Article on N-acylethanolamine signaling in tobacco and how it is mediated by a membrane-associated, high-affinity binding protein.

Article on N-acylethanolamine signaling in tobacco is mediated by a membrane-associated, high-affinity binding protein.

We report on the recent use of cathodoluminescence (CL) to probe the depth-dependent changes in radiative recombination that occur in CdTe devices during ZnTe:Cu contacting procedures. These types of CL measurements may be useful to assist in linking impurity diffusion (e.g., Cu) from the contact with depth-dependent variation in electrical activation within the CdTe layer. Variable-energy CL suggests that diffusion from the ZnTe:Cu contact interface may assist in reducing donors levels in the CdTe bulk, and thereby yield p-type material in the region near the contact. CL analysis near abrupt metal discontinuities provides estimates of diffusion lengths for carriers associated with both excitonic and donor-to-acceptor pair recombination. Finally, CL measurements at increasing excitation levels (i.e., increasing electron-beam current) provides estimates of the defect state density, as well as providing evidence that discrete multiple defect bands may exist in CdTe prior to contacting.

Voltage pulses of variable length were applied to CuIn1-xGaxSe2/CdS (0< x< 1) junction solar cells. The resulting transient capacitance emission signal was recorded for several minutes. The amplitude of the capacitance emission signal increased linearly with the log of pulse time. These data do not follow the standard model for trap capture and emission of carriers. Instead they follow a simple electrostatic model based on electrostatic charging of traps.

Topics discussed at the conference included Approaches to Overcome Bioavailability Limitations in Bioremediation; New Discoveries in Microbial Degradation of Persistent Environmental Contaminants; Biological Activity and Potential Toxicity of the Products of Biodegradation; New Methods to Monitor and Assess the Effectiveness of Remediation Processes; and Strategies for Remediation of Mixed Contaminants. The United States has thousands of hazardous waste sites, most of which are a legacy of many decades of industrial development, mining, manufacturing and military activities. There is considerable uncertainty about the health risks of these sites, such as a lack of understanding about the spectrum of health effects that could result from exposure to hazardous substances and the unique toxicity of these substances to children or the developing fetus. In addition to these kinds of knowledge gaps, the fate and transport of hazardous wastes in soil, surface water and ground water are poorly understood, making it difficult to predict exposures. Moreover, cleaning up hazardous wastes has proven costly and difficult; thus, there is a need for advanced technologies to decrease or eliminate contamination from soil, surface water, and ground water. Since biodegradative processes and bioremediation solutions form a large part of the current science and technology directed at treatment …

Ensuring reliability has and will continue to be a priority for electricity industry restructuring. Assessing the balance between public and private actions to ensure reliability should be guided in part by an understanding of the value of reliability to the nations' residential, commercial and industrial customers. Yet, there is no comprehensive body of information on this topic. This paper begins to address this information gap by analyzing studies conducted by electric utilities over the past 15 years to assess the value of electric service to their customers. Outage cost measurements prepared by 7 electric utilities through 20 studies are assembled and standardized into a national database of customer interruption costs. The database is used to describe trends in interruption costs, and regional (geographic) differences, differences in interruption costs by customer type. It can also be used to estimate customer damage functions. Results from the study are intended to contribute to an improved understanding of the importance of electricity reliability to the nation.

We apply combinatorial approaches to thin-film Si materials and device research. Our hot-wire chemical vapor deposition chamber is fitted with substrate xyz translation, a motorized shutter, and interchangable shadow masks to implement various combinatorial methods. For example, we have explored, in detail, the transition region through which thin Si changes from amorphous to microcrystalline silicon. This transition is very sensitive to deposition parameters such as hydrogen-to-silane dilution of the source gas, chamber pressure, and substrate temperature. A material library, on just a few substrates, led to a three-dimensional map of the transition as it occurs in our deposition system. This map guides our scientific studies and enables us to use several distinct transition materials in our solar-cell optimization research. We also grew thickness-graded wedge samples spanning the amorphous-to-microcrystalline Si transition. These single stripes map the temporal change of the thin silicon phase onto a single spatial dimension. Therefore, the structural, optical, and electrical properties can easily be studied through the phase transition. We have examined the nature of the phase change on the wedges with Raman spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), x-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES), ultraviolet reflectivity, and other techniques. Combinatorial techniques also accelerate …

