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Nuclear forensics has become increasingly important in the fight against illicit trafficking in nuclear and other radioactive materials. The illicit trafficking of nuclear materials is, of course, an international problem; nuclear materials may be mined and milled in one country, manufactured in a second country, diverted at a third location, and detected at a fourth. There have been a number of articles in public policy journals in the past year that call for greater interaction between the U. S. and the rest of the world on the topic of nuclear forensics. Some believe that such international cooperation would help provide a more certain capability to identify the source of the nuclear material used in a terrorist event. An improved international nuclear forensics capability would also be important as part of the IAEA verification toolkit, particularly linked to increased access provided by the additional protocol. A recent study has found that, although international progress has been made in securing weapons-usable HEU and Pu, the effort is still insufficient. They found that nuclear material, located in 40 countries, could be obtained by terrorists and criminals and used for a crude nuclear weapon. Through 2006, the IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database had recorded a …

Understanding the solution behavior of supramolecular assemblies is essential for a full understanding of the formation and chemistry of synthetic host-guest systems. While the interaction between host and guest molecules is generally the focus of mechanistic studies of host-guest complexes, the interaction of the host-guest complex with other species in solution remains largely unknown, although in principle accessible by diffusion studies. Several NMR techniques are available to monitor diffusion and have recently been reviewed. Pulsed gradient spin-echo (PGSE) NMR methods have attracted increasing interest, since they allow diffusion coefficients to be measured with high accuracy; they have been successfully used with observation of {sup 7}Li and {sup 31}P nuclei as well as with {sup 1}H NMR. We report here the direct measurement of diffusion coefficients to observe ion-association interactions by counter cations with a highly-charged supramolecular assembly. Raymond and coworkers have described the design and chemistry of a class of metal-ligand supramolecular assemblies over the past decade. The [Ga{sub 4}L{sub 6}]{sup 12-} (L = 1,5-bis(2,3-dihydroxybenzamido)naphthalene) (1) (Figure 1) assembly has garnered the most attention, with the exploration of the dynamics and mechanism of guest exchange as well as the ability of 1 to achieve either stoichiometric or catalytic reactions inside …

H Canyon is considering a flowsheet change for Plutonium (Pu) Contaminated Scrap (PuCS) material. The proposed change is to route dissolved PuCS material directly to a uranium (U) storage tank. As a result, the PuCS solution will bypass Head End and First U Cycle, and will be purified by solvent extraction in Second U Cycle. The PuCS solution contains appreciable amounts of boron (B) and fluoride (F{sup -}), which are currently at trace levels in the U storage tank. Though unlikely, if the B concentration in the U storage tank were to reach 1.8 g B/g U, the entire contents of the U storage tank would likely require a second pass through Second U Cycle to provide sufficient decontamination to meet the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Blend Grade Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) specification for B, which is 30 {micro}g/g U. In addition, Second U Cycle is expected to provide sufficient decontamination of F{sup -} and Pu regardless of the amount of PuCS solution sent to the storage tank. Though aluminum (Al) is not present in the PuCS solution, B can be credited as a complexant of F{sup -}. Both stability constants from the literature and Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) …

The Anti-Coincidence Detector (ACD), the outermost detector layer in the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) Large Area Telescope (LAT), is designed to detect and veto incident cosmic ray charged particles, which outnumber cosmic gamma rays by 3-4 orders of magnitude. The challenge in ACD design is that it must have high (0.9997) detection efficiency for singly-charged relativistic particles, but must also have a low probability for self-veto of high-energy gammas by backsplash radiation from interactions in the LAT calorimeter. Simulations and tests demonstrate that the ACD meets its design requirements. The performance of the ACD has remained stable through stand-alone environmental testing, shipment across the U.S., installation onto the LAT, shipment back across the U.S., LAT environmental testing, and shipment to Arizona. As part of the fully-assembled GLAST observatory, the ACD is being readied for final testing before launch.

The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), scheduled to be launched in fall of 2007, is the next generation satellite for high-energy gamma-ray astronomy. The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is a pair conversion telescope built with a high precision silicon tracker, a segmented CsI electromagnetic calorimeter and a plastic anticoincidence shield. The LAT will survey the sky in the energy range between 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV, shedding light on many issues left open by its highly successful predecessor EGRET. LAT will observe Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB) in an energy range never explored before; to tie these frontier observations to the better-known properties at lower energies, a second instrument, the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM) will provide important spectra and timing in the 10 keV to 30 MeV range. We briefly present the instruments onboard the GLAST satellite, their synergy in the GRB observations and the work done so far by the collaboration in simulation, analysis, and GRB sensitivity estimation.

We give an overview of the current status of investigations of the polarization of gluons in the nucleon. We describe some of the physics of the spin-dependent gluon parton distribution and its phenomenology in high-energy polarized hadronic scattering. We also review the recent experimental results.

The GLAST Large Area Telescope (LAT) is the next generation satellite experiment for high-energy gamma-ray astronomy. It employs a pair conversion technique to record photons in the energy range from 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV. The LAT will follow the steps from its predecessor EGRET (1991-2000), and will explore the high-energy gamma-ray sky with unprecedented capabilities. The observation of Gamma-Ray Bursts is one of the main science goal of the LAT: in this contribution we compute an estimation of the LAT sensitivity to GRB, adopting a phenomenological description of GRBs, where the high-energy emission in GRB is obtained extrapolating the observed BATSE spectrum up to LAT energies. The effect of the cosmological attenuation is included. We use the BATSE current catalog to build up our statistics.

We adapt the "reverse taper" scheme presented by Saldin etal. (Phys. Rev. ST Accel. Beams, 9, 050702 [2006]) for attosecond pulseproduction to the XUV/soft-xray regime. We find that that GW-level pulsesof a few femtosecond duration or shorter can be produced using electronbeams of quite moderate parameters and undulators of 20-m length orshorter. The output pulse is significantly shifted in wavelength relativeto the main background which permits a further increase in contrast ratiovia simple monochromatization. Moreover, the output pulse has a naturalwavelength chirp that allows further temporal compression, if wanted.Both positive and negative chirps can be produced depending uponthe signof the undulator taper.

The first International GLAST Symposium was held at Stanford, with less than a year to launch. Recent advances in the TeV and MeV ranges augur well for GLAST making major discoveries in GeV astronomy. Expectations for observations of several source types and backgrounds are summarized, along with some remaining organizational challenges.

We give an overview of the status of string cosmology. We explain the motivation for the subject, outline the main problems, and assess some of the proposed solutions. Our focus is on those aspects of cosmology that benefit from the structure of an ultraviolet-complete theory.

I present an overview of the measurement of the proton form factors in the time-like region. BABAR has recently measured with great accuracy the e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} p{bar p} reaction from production threshold up to an energy of {approx} 4.5 GeV, finding evidence for a ratio of the electric to magnetic form factor greater than unity, contrary to expectation. In agreement with previous measurements, BABAR confirmed the steep rise of the magnetic form factor close to the p{bar p} mass threshold, suggesting the possible presence of an under-threshold N{bar N} vector state. These and other open questions related to the nucleon form factors both in the time-like and space-like region, wait for more data with different experimental techniques to be possibly solved.

Relativistic jets may be confined by large-scale, anisotropic electromagnetic stresses that balance isotropic particle pressure and disordered magnetic field. A class of axisymmetric equilibrium jet models will be described and their radiative properties outlined under simple assumptions. The partition of the jet power between electromagnetic and mechanical forms and the comoving energy density between particles and magnetic field will be discussed. Current carrying jets may be recognized by their polarization patterns. Progress and prospects for measuring this using VLBI and GLAST observations will be summarized.

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