We introduce a simple polar fluid model for the thermodynamics of dense supercritical water based on a Buckingham (exp-6) core and point dipole representation of the water molecule. The proposed exp6-polar thermodynamics, based on ideas originally applied to dipolar hard spheres, performs very well when tested against molecular dynamics simulations. Comparisons of the model predictions with experimental data available for supercritical water yield excellent agreement for the shock Hugoniot, isotherms and sound speeds, and are also quite good for the self-diffusion constant and relative dielectric constant. We expect the present approach to be also useful for other small polar molecules and their mixtures.

LLNL proposes to obtain soil samples from the following areas: (1) Four areas downwind of the Explosives Waste Treatment Facility (EWTF) Burn Units (i.e., Thermal Treatment Unit and Burn Pan); (2) One area upwind of the Burn Units and Detonation Pad; (3) Two areas downwind of the EWTF Detonation Pad; and (4) Three areas unaffected (representing ambient conditions) by EWTF operations approximately 7000-8000 feet upwind of the facility. The purpose of the sampling in areas 1, 2, and 3 is to detect if operations cause increases in concentrations of materials downwind of the Burn Units or downwind of the Detonation Pad. The purpose of the sampling in area 4 is to determine if previously developed background screening levels can be applied to EWTF operations. A 20 foot diameter circle will define each sample area. Soil samples will be obtained from four random locations inside each 20 foot circle. The samples will be obtained immediately below the surface, free of any organic matter (e.g., roots) and other surface and subsurface material (e.g., rocks) that is not conducive to analysis. The random identification of four discrete sample locations in each circle will allow the variability between sample locations and areas, if present, …

Ion-optics calculations were performed for a new ion source and injection beam line. This source, which can accept both solid and gaseous targets, will be installed onto the 1-MV BioAMS spectrometer at the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and will augment the current LLNL cesium-sputter solid sample ion source. The ion source and its associated injection beam line were designed to allow direct quantification of {sup 14}C/{sup 12}C and {sup 3}H/{sup 1}H isotope ratios from both solid and gaseous targets without the need for isotope switching. Once installed, this source will enable the direct linking of a nanoflow LC system to the spectrometer to provide for high-throughput LC-AMS quantitation from a continuous flow. Calculations show that, for small samples, the sensitivity of the gas-accepting ion source could be precision limited but zeptomole quantitation should be feasible.

This report presents the analyses results for three samples obtained under RPP-PLAN-28509, Sampling and Analysis Plan for Building 241 702-AZ A Train. The sampling and analysis was done in response to problem evaluation request number PER-2004-6139, 702-AZ Filter Rooms Need Radiological Cleanup Efforts.

The University Research Program in Robotics (URPR) is an integrated group of universities performing fundamental research that addresses broad-based robotics and automation needs of the NNSA Directed Stockpile Work (DSW) and Campaigns. The URPR mission is to provide improved capabilities in robotics science and engineering to meet the future needs of all weapon systems and other associated NNSA/DOE activities.

The functional expansion technique (FET) was recently developed for Monte Carlo simulation. The basic idea of the FET is to expand a Monte Carlo tally in terms of a high order expansion, the coefficients of which can be estimated via the usual random walk process in a conventional Monte Carlo code. If the expansion basis is chosen carefully, the lowest order coefficient is simply the conventional histogram tally, corresponding to a flat mode. This research project studied the applicability of using the FET to estimate the fission source, from which fission sites can be sampled for the next generation. The idea is that individual fission sites contribute to expansion modes that may span the geometry being considered, possibly increasing the communication across a loosely coupled system and thereby improving convergence over the conventional fission bank approach used in most production Monte Carlo codes. The project examined a number of basis functions, including global Legendre polynomials as well as “local” piecewise polynomials such as finite element hat functions and higher order versions. The global FET showed an improvement in convergence over the conventional fission bank approach. The local FET methods showed some advantages versus global polynomials in handling geometries with discontinuous …

Weak scale supersymmetry provides elegant solutions to many of the problems of the standard model, but it also generically gives rise to excessive flavor and CP violation. We show that, if the mechanism that suppresses the Yukawa couplings also suppresses flavor changing interactions in the supersymmetry breaking parameters, essentially all the low energy flavor and CP constraints can be satisfied. The standard assumption of flavor universality in the supersymmetry breaking sector is not necessary. We study signatures of this framework at the LHC. The mass splitting among different generations of squarks and sleptons can be much larger than in conventional scenarios, and even the mass ordering can be changed. We find that there is a plausible scenario in which the next-to-lightest superparticle is a long-lived right-handed selectron or smuon which decays into the lightest superparticle, a gravitino. This leads to the spectacularsignature of monochromatic electrons or muons in a stopper detector, providing strong evidence for the framework.