OAK-B135 The gyrokinetic equations predict that various drift type waves or modes can be unstable in a tokamak. For some of these modes, such as the ion temperature gradient (ITG) mode and the electron temperature gradient mode, there exists a critical gradient, above which the mode is unstable. Since the existence of unstable modes can cause increased transport, plasmas which are centrally heated tend to increase in temperature gradient until the modes become unstable. Under some conditions the increased transport can fix the gradient at the critical value. here they present a comparison between the measured ion temperature gradients and the critical gradient as calculated by a gyrokinetic linear stability (GKS) code. They also present the maximum linear growth rate as calculated by this code for comparison to experimentally derived transport coefficients. The results show that for low confinement mode (L-mode) discharges, the measured ion temperature gradient is significantly greater than the GKS calculated critical gradient over a large region of the plasma. This is the same region of the plasma where the ion thermal diffusivity is large. For high confinement mode (H-mode) discharges the ion temperature gradient is closer to the critical gradient, but often still greater than the …

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The well-known spatial variation of packing fraction near the outer boundary of a pebble-bed reactor core is cited. The ramifications of this variation are explored with the MCNP computer code. It is found that the variation has negligible effects on the global reactor physics parameters extracted from the MCNP calculations for use in analysis by diffusion-theory codes, but for local reaction rates the effects of the variation are naturally important. Included is some preliminary work in using first-order perturbation theory for estimating the effect of the spatial variation of packing fraction on the core eigenvalue and the fision density distribution.

A271 ELM PARTICLE AND ENERGY TRANSPORT IN THE SOL AND DIVERTOR OF DIII-D. Results from a series of dedicated experiments measuring the effect of particle and energy pulses from Type-I Edge Localized Modes (ELMs) in the DIII-D scrape-off layer (SOL) and divertor are compared with a simple model of ELM propagation in the boundary plasma. The simple model asserts that the propagation of ELM particle and energy perturbations is dominated by ion parallel convection along SOL fields lines and the recovery from the ELM perturbation is determined by recycling physics. Time scales associated with the initial changes of boundary plasma parameters are expected to be on the order of the ion transit time from the outer midplane, where the ELM instability is initiated, to the divertor targets. To test the model, the ion convection velocity is changed in the experiment by varying the plasma density. At moderate to high density, n{sub e}/n{sub Gr} = 0.5-0.8, the delays in the response of the boundary plasma to the midplane ELM pulses, the density dependence of those delays and other observations are consistent with the model. However, at the lowest densities, n{sub e}/n{sub Gr} {approx} 0.35, small delays between the response sin the …

We present data showing the potential adverse effects on photovoltaic device performance of all traps in InGaAsN. Deep-level transient spectroscopy measurements were performed on InGaAsN samples grown by both metal-organic chemical vapor deposition and RF plasma-assisted molecular-beam epitaxy. For each growth technique, we studied samples with varying nitrogen composition ranging from 0% to 2.2%. A deep hole trap with activation energy ranging between 0.5 and 0.8 eV is observed in all samples. These data clearly obey the Meyer-Neldel rule, which states that all traps have the same emission rate at the isokinetic temperature. A fit of our trap data gives an isokinetic temperature of 350 K, which means that both deep and shallow traps emit slowly at the operating temperature of solar cells-thus, the traps can be recombination centers.

We investigated the electronic properties of ZnO/CdS/CIGS /Mo/SLG polycrystalline thin-film solar cells with compositions ranging from Cu-rich to In(Ga)-rich by deep-level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) and capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurements. This compositional change represents the evolution of the film during growth by the 3-stage process. Two sets (four samples each) of CIGS thin films were prepared with Ga/(In+Ga) ratios of~0.3 (low Ga) and~0.6 (high Ga). The Cu/(In+Ga) ratio ranges from 1.24 (Cu-rich) to 0.88 (In(Ga)-rich). The films were treated with NaCN to remove the Cu2-xSe phase where needed. Key results include: (1) For low-Ga devices, DLTS data show that acceptor-like traps dominate in samples where CIGS grains do not go through the Cu-rich to In(Ga)-rich transition, whereas donor-like traps dominate in In(Ga)-rich samples. Therefore, we see a clear transformation of defects from acceptor-like to donor-like traps. The activation energies of these traps range from 0.12 to 0.63 eV. We also observed that NaCN treatment eliminates a deep minority trap in the In(Ga)-rich devices, (2) For high-Ga devices, only majority-carrier traps were detected. These traps again range from shallow to deep, (3) The carrier concentration around the junction and the density of traps decrease as the CIGS becomes more In(Ga)-rich.

