We have successfully demonstrated spectrally-resolved x-ray scattering in a variety of dense plasmas as a powerful new technique for providing microscopic dense plasma parameters unattainable by other means. The results have also been used to distinguish between ionization balance models. This has led to 10 published or to be published papers, 8 invited talks and significant interest from both internal and external experimental plasma physicists and the international statistical plasma physics theory community.

We present results from 14 nights of observations of Titan in 1996-1998 using near-infrared (centered at 2.1 microns) speckle imaging at the 10-meter W.M. Keck Telescope. The observations have a spatial resolution of 0.06 arcseconds. We detect bright clouds on three days in October 1998, with a brightness about 0.5% of the brightness of Titan. Using a 16-stream radiative transfer model (DISORT) to model the central equatorial longitude of each image, we construct a suite of surface albedo models parameterized by the optical depth of Titan's hydrocarbon haze layer. From this we conclude that Titan's equatorial surface albedo has plausible values in the range of 0-0.20. Titan's minimum haze optical depth cannot be constrained from this modeling, but an upper limit of 0.3 at this wavelength range is found. More accurate determination of Titan's surface albedo and haze optical depth, especially at higher latitudes, will require a model that fully considers the 3-dimensional nature of Titan's atmosphere.

We report on the subject of temperature and/or pressure induced solid-solid phase transitions of energetic molecular crystals. Over the last three years we have applied experimental techniques that when used simultaneously provide insight into some of the complexities that govern reaction rate processes. After more than 55 years of study a global kinetics model describing the P-T phase space transition kinetics of such materials as HMX (octahydro-1,3,5,7-tetranitro-1,3,5,7-tetrazocine) is not only missing, but from a formal perspective is perhaps as many years away from completion. The essence of this report describes what material parameters affect first-order reaction rates of the CHNO moiety of molecular crystals and introduces the application of new experimental tools thus permitting quantifiable studies of important rate limiting mechanisms.

The purpose of this project is to develop a greater understanding of the kinetics involved during a liquid-solid phase transition occurring at high pressure and temperature. Kinetic limitations are known to play a large role in the dynamics of solidification at low temperatures, determining, e.g., whether a material crystallizes upon freezing or becomes an amorphous solid. The role of kinetics is not at all understood in transitions at high temperature when extreme pressures are involved. In order to investigate time scales during a dynamic compression experiment we needed to create an ability to alter the length of time spent by the sample in the transition region. Traditionally, the extreme high-pressure phase diagram is studied through a few static and dynamic techniques: static compression involving diamond anvil cells (DAC) [1], shock compression [2, 3], and quasi-isentropic compression [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Static DAC experiments explore equilibrium material properties along an isotherm or an isobar [1]. Dynamic material properties can be explored with shock compression [2, 3], probing single states on the Hugoniot, or with quasi-isentropic compression [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. In the case of shocks, pressures variation typically occurs on a sub-nanosecond time scale or …

FEMIS v1.5.3 SR1 includes updates to Section 2.0, FEMIS UNIX Installation, for the FEMIS Installation Guide.

The United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology Program (US-VISIT) will deploy biometric and other systems to identify and track foreign nationals entering and exiting the U.S. Evaluation of the large number of possible policy options and technical configurations for implementation of US-VISIT requires validated system analyses with appropriate tools that can address the requirements of this new program and its processes. Early identification of performance issues and capability gaps will prove critical to the success of the program.

Two reference artifacts will be fabricated for this study. One of the artifacts will have a cylindrical geometry and will contain features similar to those on an SNRT target. The second artifact will have a spherical geometry and will contain features similar to those on a Double Shell target. The artifacts were designed for manufacturability and to provide a range of features that can be measured using NDE methods. The cylindrical reference artifact is illustrated in Figure 1. This artifact consists of a polystyrene body containing two steps and a machined slot, into which will fit a tracer made of doped polystyrene. The polystyrene body contains several grooves and can be fabricated entirely on a diamond turning machine. The body can be machined by turning a PS rod to a diameter slightly greater than the finished diameter of 2 mm. The part can be moved off-axis to face it off and to machine the steps, slot, and grooves. The tracer contains a drilled hole and a milled slot, which could be machined with a single setup on a milling machine. Once assembled, the artifact could be placed in a Be tube or other structure relevant to target assemblies. The assembled …

This Third FSC workshop focused on, ''Understanding the factors that influence public perception and confidence in the area of radioactive waste management...'' The workshop was held in Finland in close cooperation with Finnish stakeholders. This was most appropriate because of the recent successes in achieving positive decisions at the municipal, governmental, and Parliamentary levels, allowing the Finnish high-level radioactive waste repository program to proceed, including the identification of a proposed site. The workshop objective was to gain insight in answering the question, ''How did this political and societal decision come about?''