This document describes the test events and numbers of samples comprising the experimental design that was developed for the contamination, decontamination, and sampling of a building at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). This study is referred to as the INL Sample Collection Operational Test. Specific objectives were developed to guide the construction of the experimental design. The main objective is to assess the relative abilities of judgmental and probabilistic sampling strategies to detect contamination in individual rooms or on a whole floor of the INL building. A second objective is to assess the use of probabilistic and Bayesian (judgmental + probabilistic) sampling strategies to make clearance statements of the form “X% confidence that at least Y% of a room (or floor of the building) is not contaminated. The experimental design described in this report includes five test events. The test events (i) vary the floor of the building on which the contaminant will be released, (ii) provide for varying or adjusting the concentration of contaminant released to obtain the ideal concentration gradient across a floor of the building, and (iii) investigate overt as well as covert release of contaminants. The ideal contaminant gradient would have high concentrations of contaminant in …

We are developing a novel code that treats induced fission by statistical (or Monte-Carlo) simulation of individual decay chains. After its initial excitation, the fissionable compound nucleus may either deexcite by evaporation or undergo binary fission into a large number of fission channels each with different energetics involving both energy dissipation and deformed scission prefragments. After separation and Coulomb acceleration, each fission fragment undergoes a succession of individual (neutron) evaporations, leading to two bound but still excited fission products (that may further decay electromagnetically and, ultimately, weakly), as well as typically several neutrons. (The inclusion of other possible ejectiles is planned.) This kind of approach makes it possible to study more detailed observables than could be addressed with previous treatments which have tended to focus on average quantities. In particular, any type of correlation observable can readily be extracted from a generated set of events. With a view towards making the code practically useful in a variety of applications, emphasis is being put on making it numerically efficient so that large event samples can be generated quickly. In its present form, the code can generate one million full events in about 12 seconds on a MacBook laptop computer. The development …

The California Water Resources Control Board, in collaboration with the US Geological Survey and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has implemented a program to assess the susceptibility of groundwater resources. Advanced techniques such as groundwater age dating using the tritium-helium method, extensive use of oxygen isotopes of the water molecule ({delta}{sup 18}O) for recharge water provenance, and analysis of common volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at ultra-low levels are applied with the goal of assessing the contamination vulnerability of deep aquifers, which are frequently used for public drinking water supply. Over 1200 public drinking water wells have been tested to date, resulting in a very large, tightly spaced collection of groundwater ages in some of the heavily exploited groundwater basins of California. Smaller scale field studies that include shallow monitoring wells are aimed at assessing the probability that nitrate will be transported to deep drinking water aquifers. When employed on a basin-scale, groundwater ages are an effective tool for identifying recharge areas, defining flowpaths, and determining the rate of transport of water and entrained contaminants. De-convolution of mixed ages, using ancillary dissolved noble gas data, gives insight into the water age distribution drawn at a well, and into the effective dilution of …

The ninth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) shock-capturing method is used to investigate the physics of reshock and mixing in two-dimensional single-mode Richtmyer-Meshkov instability to late times. The initial conditions and computational domain were adapted from the Mach 1.21 air(acetone)/SF{sub 6} shock tube experiment of Collins and Jacobs [J. Fluid Mech. 464, 113 (2002)]: the growth of the bubble and spike perturbation amplitudes from fifth- and ninth-order WENO simulations of this experiment were compared to the predictions of amplitude growth models, and were shown to be in very good agreement with the experimental data prior to reshock [Latini, Schilling and Don, Phys. Fluids (2007), in press]. In the present investigation, the density, vorticity, baroclinic vorticity production, and simulated density Schlieren fields are first presented to qualitatively describe reshock. The baroclinic circulation deposition on the interface is shown to agree with the predictions of the Samtaney and Zabusky [J. Fluid Mech. 269, 45 (1994)] model and linear instability theory. The time-evolution of the positive and negative circulation on the interface is considered before and after reshock: it is shown that the circulations are equal before, as well as after reshock, until the interaction of the reflected rarefaction with the layer leads to …

Harper-Dorn (H-D) creep is observed in metals and geological materials exposed to very low stresses at temperatures close to the melting point. It is one of several types of creep processes wherein the steady-state strain rate is proportional to the applied stress, Nabarro-Herring creep and Coble creep being two other important processes. H-D creep can be somewhat insidious because the creep rates are much larger than those expected for Nabarro-Herring or Coble creep. Since the working conditions of structural components of power plants and propulsion systems, as well as the motion of the earth’s mantle all involve very low stresses, an understanding of the factors controlling H-D creep is critical in preventing failures associated with those higher-than-expected creep rates. The purpose of this investigation was to obtain missing microstructural information on the evolution of the dislocation structures during static annealing of materials with fcc, bcc and hcp structure and use obtained results to test predictive capabilities of the dislocation network theory of H-D creep. In our view the evolutionary processes during static annealing and during Harper-Dorn creep are intimately related. The materials used in this study were fcc aluminum, hcp zinc and bcc tin. All characterizations of dislocation structures, densities …

