. The lowest order for the latter can generally only serve to give a rough description of the reaction under study. It merely captures the main features, but does not usually provide a quantitative understanding. The first-order ('next-to-leading order' (NLO)) corrections are generally indispensable in order to arrive at a firmer theoretical prediction for hadronic cross sections, and in some cases even an all-order resummation of large perturbative corrections is …

During Run-8, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) provided collisions of spin-polarized proton beams at two interaction regions. Physics data were taken with vertical orientation of the beam polarization, which in the 'Yellow' RHIC ring was significantly lower than in previous years. We present recent developments and improvements as well as the luminosity and polarization performance achieved during Run-8, and we discuss possible causes of the not as high as previously achieved polarization performance of the 'Yellow' ring.

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In calculating the strengths of depolarizing resonances it may be convenient to reformulate the equations of spin motion in a coordinate system based on the actual trajectory of the particle, as introduced by Kondratenko, rather than the conventional one based on a reference orbit. It is shown that resonance strengths calculated by the conventional and the revised formalisms are identical. Resonances induced by radiofrequency dipoles or solenoids are also treated; with rf dipoles it is essential to consider not only the direct effect of the dipole but also the contribution from oscillations induced by it.

A series of highly luminescent Tb(III) complexes of para-substituted 2-hydroxyisophthalamide ligands (5LI-IAM-X) has been prepared (X = H, CH{sub 3}, (C=O)NHCH{sub 3}, SO{sub 3}{sup -}, NO{sub 2}, OCH{sub 3}, F, Cl, Br) to probe the effect of substituting the isophthalamide ring on ligand and Tb(III) emission in order to establish a method for predicting the effects of chromophore modification on Tb(III) luminescence. The energies of the ligand singlet and triplet excited states are found to increase linearly with the {pi}-withdrawing ability of the substituent. The experimental results are supported by time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) calculations performed on model systems, which predict ligand singlet and triplet energies within {approx}5% of the experimental values. The quantum yield ({Phi}) values of the Tb(III) complex increases with the triplet energy of the ligand, which is in part due to the decreased non-radiative deactivation caused by thermal repopulation of the triplet. Together, the experimental and theoretical results serve as a predictive tool that can be used to guide the synthesis of ligands used to sensitize lanthanide luminescence.

The strong electromagnetic fields carried by relativistic highly charged ions make heavy-ion colliders attractive places to study photonuclear interactions and two-photon interactions. At RHIC, three experiments have studied coherent photoproduction of {rho}{sup 0}, 4{pi}, J/{psi}, e{sup +}e{sup -} pairs, and e{sup +}e{sup -} pairs where the electron is bound to one of the incident nuclei. These results show that photoproduction studies are possible, and demonstrate some of the unique possibilities due to the symmetric final states and the ion targets. The LHC will reach photon-nucleon energies many times higher than at HERA; these collisions can be used to measure the gluon distributions in nuclei at very low Bjorken-x, where shadowing and gluon saturation may become important; LHC {gamma}{gamma} collisions may also be attractive places to search for some types of new physics. ATLAS, CMS and ALICE are all planning to study photoproduction. After introducing the principles of photoproduction at hadron colliders, I will review recent results from RHIC on meson and e{sup +}e{sup -} production, and then discuss prospects for studies at the LHC.

A major obstacle to collaboration on accelerator projects has been the sharing of lattice description files between modeling codes. To address this problem, a lattice description format called Accelerator Markup Language (AML) has been created. AML is based upon the standard eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format; this provides the flexibility for AML to be easily extended to satisfy changing requirements. In conjunction with AML, a software library, called the Universal Accelerator Parser (UAP), is being developed to speed the integration of AML into any program. The UAP is structured to make it relatively straightforward (by giving appropriate specifications) to read and write lattice files in any format. This will allow programs that use the UAP code to read a variety of different file formats. Additionally, this will greatly simplify conversion of files from one format to another. Currently, besides AML, the UAP supports the MAD lattice format.

Magnesium diboride (MgB{sub 2}) has a transition temperature (T{sub c}) of {approx} 40 K, i.e., about 4 times higher than niobium (Nb). Studies in the last 3 years have shown that it could have about one order of magnitude less RF surface resistance (R{sub s}) than Nb at 4 K and seems to have much less power dependence than high-T{sub c} materials such as YBCO. However, it was also found that it will depend on the way you deposit the film. The result from on-axis pulsed laser deposition (PLD) showed rapid increase in R{sub s} with higher surface magnetic fields compared to the film deposited with reactive evaporation method.

In this paper we present a complete linear synchrobetatron coupling formalism by studying the transfer matrix which describes linear horizontal and longitudinal motions. With the technique established in the linear horizontal-vertical coupling study [D. Sagan and D. Rubin, Phys. Rev. ST Accel. Beams 2, 074001 (1999)], we found a transformation to block diagonalize the transfer matrix and decouple the betatron motion and the synchrotron motion. By separating the usual dispersion term from the horizontal coordinate first, we were able to obtain analytic expressions of the transformation under reasonable approximations. We also obtained the perturbations to the betatron tune and the Courant-Snyder functions. The closed orbit changes due to finite energy gains at rf cavities and radiation energy losses were also studied by the 5 x 5 extended transfer matrix with the fifth column describing kicks in the 4-dimension phase space.

The notion of mimicking natural structures in the synthesis of new structural materials has generated enormous interest but has yielded few practical advances. Natural composites achieve strength and toughness through complex hierarchical designs extremely difficult to replicate synthetically. Here we emulate Nature's toughening mechanisms through the combination of two ordinary compounds, aluminum oxide and polymethylmethacrylate, into ice-templated structures whose toughness can be over 300 times (in energy terms) that of their constituents. The final product is a bulk hybrid ceramic material whose high yield strength and fracture toughness ({approx}200 MPa and {approx}30 MPa{radical}m) provide specific properties comparable to aluminum alloys. These model materials can be used to identify the key microstructural features that should guide the synthesis of bio-inspired ceramic-based composites with unique strength and toughness.

We review the current status of flavor-changing neutral currents in the charm sector. We focus on the standard-model predictions and identify the main sources of theoretical uncertainties in both charm mixing and rare charm decays. The potential of these observables for constraining short-distance physics in the standard model and its extensions is compromised by the presence of large nonperturbative effects. We examine the possible discovery windows in which short-distance physics can be tested and study the effects of various extensions of the standard model. The current experimental situation and future prospects are reviewed.

Brazil started the use of radiation technology in the seventies on crosslinking polyethylene for insulation of wire and electronic cables and sterilization of medical care devices. The present status of industrial applications of radiation shows that the use of this technology is increasing according to the economical development and the necessity to become the products manufactured in the local industries competitive in quality and price for internal and external market. The on going development activities in this area are concentrated on polymers processing (materials modification), foodstuff treatment and environmental protection. The development, the promotion and the technical support to consolidate this technology to the local industries is the main attribution of Institute for Energetic and Nuclear Research-IPEN, a governmental Institution.

An LDRD (Laboratory Directed Research and Development) project is ongoing at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) for applying the three-dimensional multi-group deterministic neutron transport code (Attila{reg_sign}) to criticality, flux and depletion calculations of the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR). This paper discusses the model development, capabilities of Attila, generation of the cross-section libraries, and comparisons to an ATR MCNP model and future.