The SCDAP/RELAP5-3D code was extended to enable the code to perform transient analyses of advanced LWRs (Light Water Reactors) and HTGRs (High Temperature Gas Reactors). The extensions for LWRs included: (1) representation of micro-heterogeneous fuel varying in composition in the radial and axial directions, (2) modeling of two-dimensional radial/axial heat conduction for more accurate calculation of fuel and cladding temperatures during the reflood period of a large break loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA), (3) modeling of fuel-cladding interface pressure and fuel-cladding gap conductance, (4) representation of radial power profiles varying in a discontinuous manner in the axial direction, and (5) addition of material properties for fuel composed of mixtures of ThO2-UO2 and ThO2-PuO2. The extensions for HTGR analyses included: (1) modeling of the transient two-dimensional temperature behavior of graphite moderated reactor cores (pebble bed and block-type), reactor vessel, and reactor containment, (2) modeling of flow losses and convective heat transfer in pebble bed reactor cores, (3) modeling of oxidation of graphite components in reactor cores due to the ingress of air and/or water, and (4) modeling of the affect of oxidation on the composition of gases in the reactor system. The applications of the extended code to LWR analyses showed that advanced …

The Federal Radiological Monitoring and Assessment Center (FRMAC) is authorized by the Federal Radiological Emergency Response Plan to coordinate all off-site radiological response assistance to state and local government s, in the event of a major radiological emergency in the United States. The FRMAC is established by the U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration, to coordinate all Federal assets involved in conducting a comprehensive program of radiological environmental monitoring, sampling, radioanalysis, quality assurance, and dose assessment. During an emergency response, the initial analytical data is provided by portable field instrumentation. As incident responders scale up their response based on the seriousness of the incident, local analytical assets and mobile laboratories add additional capability and capacity. During the intermediate phase of the response, data quality objectives and measurement quality objectives are more rigorous. These higher objectives will require the use of larger laboratories, with greater capacity and enhanced capabilities. These labs may be geographically distant from the incident, which will increase sample management challenges. This paper addresses emergency radioanalytical capability and capacity and its utilization during FRMAC operations.

Beginning in the 1980s a primary focus of human reliability analysis was estimation of human error probabilities. However, detailed qualitative modeling with comprehensive representation of contextual variables often was lacking. This was likely due to the lack of comprehensive error and performance shaping factor taxonomies, and the limited data available on observed error rates and their relationship to specific contextual variables. In the mid 90s Boeing, America West Airlines, NASA Ames Research Center and INEEL partnered in a NASA sponsored Advanced Concepts grant to: assess the state of the art in human error analysis, identify future needs for human error analysis, and develop an approach addressing these needs. Identified needs included the need for a method to identify and prioritize task and contextual characteristics affecting human reliability. Other needs identified included developing comprehensive taxonomies to support detailed qualitative modeling and to structure meaningful data collection efforts across domains. A result was the development of the FRamework Assessing Notorious Contributing Influences for Error (FRANCIE) with a taxonomy for airline maintenance tasks. The assignment of performance shaping factors to generic errors by experts proved to be valuable to qualitative modeling. Performance shaping factors and error types from such detailed approaches can be …

A generic procedure for Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) normalization for airborne multispectral images has been developed and implemented as an add-on module of ENVI at the U.S. Department of Energy's Remote Sensing Laboratory. The main advantage of this procedure is that it does not require multiple image acquisitions over the same area for establishing empirical BRDF functions.

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A review of both the data base and current model predictions for the observables of the deuteron photodisintegration reaction, {gamma}d {yields} p{sub n} is presented. Recent cross section and polarization measurements at Jefferson Lab are shown and discussed. A few conclusions are attempted.

