A technique has been developed for measuring the properties of discharge-based plasma channels by monitoring the centroid location of a laser beam exiting the channel as a function of input alignment offset between the laser and the channel. The centroid position of low-intensity (<10{sup 14}Wcm{sup -2}) laser pulses focused at the input of a hydrogen-filled capillary discharge waveguide was scanned and the exit positions recorded to determine the channel shape and depth with an accuracy of a few %. In addition, accurate alignment of the laser beam through the plasma channel can be provided by minimizing laser centroid motion at the channel exit as the channel depth is scanned either by scanning the plasma density or the discharge timing. The improvement in alignment accuracy provided by this technique will be crucial for minimizing electron beam pointing errors in laser plasma accelerators.

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Energy saving has become a crucial concern in datacenters as several reports predict that the anticipated energy costs over a three year period will exceed hardware acquisition. In particular, saving energy for storage is of major importance as storage devices (and cooling them off) may contribute over 25 percent of the total energy consumed in a datacenter. Recent work introduced the concept of energy proportionality and argued that it is a more relevant metric than just energy saving as it takes into account the tradeoff between energy consumption and performance. In this paper, we present a novel approach, called FREP (Fractional Replication for Energy Proportionality), for energy management in large datacenters. FREP includes areplication strategy and basic functions to enable flexible energy management. Specifically, our method provides performance guarantees by adaptively controlling the power states of a group of disks based on observed and predicted workloads. Our experiments, using a set of real and synthetic traces, show that FREP dramatically reduces energy requirements with a minimal response time penalty.

The paper presents an overview of the authors contribution to the BANC-I Workshop on the flow past tandem cylinders (Category 2). It includes an outline of the simulation approaches, numerics, and grid used, the major results of the simulations, their comparison with available experimental data, and some preliminary conclusions. The effect of varying the spanwise period in the simulations is strong for some quantities, and not others.

Presentation highlighting practical considerations for photovoltaic technologies and strategies for future reductions in cost and increases in efficiency.

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Semi-insulating (Cd,Mn)Te crystals offer a material that may compete well with the commonly used (Cd,Zn)Te crystals for manufacturing large-area X- and gamma-ray detectors. The Bridgman growth method yields good quality, high-resistivity (10{sup 9} - 10{sup 10} {Omega} {center_dot} cm) crystals of (Cd,Mn)Te:V. Doping the as-grown crystals with the compensating agent vanadium ({approx} 10{sup 16} cm{sup -3}) ensures their high resistivity; thereafter, annealing them in cadmium vapors reduces the number of cadmium vacancies. Applying the crystals as detectors necessitates having satisfactory electrical contacts. Accordingly, we explored various techniques of ensuring good electrical contacts to these semi-insulating (Cd,Mn)Te crystals, assessing metallic layers, monocrystalline semiconductor layers, and amorphous (or nanocrystalline) semiconductor layers. We found that ZnTe heavily doped ({approx} 10{sup 18} cm{sup -3}) with Sb, and CdTe heavily doped ({approx} 10{sup 17} cm{sup -3}) with In, proved satisfactory semiconductor contact layers. They subsequently enabled us to establish good contacts (with only narrow tunneling barriers) to the Au layer that usually constitutes the most external contact layer. We outline our technology of applying electrical contacts to semi-insulating (Cd,Mn)Te, and describe some important properties.