We are working on a composite thin-disk laser design that can be scaled as a source of high brightness laser power for tactical engagement and other high average power applications. The key component is a diffusion-bonded composite comprising a thin gain-medium and thicker cladding that is strikingly robust and resolves prior difficulties with high average power pumping/cooling and the rejection of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). In contrast to high power rods or slabs, the one-dimensional nature of the cooling geometry and the edge-pump geometry scale gracefully to very high average power. The crucial design ideas have been verified experimentally. Progress this last year included: extraction with high beam quality using a telescopic resonator, a heterogeneous thin film coating prescription that meets the unusual requirements demanded by this laser architecture, thermal management with our first generation cooler. Progress was also made in design of a second-generation laser.

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Surface critical phenomena and the related onset of Goldstone modes represent fundamental properties of the confining flux in Quantum Chromodynamics. New ideas on surface roughening and their implications for lattice studies of quark confinement and string formation are presented. Problems with a simple string description of the large Wilson surface are discussed.

The authors summarize the results of two recent searches for flavor-changing neutral current, lepton-flavor violating, and lepton-number violating decays of D{sup +}, D{sub s}{sup +}, and D{sup 0} mesons (and their antiparticles) into modes containing muons and electrons. using data from Fermilab charm hadroproduction experiment E791, they examined D{sup +} and D{sub s}{sup +} {pi}{ell}{ell} and {Kappa}{ell}{ell} decay modes and the D{sup 0} dilepton decay modes containing either {ell}{sup +}{ell}{sup {minus}}, a {rho}{sup 0}, {bar {Kappa}}*{sup 0}, or {phi} vector meson, or a non-resonant {pi}{pi}, {Kappa}{pi}, or {Kappa}{Kappa} pair of pseudoscalar mesons. No evidence for any of these decays was found. Therefore, the authors presented branching-fraction upper limits at 90% confidence level for the 51 decay modes examined. Twenty-six of these modes had no previously reported limits, and eighteen of the remainder were reported with significant improvements over previously published results.