We report the first inclusive photon measurements about mid-rapidity (|y| < 0.5) from {sup 197}Au + {sup 197}Au collisions at {radical}s{sub NN} = 130 GeV at RHIC. Photon pair conversions were reconstructed from electron and positron tracks measured with the Time Projection Chamber (TPC) of the STAR experiment. With this method, an energy resolution of {Delta}E/E {approx} 2% at 0.5 GeV has been achieved. Reconstructed photons have also been used to measure the transverse momentum (p{sub t}) spectra of {pi}{sup 0} mesons about mid-rapidity (|y| < 1) via the {pi}{sup 0} {yields} {gamma}{gamma} decay channel. The fractional contribution of the {pi}{sup 0} {yields} {gamma}{gamma} decay to the inclusive photon spectrum decreases by 20% {+-} 5% between p{sub t} = 1.65 GeV/c and p{sub t} = 2.4 GeV/c in the most central events, indicating that relative to {pi}{sup 0} {yields} {gamma}{gamma} decay the contribution of other photon sources is substantially increasing.

Solid Phase Microextraction (SPME) has been used to sample nonnuclear materials for analysis by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC/MS). This report summarizes progress in the areas of individual materials' outgassing signatures, microcompatibility tests and analysis of polar analytes.

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The purpose of this analysis, as directed by ''Technical Work Plan for: Regulatory Integration Modeling and Analysis of the Waste Form and Waste Package'' (BSC 2004 [DIRS 171583]), is to compile applicable corrosion data from the literature (journal articles, engineering documents, materials handbooks, or standards, and national laboratory reports), evaluate the quality of these data, and use these to perform statistical analyses and distributions for aqueous corrosion rates of waste package materials. The purpose of this report is not to describe the performance of engineered barriers for the TSPA-LA. Instead, the analysis provides simple statistics on aqueous corrosion rates of steels and alloys. These rates are limited by various aqueous parameters such as temperature (up to 100 C), water type (i.e., fresh versus saline), and pH. Corrosion data of materials at pH extremes (below 4 and above 9) are not included in this analysis, as materials commonly display different corrosion behaviors under these conditions. The exception is highly corrosion-resistant materials (Inconel Alloys) for which rate data from corrosion tests at a pH of approximately 3 were included. The waste package materials investigated are those from the long and short 5-DHLW waste packages, 2-MCO/2-DHLW waste package, and the 21-PWR commercial waste …

A chemical ionization mass spectrometry (CIMS) technique has been developed for precise in situ measurements of hydrochloric acid (HCl) from a high-altitude aircraft. In measurements at subtropical latitudes, minimum HCl values found in the upper troposphere (UT) are often near or below the 0.005-ppbv detection limit of the measurements, indicating that background HCl values are much lower than a global mean estimate. However, significant abundances of HCl were observed in many UT air parcels as a result of stratosphere-to-troposphere transport events. A method for diagnosing the amount of stratospheric ozone in these UT parcels was developed using the compact linear correlation of HCl with ozone found throughout the lower stratosphere (LS). Expanded use of this method will lead to improved quantification of cross-tropopause transport events and validation of global chemical transport models.

We assess how well next generation neutrinoless double beta decay and normal neutrino beta decay experiments can answer four fundamental questions. 1) If neutrinoless double beta decay searches do not detect a signal, and if the spectrum is known to be inverted hierarchy, can we conclude that neutrinos are Dirac particles? 2) If neutrinoless double beta decay searches are negative and a next generation ordinary beta decay experiment detects the neutrino mass scale, can we conclude that neutrinos are Dirac particles? 3) If neutrinoless double beta decay is observed with a large neutrino mass element, what is the total mass in neutrinos? 4) If neutrinoless double beta decay is observed but next generation beta decay searches for a neutrino mass only set a mass upper limit, can we establish whether the mass hierarchy is normal or inverted? We base our answers on the expected performance of next generation neutrinoless double beta decay experiments and on simulations of the accuracy of calculations of nuclear matrix elements.