We have found that narrow-bandgap--1.25< Tauc Gap< 1.50 eV--amorphous silicon germanium (a-SiGe:H) alloys grown by hot-wire chemical vapor deposition (CVD) can be improved by lowering both substrate and filament temperatures. We systematically studied films deposited using a one-tungsten filament, decreasing filament temperature (Tf) from our standard temperature of 2150ý down to 1750ýC, and fixing all other deposition parameters. By decreasing Tf at the fixed substrate temperature (Ts) of 180ýC, the Ge-H bonding increases, whereas the Si-H2 bonding is eliminated. Films with higher Ge-H bonding and less Si-H2 have improved photoconductivity. For the series of films deposited using the same germane gas fraction at 35%, the energy where the optical absorption is 1x104 (E04) drops from 1.54 to 1.41 eV with decreasing Tf. This is mainly due to the combination of an increasing Ge solid fraction (x) in the film, and an improved homogeneity and compactness due to significant reduction of microvoids, which was confirmed by small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). We also studied a series of films grown by decreasing the Ts from our previous standard temperature of 350ýC down to 125ýC, fixing all other deposition parameters including Tf at 1800ýC. By decreasing Ts, both the total hydrogen content and the …

We have studied the influence of substrate temperature and hydrogen dilution ratio on the properties of silicon thin films deposited on single-crystal silicon and glass substrates. We varied the initial substrate temperature from 200 to 400C and the dilution ratio from 10 to 100. We also studied the effectiveness of the use of a seed layer to increase the crystallinity of the films. The films were analyzed by atomic force microscopy, X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, and transmission and scanning electron microscopy. We found that as the dilution ratio is increased, the films go from amorphous, to a mixture of amorphous and crystalline, to nanocrystalline. The effect of substrate temperature is to increase the amount of crystallinity in the film for a given dilution ratio. We found that the use of a seed layer has limited effects and is important only for low values of dilution ratio and substrate temperature, when the films have large amounts of the amorphous phase.

Modeling of two-junction tandem devices shows that for optimal device performance, the bandgap of the top cell should be around 1.6-1.8 eV. CdZnTe alloys can be tailored to yield bandgaps in the desired range. In this study, we considered were used to fabricate these films, using close-spaced sublimation (CSS) and radio-frequency sputtering (RFS) techniques. In the first approach, we used mixed powders of CdTe and ZnTe as the source for film deposition by CSS. Even for the ZnTe/CdTe (95:5 ratio) source material, the deposited films were entirely CdTe due to higher vapor pressure of CdTe. In the second approach, we used pre-alloyed CdZnTe powders (CERAC, Inc.) as the source. Due to the lower sticking coefficient of Zn, even for the source composition of 75% Zn, these films contained very low quantities of Zn (~5%). We tried unsuccessfully to increase the Zn content in the films by confining Zn vapor by enclosing the region between the source and substrate, reducing the substrate temperature to 400C, and adjusting the source/substance distance. Finally, we used thin-film couples consisting of 300-nm-thick CdTe deposited by CSS and 300-nm-thick ZnTe deposited by RFS; the samples were then heat-treated in cadmium chloride vapor. Compositional analysis of the …

The ratio of the proton's elastic electromagnetic form factors G{sub E{sub p}}/G{sub M{sub p}} was obtained by measuring P{sub t} and P{sub {ell}}, the transverse and longitudinal recoil proton polarization, respectively. For the elastic reaction {rvec e}p {yields} e{rvec p}, G{sub E{sub p}}/G{sub M{sub p}} is proportional to P{sub t}/P{sub {ell}}. The simultaneous measurement of P{sub t} and P{sub {ell}} in a polarimeter reduces systematic uncertainties. The results for the ratio G{sub E{sub p}}/G{sub M{sub p}} measured in Hall A so far show a systematic decrease with increasing Q{sup 2}, indicating for the first time a definite difference in the distribution of charge and magnetization in the proton. Together these experiments cover the Q{sub 2}- range of 0.5 to 5.6 GeV{sup 2}. A new experiment is currently being prepared, to extend the Q{sup 2}-range to 9 GeV{sup 2} in Hall C.

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