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This abstract presents current collaborative work on the development of a stage system for accurate nanometer level positioning for scanning specimens spanning an area of 50 mm x 50 mm. The completed system employs a coarse/fine approach which comprises a short-range, six degree-of-freedom fine-motion platform (5 microns 200 micro-radians) carried by a long-range, two-axis X-Y coarse positioning system. Relative motion of the stage to a fixed metrology frame will be measured using a heterodyne laser in an eight-pass interferometer configuration. The final stage system will be housed in a vacuum environment and operated in a temperature-controlled laboratory. Results from a simple single coarse/fine axis system will be the design basis for the final multi-axis system. It is expected that initial stage performance evaluation will be presented at the conference.

In this paper we extend the difference formulation for radiation transport to the case of a single atomic line. We examine the accuracy, performance and stability of the difference formulation within the framework of the Symbolic Implicit Monte Carlo method. The difference formulation, introduced for thermal radiation by some of the authors, has the unique property that the transport equation is written in terms that become small for thick systems. We find that the difference formulation has a significant advantage over the standard formulation for a thick system. The correct treatment of the line profile, however, requires that the difference formulation in the core of the line be mixed with the standard formulation in the wings, and this may limit the advantage of the method. We bypass this problem by using the gray approximation. We develop three Monte Carlo solution methods based on different degrees of implicitness for the treatment of the source terms, and we find only conditional stability unless the source terms are treated fully implicitly.

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The transport of chemicals or heat in fractured reservoirs is strongly affected by the fracture-matrix interfacial area. In a vapor-dominated geothermal reservoir, this area can be estimated by inert gas tracer tests, where gas diffusion between the fracture and matrix causes the tracer breakthrough curve (BTC) to have a long tail determined by the interfacial area. For water-saturated conditions, recent studies suggest that sorbing solute tracers can also generate strong tails in BTCs that may allow a determination of the fracture-matrix interfacial area. To theoretically explore such a useful phenomenon, this paper develops an analytical solution for BTCs in slug-tracer tests in a water-saturated fractured reservoir. The solution shows that increased sorption should have the same effect on BTCs as an increase of the diffusion coefficient. The solution is useful for understanding transport mechanisms, verifying numerical codes, and for identifying appropriate chemicals as tracers for the characterization of fractured reservoirs.