Incomplete or sparse information on types of data such as geologic or formation characteristics introduces a high level of risk for oil exploration and development projects. ''Expert'' systems developed and used in several disciplines and industries have demonstrated beneficial results. A state-of-the-art exploration ''expert'' tool, relying on a computerized database and computer maps generated by neural networks, is being developed through the use of ''fuzzy'' logic, a relatively new mathematical treatment of imprecise or non-explicit parameters and values. Oil prospecting risk can be reduced with the use of a properly developed and validated ''Fuzzy Expert Exploration (FEE) Tool.'' This FEE Tool can be beneficial in many regions of the U.S. by enabling risk reduction in oil and gas prospecting as well as decreased prospecting and development costs. In the 1998-1999 oil industry environment, many smaller exploration companies lacked the resources of a pool of expert exploration personnel. Downsizing, low oil prices, and scarcity of exploration funds have also affected larger companies, and will, with time, affect the end users of oil industry products in the U.S. as reserves are depleted. The FEE Tool will benefit a diverse group in the U.S., leading to a more efficient use of scarce funds, …

The ab initio No-Core Shell Model (NCSM) has recently been expanded to include nucleon-nucleon (NN) and three-nucleon (3N) interactions at the three-body cluster level. Here it is used to predict binding energies and spectra of p-shell nuclei based on realistic NN and 3N interactions. It is shown that 3N force (3NF) properties can be studied in these nuclear systems. First results show that interactions based on chiral perturbation theory lead to a realistic description of {sup 6}Li.

The accuracy in the measurement of the masses of sleptons and heavy Higgs bosons in cMSSM scenarios, compatible with the WMAP result on cold dark matter, has been re-analysed in view of the requirements for predicting this density to a few percent level from SUSY measurements at the linear collider.

Nanoscale materials provide unique properties that will enable new technologies and enhance older ones. One area of intense activity in which nanoscale materials are being used is in the development of new functional materials for battery applications.1-4 This effort promises superior materials with properties that circumvent many of the problems associated with traditional battery materials. Previously we have worked on several approaches for using nanoscale materials for application as cathode materials in rechargeable Li batteries.5-11 Our recent work has focused on synthesizing MnO2 nanoparticles and using conducting polymers to electronically address these particles in nanoparticle assemblies. This presentation will focus on those efforts. MnO2 nanoparticles that are encapsulated with poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) are prepared using 3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene (EDOT) as a chemical reductant for permanganate anion. This non-aqueous preparation is based on a recent report of a similar method for preparation of PEDOT-encapsulated Au nanoparticles.12 We also describe the synthesis of MnO2 colloidal nanoparticles prepared using an aqueous route involving reduction of permanganate anion with butanol using a previously described route.13 We report the synthesis and characterization of the PEDOT material, and the aqueous colloidal material. We show that the aqueous colloidal nanoparticles can be trapped in thin films using a layer-by-layer deposition …

Unresolved transitions in the nuclear {gamma}-ray cascade produced in the decay of excited nuclei are best described by statistical concepts: a continuous radiative strength function (RSF) and level density yield mean values of transition matrix elements. Data on the soft (E{sub {gamma}} < 3-4 MeV) RSF for transitions between warm states (i.e. states several MeV above the yrast line) have, however, remained elusive.

The availability of compact transmission grating spectrometers now allows an attractive and economical alternative to the more familiar Czerny-Turner configuration for many high-temperature plasma applications. Higher throughput is obtained with short focal length refractive optics and stigmatic imaging. Many more spectra can be obtained with a single spectrometer since smaller, more densely packed optical input fibers can be used. Multiple input slits, along with a bandpass filter, can be used to maximize the number of spectra per detector, providing further economy. Curved slits can correct for the strong image curvature of the short focal length optics. Presented here are the governing grating equations for both standard and high-dispersion transmission gratings, defining dispersion, image curvature, and desired slit curvature, that can be used in the design of improved plasma diagnostics.

