Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The anthrax attacks of 2001 resulted in 23 cases of the disease, 5 deaths, and the contamination of numerous U.S. Postal Service facilities, including the Southern Connecticut Processing and Distribution Center in Wallingford, Connecticut (the Wallingford facility). But none of the workers at the Wallingford facility contracted the disease from the anthrax contamination. As a result, GAO was asked to examine the adequacy of methods used to determine whether the Wallingford facility and other postal facilities were contaminated. In this testimony, GAO presents its preliminary findings concerning the test results for the Wallingford facility: (1) the collection of samples to detect anthrax, (2) the meaning of the test results, and (3) the communication of the test results to workers."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "On April 1, we testified before the Subcommittee on Civil Service and Agency Organization, House Committee on Government Reform at a hearing on "Compensation Reform: How Should the Federal Government Pay Its Employees?" This letter responds to a request that we provide answers to follow-up questions from the hearing."

Bill introduced by the Texas Senate relating to the composition of the Recycling Market Development Board and the termination of certain duties of the General Land Office relating to the board and the recycling awareness campaign.

Bill introduced by the Texas Senate relating to the Records Management Interagency Coordinating Council

Bill introduced by the Texas House of Representatives relating to the eligibility requirements to serve as a director of a groundwater conservation district.

The amending process is central to the consideration of legislation by the Senate. This report briefly describes the various types of amendments that take place in the Senate.

This report discusses a possible reduction in federal highway program spending. Congress has chosen to overrule provisions of law that would have reduced the FY2003 spending level to $23.2 billion, and has instead settled on $31.8 billion, the same as the FY2002 level.

We present an improved analytical expression for the x-ray dynamic structure factor from a dense plasma which includes the effects of weakly bound electrons. This result can be applied to describe scattering from low to moderate Z plasmas, and it covers the entire range of plasma conditions that can be found in inertial confinement fusion experiments, from ideal to degenerate up to moderately coupled systems. We use our theory to interpret x-ray scattering experiments from solid density carbon plasma and to extract accurate measurements of electron temperature, electron density and charge state. We use our experimental results to validate various equation-of-state models for carbon plasmas.

We summarize a recent calculation of perturbative neutrino cross sections that includes NLO and mass corrections. We provide numerical results for quantities that are related to the extraction of the weak mixing angle from neutrino deep inelastic scattering.

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Bacterial endospore disruption and nucleic acid extractionresulting in DNA of PCR-amplifiable quality and quantity are not trivial.Responding to the needs of the Hazardous Materials Response Unit (HMRU),Laboratory Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation, protocols weredeveloped to close these gaps. Effectiveness and reproducibility of thetechniques were validated with laboratory grown pure spores of Bacillusanthracis and its close phylogenetic neighbors, and with spiked soils anddamaged samples.

The Astra simulation code has been successfully used in the design of linac and rf photoinjector systems utilizing beams with azimuthal symmetry. We present recently implemented changes to Astra that allow tracking of beams in beamlines without the assumption of any symmetry. The changes especially include a 3D mesh space charge algorithm and the possibility to import 3D electromagnetic fieldmaps from eigensolver programs.

The cavity design for a 3rd harmonic cavity for the TTF 2 photoinjector has been revised to increase the coupling between the main coupler and the cavity cells. The iris radius of the end cup of the cavity has been increased to accomplish a better coupling. The basic rf-parameters and the higher order modes of the modified design are summarized in this report.

Beam dynamics studies on the FNPL photo injector that seek to optimize the transport of intense electron beams with large values of canonical angular momentum have been performed. These studies investigate the effect of solenoid emittance compensation on beams that evolve under the combined influence of intense space charge forces and large angular momentum. We present details of experimental measurements and supporting simulations of beam envelope evolution.

With increased concern about the impact of refrigerant leakage on global warming, a number of new supermarket refrigeration system configurations requiring significantly less refrigerant charge are being considered. In order to help promote the development of advanced systems and expand the knowledge base for energy-efficient supermarket technology, the International Energy Agency (IEA) established IEA Annex 26 (Advanced Supermarket Refrigeration/Heat Recovery Systems) under the ''IEA Implementing Agreement on Heat Pumping Technologies''. Annex 26 focuses on demonstrating and documenting the energy saving and environmental benefits of advanced systems design for food refrigeration and space heating and cooling for supermarkets. Advanced in this context means systems that use less energy, require less refrigerant and produce lower refrigerant emissions. Stated another way, the goal is to identify supermarket refrigeration and HVAC technology options that reduce the total equivalent warming impact (TEWI) of supermarkets by reducing both system energy use (increasing efficiency) and reducing total refrigerant charge. The Annex has five participating countries: Canada, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The working program of the Annex has involved analytical and experimental investigation of several candidate system design approaches to determine their potential to reduce refrigerant usage and energy consumption. Advanced refrigeration system …