Protein arrays are the best tool for the rapid analysis of a whole proteome thus helping to identify all the protein/protein interactions in a living cell and they can also be used as powerful biosensors. The objective of this proposal is to develop a new entropically activated ligation method based in the naturally occurring protein trans-splicing process. This method will be used for the generation of spatially addressable arrays of multiple protein components by standard photolithographic techniques. Key to our approach is the use of the protein trans-splicing process. This naturally occurring process will allow us to create a truly generic and highly efficient method for the covalent attachment of proteins through its C-terminus to any solid support.

Electronics based on carbon nanotubes (CNT) has received a lot of attention recently because of its tremendous application potential, such as active components and interconnects in nanochips, nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), display devices, and chemical and biological sensors. However, as with most nanoelectronic systems, successful commercial deployment implies structural control at the molecular level. To this end, it is clearly necessary to understand the effect of contacts, topological defects, dopants, and chemisorbed atoms and molecules on the electronic transport through CNT's. This paper summarizes our computational efforts to address some of the above questions. Examples include: wetting properties and bonding strength of metal contacts on the CNT surface, the effect of Stone-Wales defects on the chemisorption of O{sub 2} and NH3, and how such chemisorbed species and defects effect the electronic transmission and conductance. Our approach is based on first-principles density functional theory (DFT) to compute equilibrium structures, and nonequilibrium Green's function (NEGF) methods, using both DFT and semi-empirical tight-binding formalisms, for computing electronic transport properties.

Given a Morse function f over a 2-manifold with or without boundary, the Reeb graph is obtained by contracting the connected components of the level sets to points. We prove tight upper and lower bounds on the number of loops in the Reeb graph that depend on the genus, the number of boundary components, and whether or not the 2-manifold is orientable. We also give an algorithm that constructs the Reeb graph in time O(n log n), where n is the number of edges in the triangulation used to represent the 2-manifold and the Morse function.

The objective of this evaluation was to determine whether a single rotating pump located 20 ft off-center would adequately mix expected AN-101 waste. Three-dimensional, AN-101 pump jet mixing simulation results indicate that a single, 20-ft off-centered mixer pump would mobilize almost all solids even at the furthest tank wall for sludge yield strength up to 150 Pa or less. Because the yield strength of the AN-101 waste was estimated to be less than 150 Pa, the AN-101 pump mixing model results indicate that a single mixer pump would be suffice to mobilize bulk of the disturbed and diluted AN-101 solids.

During the past two years, we have succeeded in implementing an efficient parallel Importance Sampling Monte-Carlo (ISMC) scheme with application towards rarely occurring transition events, of great abundance in materials science and chemistry. The inefficiency of the standard atomistic modeling techniques for these problems may be traced to the extremely low probability of sampling system trajectories, or paths, that lead to a successful transition event. Instead of following the conventional approach of developing smart algorithms for searching transition paths, we tackle this problem by explicitly enhancing the probability of sampling successful transition events by means of an importance function. By selecting it appropriately, one focuses predominantly on the successful transition paths while discarding most irrelevant ones. In this manner, the rare-event problem is reformulated into an optimization problem for finding the best-possible importance function. Utilizing efficient iterative minimization algorithms, our IS approach can now be used to calculate the rate of occurrence of low-probability transition phenomena of short duration (short successful paths), but which involve collective degrees of freedom of many atoms.

Experiments have been performed to explore conditions under which spall damage is recompressed with the ultimate goal of developing a predictive model. Spall is introduced through traditional gas gun techniques or with laser ablation. Recompression techniques producing a uniaxial stress state, such as a Hopkinson bar, do not create sufficient confinement to close the porosity. Higher stress triaxialities achieved through a gas gun or laser recompression can close the spall. Characterization of the recompressed samples by optical metallography and electron microscopy reveal a narrow, highly deformed process zone. At the higher pressures achieved in the gas gun, little evidence of spall remains other than differentially etched features in the optical micrographs. With the very high strain rates achieved with laser techniques there is jetting from voids and other signs of turbulent metal flow. Simulations of spall and recompression on micromechanical models containing a single void suggest that it might be possible to represent the recompression using models similar to those employed for void growth. Calculations using multiple, randomly distributed voids are needed to determine if such models will yield the proper behavior for more realistic microstructures.

As an integral part of the plutonium disposition program, formulation and process development is being performed for the immobilization of surplus plutonium in a titanate-based ceramic. Small-scale process prototypic and lab-scale functionally prototypic equipment have been tested to help define the immobilization process. The testing has included non-radioactive surrogates and actual actinide oxides contained in the immobilized form. A summary of the process development studies, as well as the formulation studies relevant to the process, will be provided.

Several classes of mesh motion algorithms are presented for the remap phase of unstructured mesh ALE codes. The methods range from local shape optimization procedures to more complex variational minimization methods applied to arbitrary unstructured polyhedral meshes necessary for the Kull code.