Precision cleaning studies done at Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies (FM&T), the Kansas City Plant (KCP), and at other locations within the Department of Energy (DOE) Weapons complex over the last 30 years have depended upon results from MESERAN Evaporative Rate Analysis for detecting low levels of organic contamination. The characterization of the surface being analyzed is carried out by depositing a Carbon-14 tagged radiochemical onto the test surface and monitoring the rate at which the radiochemical disappears from the surface with a Geiger-Mueller counter. In the past, the total number of counts over a 2-minute span have been used to judge whether a surface is contaminated or not and semi-quantitatively to what extent. This technique is very sensitive but has not enjoyed the broad acceptance of a purely quantitative analysis. The work on this project developed calibrations of various organic contaminants typically encountered in KCP operations. In addition, a new analysis method was developed to enhance the ability of MESERAN Analyzers to detect organic contamination and yield quantitative data in the microgram and nanogram levels.

A real-time radiological sensor network for emergency response was developed and deployed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The Real-Time Radiological Area Monitoring (RTRAM) network is comprised of 16 Geiger-Mueller (GM) sensors positioned on the LLNL Livermore site perimeter to continuously monitor for a radiological condition resulting from a terrorist threat to site security and the health and safety of LLNL personnel. The RTRAM network sensor locations coincide with wind sector directions to provide thorough coverage of the one square mile site. These low-power sensors are supported by a central command center (CCC) and transmit measurement data back to the CCC computer through the LLNL telecommunications infrastructure. Alarm conditions are identified by comparing current data to predetermined threshold parameters and are validated by comparison with plausible dispersion modeling scenarios and prevailing meteorological conditions. Emergency response personnel are notified of alarm conditions by automatic radio and computer based notifications. A secure intranet provides emergency response personnel with current condition assessment data that enable them to direct field response efforts remotely. The RTRAM network has proven to be a reliable system since initial deployment in August 2001 and maintains stability during inclement weather conditions.

Trends in high-performance computing are making it necessary for long-running applications to tolerate hardware faults. The most commonly used approach is checkpoint and restart(CPR)-the state of the computation is saved periodically on disk, and when a failure occurs, the computation is restarted from the last saved state. At present, it is the responsibility of the programmer to instrument applications for CPR. Our group is investigating the use of compiler technology to instrument codes to make them self-checkpointing and self-restarting, thereby providing an automatic solution to the problem of making long-running scientific applications resilient to hardware faults. Our previous work focused on message-passing programs. In this paper, we describe such a system for shared-memory programs running on symmetric multiprocessors. The system has two components: (i)a pre-compiler for source-to-source modification of applications, and (ii) a runtime system that implements a protocol for coordinating CPR among the threads of the parallel application. For the sake of concreteness, we focus on a non-trivial subset of OpenMP that includes barriers and locks. One of the advantages of this approach is that the ability to tolerate faults becomes embedded within the application itself, so applications become self-checkpointing and self-restarting on any platform. We demonstrate this by …

X-ray fluorescence microscopy (mu-XRF), x-ray beam induced current (XBIC), and x-ray absorption spectromicroscopy (mu-XAS) were performed on fully-processed Bay Six cast multicrystalline silicon and aluminum-gettered AstroPower Silicon-Film(TM) sheet material. Over ten iron precipitates--predominantly of iron silicide--were identified at low lifetime regions in both materials, both at grain boundaries and intragranular defects identified by XBIC. In addition, large (micron-sized) particles containing oxidized iron and other impurities (Ca, Cr, Mn) were found in BaySix material. The smaller iron silicide precipitates were more numerous and spatially distributed than their larger oxidized iron counterparts, and thus deemed more detrimental to minority carrier diffusion length.