The High Average Power Laser Program (HAPL) is a multi-institutional, coordinated effort to develop a high-energy, repetitively pulsed laser system for Inertial Fusion Energy and other DOE and DOD applications. This program is building a laser-fusion energy base to complement the laser-fusion science developed by DOE Defense programs over the past 25 years. The primary institutions responsible for overseeing and coordinating the research activities are the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and LLNL. The current LLNL proposal is a companion proposal to that submitted by NRL, for which the driver development element is focused on the krypton fluoride excimer laser option. Aside from the driver development aspect, the NRL and LLNL companion proposals pursue complementary activities with the associated rep-rated laser technologies relating to target fabrication, target injection, final optics, fusion chamber, materials and power plant economics. This report requests continued funding in FY02 to support LLNL in its program to build a 1kW, 100J, diode-pumped, crystalline laser. In addition, research in high gain laser target design, fusion chamber issues and survivability of the final optic element will be pursued. These technologies are crucial to the feasibility of inertial fusion energy power plants and also have relevance in rep-rated stewardship experiments.

We present a study, based on simulations with SERDYCA, a spatially-explicit individual-based model of rodent dynamics, on the relation between population persistence and the presence of numerous isolated disturbances in the habitat. We are specifically interested in the effect of disturbances that do not fragment the environment on population persistence. Our results suggest that the presence of disturbances in the absence of fragmentation can actually increase the average time to extinction of the modeled population. The presence of disturbances decreases population density but can increase the chance for mating in monogamous species and consequently, the ratio of juveniles in the population. It thus provides a better chance for the population to restore itself after a severe period with critically low population density. We call this the ''disturbance-forced localization effect''.

Waveguides were written in soda lime silicate glasses with a composition of xNa{sub 2}O xCaO (1-2x)SiO{sub 2}, where x = 15 and 20, using an amplified femtosecond laser. The waveguides formed around, not inside the exposed regions. This is similar to the waveguide behavior our group first observed in a phosphate glass, Schott IOG-1, and is distinctly different from fused silica in which the waveguides are inside the exposed regions. This data supports the rapid quenching theory, i.e. that the exposed regions cool rapidly, locking in a glass structure with a high fictive temperature, with the dependence of the refractive index on the glass cooling rate determining the qualitative behavior of the waveguides.

Four methods of up-scaling coupled equations at the microscale to equations valid at the mesoscale and/or macroscale for fluid-saturated and partially saturated porous media will be discussed, compared, and contrasted. The four methods are: (1) effective medium theory, (2) mixture theory, (3) two-scale and multiscale homogenization, and (4) volume averaging. All these methods have advantages for some applications and disadvantages for others. For example, effective medium theory, mixture theory, and homogenization methods can all give formulas for coefficients in the up-scaled equations, whereas volume averaging methods give the form of the up-scaled equations but generally must be supplemented with physical arguments and/or data in order to determine the coefficients. Homogenization theory requires a great deal of mathematical insight from the user in order to choose appropriate scalings for use in the resulting power-law expansions, while volume averaging requires more physical insight to motivate the steps needed to find coefficients. Homogenization often is performed on periodic models, while volume averaging does not require any assumption of periodicity and can therefore be related very directly to laboratory and/or field measurements. Validity of the homogenization process is often limited to specific ranges of frequency - in order to justify the scaling hypotheses that …

At present the ETA beam energy as measured by the ETA energy analyzer and the DARHT spectrometer differ by {approx}12%. This discrepancy is due to two sources, an overestimate of the effective length of the ETA energy analyzer bending-field, and data reduction methods that are not valid. The discrepancy can be eliminated if we return to the original process of measuring the angular deflection of the beam and use a value of 43.2cm for the effective length of the axial field profile.

The increasing rate of growth in size of currently available datasets is a well known issue. The possibility of developing fast and easy to implement frameworks able to visualize at least part of a tera-sized volume is a challenging task. Subdivision methods in recent years have been one of the most successful techniques applied to the multiresolution representation and visualization of surface meshes. Extensions of these techniques to the volumetric case presents positive effects and major challenges mainly concerning the generalization of the combinatorial structure of the refinement procedure and the analysis of the smoothness of the limit mesh. In this paper we address mainly the first part of the problem, presenting a framework that exploits a subdivision scheme suitable for extension to 3D and higher dimensional meshes.