Mesoscale simulations have traditionally been used to investigate structural morphology of polymer in solution, melts and blends. Recently we have been pushing such modeling methods to important areas of Nanotechnology and Drug delivery that are well out of reach of classical molecular dynamics. This paper summarizes our efforts in three important emerging areas: (1) polymer-nanotube composites; (2) drug diffusivity through cell membranes; and (3) solvent exchange in nanoporous membranes. The first two applications are based on a bead-spring-based approach as encoded in the Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) module. The last application used density-based Mesoscale modeling as implemented in the Mesodyn module.

The binding of transcription factors to specific regulatory sequence elements is a primary mechanism for controlling gene transcription. Eukaryotic genes are often regulated by several transcription factors, whose binding sites are tightly clustered and form cis-regulatory modules. In this paper we present a web-server, CREME, for identifying and visualizing cis-regulatory modules in the promoter regions of a given set of potentially co-regulated genes. CREME relies on a database of putative transcription factor binding sites that have been annotated across the human genome using a library of position weight matrices and evolutionary conservation with the mouse and rat genomes. A search algorithm is applied to this dataset to identify combinations of transcription factors whose binding sites tend to co-occur in close proximity in the promoter regions of the input gene set. The identified cis-regulatory modules are statistically scored and significant combinations are reported and graphically visualized. Our web-server is available at http://creme.dcode.org/.

Within the scope of the Accelerator Driven System (ADS) concept for nuclear waste management applications, the burnup uncertainty estimates due to uncertainty in the activation cross sections (XSs) are important regarding both the safety and the efficiency of the waste burning process. We have applied both sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo methodology to actinides burnup calculations in a lead-bismuth cooled subcritical ADS. The sensitivity analysis is used to identify the reaction XSs and the dominant chains that contribute most significantly to the uncertainty. The Monte Carlo methodology gives the burnup uncertainty estimates due to the synergetic/global effect of the complete set of XS uncertainties. These uncertainty estimates are valuable to assess the need of any experimental or systematic reevaluation of some uncertainty XSs for ADS.

A responsibility of the Laser Safety Officer (LSO) is to perform laser safety audits. The American National Standard Z136.1 Safe use of Lasers references this requirement in several sections: (1) Section 1.3.2 LSO Specific Responsibilities states under Hazard Evaluation, ''The LSO shall be responsible for hazards evaluation of laser work areas''; (2) Section 1.3.2.8, Safety Features Audits, ''The LSO shall ensure that the safety features of the laser installation facilities and laser equipment are audited periodically to assure proper operation''; and (3) Appendix D, under Survey and Inspections, it states, ''the LSO will survey by inspection, as considered necessary, all areas where laser equipment is used''. Therefore, for facilities using Class 3B and or Class 4 lasers, audits for laser safety compliance are expected to be conducted. The composition, frequency and rigueur of that inspection/audit rests in the hands of the LSO. A common practice for institutions is to develop laser audit checklists or survey forms. In many institutions, a sole Laser Safety Officer (LSO) or a number of Deputy LSO's perform these audits. For that matter, there are institutions that request users to perform a self-assessment audit. Many items on the common audit list and the associated findings are …

This short contribution is a description of data now available in NORSAR's data archives from a temporary deployment during 2002-2004 of six seismic stations in northern Norway and Finland. Explosions in underground as well as open-pit mines in the Khibiny massif of the Kola Peninsula of northwestern Russia are conducted on a frequent and relatively regular basis. It was decided to supplement the network of permanent stations in northern Fennoscandia and northwest Russia with temporarily deployed stations, in order to record these explosions, as well as other mining explosions and natural events occurring in this general area. As shown in Fig. 6.4.1, the six temporary stations were deployed along two profile lines, extending westwards from the Khibini massif. The rationale for this deployment was to collect data to examine distance as well as azimuthal dependence of seismic discriminants. As can be seen from Fig. 6.4.1 the southernmost of the two profile lines runs through the permanent seismic array ARCES in northern Norway.

The {delta} to {alpha}' phase transformation in Pu-Ga alloys is intriguing for both scientific and technological reasons. On cooling, the ductile fcc {delta}-phase transforms martensitically to the brittle monoclinic {alpha}'-phase at approximately -120 C (depending on composition). This exothermic transformation involves a 20% volume contraction and a significant increase in resistivity. The reversion of {alpha}' to {delta} involves a large temperature hysteresis beginning just above room temperature. In an attempt to better understand the underlying thermodynamics and kinetics responsible for these unusual features, we have investigated the {delta} {leftrightarrow} {alpha}' phase transformations in a Pu-0.6 wt% Ga alloy using a combination of experimental and modeling techniques.

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FEMIS v1.5.3 SR1 includes updates to Section 8.0, FEMIS GIS Database, for the v1.5.3 FEMIS System Administration Guide.