Synchrotron-based microprobe techniques have been applied to study the distribution, size, chemical state, and recombination activity of Fe clusters in two types of mc-Si materials: block cast mc-Si, and AstroPower Silicon Film(TM) sheet material. In sheet material, high concentrations of metals were found at recombination-active, micron-sized intragranular clusters consisting of micron and sub-micron sized particles. In addition, Fe nanoparticles were located in densities of {approx}2'107 cm-2 along recombination-active grain boundaries. In cast mc-Si,two types of particles were identified at grain boundaries: (1) micron-sized oxidized Fe particles accompanied by other metals (Cr, Mn, Ca, Ti), and (2) a higher number of sub-micron FeSi2 precipitates that exhibited a preferred orientation along the crystal growth direction. In both materials, it is believed that the larger Fe clusters are inclusions of foreign particles, from which Fe dissolves in the melt to form the smaller FeSi2 nanoprecipitates, which by virtue of their more homogeneous distribution are deemed more dangerous to solar cell device performance. Based on this understanding, strategies proposed to reduce the impact of Fe on mc-Si electrical properties include gettering, passivation, and limiting the dissolution of foreign Fe-rich particles in the melt.

Synchrotron-based microprobe techniques were used to obtain precise and systematic information about the size distribution, spatial distribution, shape, electrical activity, and chemical states of iron-rich impurity clusters in multicrystalline silicon materials used for cost-effective solar cells. These experimentally observed properties of iron-rich clusters allow one to derive conclusions about the origins of iron contamination, the mechanisms for incorporating large amounts of Fe into mc-Si, quantitative information about the distribution of Fe in mc-Si and the impacts of such contamination on solar cell performance. Two distinct groups of iron-rich clusters have been identified in both materials: (a) the occasional large (diameter greater than or equal to 1 mu-m) particles, either oxidized and/or present with multiple other metal species reminiscent of stainless steels or ceramics, which are believed to originate from a foreign source such as the growth surfaces, production equipment, or feedstock, and (b) the more numerous, homogeneously distributed, and smaller iron silicide precipitates (dia. less than or equal to 800 nm, often < 100 nm), originating from a variety of possible formation mechanisms involving atomically dissolved iron in the melt or in the crystal. It was found that iron silicide nanoprecipitates account for bulk Fe concentrations as high as 1014-15cm-3 …

In this study, synchrotron-based x-ray absorption microspectroscopy (mu-XAS) is applied to identifying the chemical states of copper-rich clusters within a variety of silicon materials, including as-grown cast multicrystalline silicon solar cell material with high oxygen concentration and other silicon materials with varying degrees of oxygen concentration and copper contamination pathways. In all samples, copper silicide (Cu3Si) is the only phase of copper identified. It is noted from thermodynamic considerations that unlike certain metal species, copper tends to form a silicide and not an oxidized compound because of the strong silicon-oxygen bonding energy; consequently the likelihood of encountering an oxidized copper particle in silicon is small, in agreement with experimental data. In light of these results, the effectiveness of aluminum gettering for the removal of copper from bulk silicon is quantified via x-ray fluorescence microscopy (mu-XRF),and a segregation coefficient is determined from experimental data to beat least (1-2)'103. Additionally, mu-XAS data directly demonstrates that the segregation mechanism of Cu in Al is the higher solubility of Cu in the liquid phase. In light of these results, possible limitations for the complete removal of Cu from bulk mc-Si are discussed.

Fluid flow experiments are being conducted on core specimens of quartz monzonite retrieved from depths of about 1 km at the Desert Peak East EGS site in Churchill County, Nevada. Our immediate goal is to observe permeability evolution in fractures at pressure and temperature conditions appropriate to the Desert Peak geothermal site. Longer term, we aim to evaluate mechanisms that control the evolution of fracture permeability. In the experiments saline water is flowed through an artificial fracture at a constant rate of 0.02 ml/min over a period of several weeks. The constant flow tests are interrupted at selected times for shorter tests in which flow is either stopped or varied between 0 and 2.0 ml/min. The experiments to date were conducted at a confining pressure of 5.5 MPa, pore pressures of 1.38 MPa or 2.07 MPa and temperatures of 167- 169 C. Measurements include differential pressure and electrical resistance across the specimen. The short-term variable flow rate experiments allow us to calculate the effective hydraulic aperture of the fracture at various times during the experiment. Changes in electrical resistivity provide indirect evidence of ongoing mineral dissolution and precipitation processes that are expected to change fracture permeability over time. The early …