The Computational Physics Group of the Earth Sciences Division focuses much of its effort on improving current understanding of the response of geologic media to strong shock waves, and on the interaction of those waves with underground structures. Two codes have been developed and used to achieve these objectives: LDEC and GEODYN. Both codes are three-dimensional and massively parallel, and they have both been used on LLNLs high performance computing platforms to advance the state of the art in computational geophysics.

Bursts of ~60 kHz activity on Mirnov coils occur frequently in NSTX plasmas and these are accompanied by bursts of neutral beam ion loss over a range in pitch angles. These losses have been measured with a scintillator type loss probe imaged with a high speed (>10,000 frames/s) video camera, giving the evolution of the energy and pitch angle distributions of the lost neutral beam ions over the course of the events. The instability occurs below the TAE frequency in NSTX (~100 kHz) in high beta plasmas and may be a beta driven Alfvén acoustic (BAAE) mode.

First, we review a result in our previous paper, of how a ten-dimensional superparticle, taken off-shell, has a hidden eleven-dimensional superPoincare symmetry. Then, we show that the physical sector is defined by three first-class constraints which preserve the full eleven-dimensional symmetry. Applying the same concepts to the eleven dimensional superparticle, taken off-shell, we discover a hidden twelve dimensional superPoincare symmetry that governs the theory.

A hot, T{sub e} {approx} 2- to 3-keV surface plasma was observed in the interaction of a 0.7-ps petawatt laser beam with solid copper-foil targets at intensities >10{sup 20} W/cm{sup 2}. Copper K-shell spectra were measured in the range of 8 to 9 keV using a single-photon-counting x-ray CCD camera. In addition to K{sub {alpha}} and K{sub {beta}} inner-shell lines, the emission contained the Cu He{sub {alpha}} and Ly{sub {alpha}} lines, allowing the temperature to be inferred. These lines have not been observed previously with ultrafast laser pulses. For intensities less than 3 x 10{sup 18} W/cm{sup 2}, only the K{sub {alpha}} and K{sub {beta}} inner-shell emissions are detected. Measurements of the absolute K{sub {alpha}} yield as a function of the laser intensity are in agreement with a model that includes refluxing and confinement of the suprathermal electrons in the target volume.

Gold is a highly valuable metal that can concentrate in iron-rich exogenetic horizons such as laterites. An improved knowledge of the retention mechanisms of gold onto highly reactive soil components such as iron oxyhydroxides is therefore needed to better understand and predict the geochemical behavior of this element. In this study, we use EXAFS information and titration experiments to provide a realistic thermochemical description of the sorption of trivalent gold onto iron oxy-hydroxides. Analysis of Au L{sub III}-edge XAFS spectra shows that aqueous Au(III) adsorbs from chloride solutions onto goethite surfaces as inner-sphere square-planar complexes (Au(III)(OH,Cl){sub 4}), with dominantly OH ligands at pH > 6 and mixed OH/Cl ligands at lower pH values. In combination with these spectroscopic results, Reverse Monte Carlo simulations were used to constraint the possible sorption sites on the surface of goethite. Based on this structural information, we calculated sorption isotherms of Au(III) on Fe oxy-hydroxides surfaces, using the CD-MUSIC (Charge Distribution--Multi Site Complexation) model. The various Au(III)-sorbed species were identified as a function of pH, and the results of these EXAFS+CD-MUSIC models are compared with titration experiments. The overall good agreement between the predicted and measured structural models shows the potential of this combined approach …

The local structure around Th, U, Ce and Nd in leached silicate glasses was examined using XAFS spectroscopy at their L3 edges and also at the K edge of Fe, Co, Ni, Zr and Mo. Pellets of inactive borosilicate glasses with a simplified or a complex composition were leached statically at 90 C, at pH buffered to 0 or 6 for 28 days (surface/volume, S/V, ratios of 0.1 cm{sup -1}). These glasses are compared to another SON68 sample (denoted ''SP1'' in this paper) that was statically leached for 12 years under similar conditions, except for a higher S/V of 12 cm{sup -1} and a higher unconstrained pH of 9.6. The speciation of Fe, Co, Ni, Zr and Mo in the simple and the complex unleached are similar. In the statically leached glasses, the speciation of these transition metals is mostly identical to in the unleached glasses, except in the gels formed at the surface of the glasses leached at low pH, where large speciation differences are observed. Surface precipitates, especially for Fe (as ferrihydrite), Mo (possibly sidwillite) and Th (as ThO{sub 2}) were detected. Finally, the drying of the gels considerably affects the metal speciation by enhancing metal polymerization.