To study CP violation, the HEM-B experiment uses an internal wire target in the transverse halo of the stored HERA proton beam. Operational experience shows that the resulting interaction rates are extremely sensitive to tiny orbit jitter amplitudes. Various methods have been studied to stabilize these interaction rates by increasing diffusion in the transverse proton beam tails without affecting the luminosity at the electron-proton collider experiments ZEUS and H1. Tune modulation was found to be a promising method for this task. Experiments performed in recent years will be reported.

Antimony, antimony-copper, and antimony-silver thin films were prepared by DC magnetron sputtering on glass substrates. Their reflectance and transmittance in the visible range were measured before and after electrochemical lithiation. The mixed metal films exhibited larger changes in reflectance and small shifts in the optical absorption edge compared with pure antimony films. Electrochromic cycling speed and stability of the Sb-Li system were improved by the addition of copper and silver.

The authors present a novel treatment of resonant massive particles appearing as intermediate states in high energy collisions. The approach uses effective field theory methods to treat consistently the instability of the intermediate resonant state. As a result gauge invariance is respected in every step and calculations can in principle be extended to all orders in perturbation theory, the only practical limitation in going to higher orders being the standard difficulties related to multi-loop integrals. The authors believe that the longstanding problem related to the treatment of instability of particles is now solved.

In low-pressure discharges, when the electron mean free path is larger or comparable with the discharge length, the electron dynamics is essentially non-local. Moreover, the electron energy distribution function (EEDF) deviates considerably from a Maxwellian. Therefore, an accurate kinetic description of the low-pressure discharges requires knowledge of the non-local conductivity operator and calculation of the non-Maxwellian EEDF. The previous treatments made use of simplifying assumptions: a uniform density profile and a Maxwellian EEDF. In the present study a self-consistent system of equations for the kinetic description of nonlocal, non-uniform, nearly collisionless plasmas of low-pressure discharges is derived. It consists of the nonlocal conductivity operator and the averaged kinetic equation for calculation of the non-Maxwellian EEDF. The importance of accounting for the non-uniform plasma density profile on both the current density profile and the EEDF is demonstrated.

A new spectroscopic diagnostic on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) measures the velocity distribution of ions in the plasma edge with both poloidal and toroidal views. An anisotropic ion temperature is measured during the presence of high power HHFW RF heating in He plasmas, with the poloidal T(sub)i roughly twice the toroidal T(sub)i. Moreover, the measured spectral distribution suggests that two populations have temperatures of 500 eV and 50 eV with rotation velocities of -50 km/s and -10 km/s, respectively. This bi-modal distribution is observed in both the toroidal and poloidal views (in both He II and C III ions), and is well correlated with the period of RF power application to the plasma. The temperature of the edge ions is observed to increase with the applied RF power, which was scanned between 0 and 4.3MW. The ion heating mechanism from HHFW RF power has not yet been identified.

Berkeley Lab has proposed to build a recirculating linac based X-ray source for ultra-fast dynamic studies [1]. This machine requires a flat electron beam with a small vertical emittance and large x/y emittance ratio to allow for compression of spontaneous undulator emission of soft and hard x-ray pulses, and a low-emittance, round electron beam for coherent emission of soft x-rays via the FEL process based on cascaded harmonic generation [2]. We propose an injector system consisting of two high gradient high repetition rate photo cathode guns [3] (one for each application), an {approx}120 MeV super conducting linear accelerator, a 3rd harmonic cavity for linearization of the longitudinal phase space, and a bunch compressor. We present details of the design and the results of particle tracking studies using several computer codes.

In the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) the abort kicker magnets are the limiting aperture. Continuous losses at this location could deteriorate the kicker performance. In addition, losses especially in the triplet area cause backgrounds in the experimental detectors. The RHIC one-stage collimation system was used to reduce these backgrounds as well as losses at the abort kickers. Collimation performance and results from various runs with even and uneven species (Au-Au, pp and d-Au) are presented and compared. Upgrades of the system for the upcoming high luminosity runs are outlined.

This report examines the economics of information sharing in consumer credit markets by (1) explaining the role of information in the lending process; (2) describing the economic effects of credit reporting; and (3) outlining the potential economic benefits forgone by restricting consumer credit information.

The present status of fragmentation function (FF) analysis is summarized and the role of FFs in QCD hard scattering phenomenology is outlined with emphasis on spin physics.