The Sub-Picosecond Pulse Source (SPPS) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) produces the brightest ultrafast x-ray pulses in the world, and is the first to employ compressed femtosecond electron bunches for the x-ray source. Both SPPS and future X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFEL's) will use precise measurements of individual electron bunches to time the arrival of x-ray pulses for time-resolved experiments. At SPPS we use electro-optic sampling (EOS) to perform these measurements. Here we present the first results using this method. An ultrafast laser pulse (135 fs) passes through an electro-optic crystal adjacent to the electron beam. The refractive index of the crystal is distorted by the strong electromagnetic fields of the ultra-relativistic electrons, and this transient birefringence is imprinted on the laser polarization. A polarizer decodes this signal, producing a time-dependent image of the compressed electron bunch. Our measurements yield the relative timing between an ultrafast optical laser and an ultrafast x-ray pulse to within 60 fs, making it possible to use the SPPS to observe atomic-scale ultrafast dynamics initiated by laser-matter interaction.

One of the biggest challenges in cell biology is the imaging of living cells. For this purpose, the most commonly used visualization tool is fluorescent markers. However, conventional labels, such as organic fluorescent dyes or green fluorescent proteins (GFP), lack the photostability to allow the tracking of cellular events that happen over minutes to days. In addition, they are either toxic to cells (dyes), or difficult to construct and manipulate (GFP). We report here the use of a new class of fluorescent labels, silanized CdSe/ZnS nanocrystal-peptide conjugates, for imaging the nuclei of living cells. CdSe/ZnS nanocrystals, or so called quantum dots (qdots), are extremely photostable, and have been used extensively in cellular imaging of fixed cells. Most of the studies about living cells so far have been concerned only with particle entry into the cytoplasm or the localization of receptors on the cell membrane. Specific targeting of qdots to the nucleus of living cells has not been reported in previous studies, due to the lack of a targeting mechanism and proper particle size. Here we demonstrate for the first time the construction of a CdSe/ZnS nanocrystal-peptide conjugate that carries the SV40 large T antigen nuclear localization signal (NLS), and the …

The objective of this work was to develop predictive models for the Low Activity Waste (LAW) melter offgas flammability assessment and to conduct case studies in support of the on-going safety analysis efforts for the River Protection Project Waste Treatment Plant (RPPWTP). This required that Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) personnel develop process models that are comprehensive enough to explicitly describe the effects of key melter operating variables such as total organic carbon (TOC) in the feed, melter air purge, and vapor space temperature on the offgas flammability.

In general, the Phase Retrieval from Modulus problem is very difficult. In this report, we solve the difficult, but somewhat more tractable case in which we constrain the solution to a minimum phase reconstruction. We exploit the real-and imaginary part sufficiency properties of the Fourier and Hilbert Transforms of causal sequences to develop an algorithm for reconstructing spectral phase given only spectral modulus. The algorithm uses homeomorphic signal processing methods with the complex cepstrum. The formal problem of interest is: Given measurements of only the modulus {vert_bar}H(k){vert_bar} (no phase) of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) of a real, finite-length, stable, causal time domain signal h(n), compute a minimum phase reconstruction {cflx h}(n) of the signal. Then compute the phase of {cflx h}(n) using a DFT, and exploit the result as an estimate of the phase of h(n). The development of the algorithm is quite involved, but the final algorithm and its implementation are very simple. This work was motivated by a Phase Retrieval from Modulus Problem that arose in LLNL Defense Sciences Engineering Division (DSED) projects in lightning protection for buildings. The measurements are limited to modulus-only spectra from a spectrum analyzer. However, it is desired to perform system identification …