The modern era of electron-electron interactions began a decade ago. Plummer's group initiated a program of using angular resolved photoemission to examine the band structure of the simple metals. Beginning with aluminum, and carrying on to sodium and potassium, they always found that the occupied energy bands were much narrower than expected. For example, the compressed energy bands for metallic potassium suggest a band effective mass of m* = 1.33m{sub e}. This should be compared to the band mass found from optical conductivity m*/m{sub e} = 1.01 {plus minus} 0.01. The discrepancy between these results is startling. It was this great difference which started my group doing calculations. Our program was two-fold. On one hand, we reanalyzed the experimental data, in order to see if Plummer's result was an experimental artifact. On the other hand, we completely redid the electron-electron self-energy calculations for simple metals, using the most modern choices of local-field corrections and vertex corrections. Our results will be reported in these lectures. They can be summarized as following: Our calculations give the same effective masses as the older calculations, so the theory is relatively unchanged; Our analysis of the experiments suggests that the recent measurements of band narrowing …

This report consists of two parts. Part 1 describes the development of novel analytical methods needed to predict the BOM performance and the subsequent performance degradation of the mutually obstructed RTGs for the CRAF and Cassini missions. Part II applies those methods to the two missions, presents the resultant predictions, and discusses their programmatic implications.; The results indicate that JPL's original power demand goals could have been met with two standard GPHS RTGs for each mission. However, JPL subsequently raised both the power demand profile and the duration for both missions, to the point where two standard RTGs could no longer provide the desired power margin. Each mission can be satisfied by adding a third RTG, and in the case of the Cassini mission the use of three RTGs appears to be unavoidable. In the case of the CRAF mission, there appears to be a possibility that modest modifications of the RTGs' design and/or operating scheme and meet the missions' power demand without the addition of a third RTG. The potential saving in cost and schedule pressure prompted Fairchild to undertake a study of various obvious and not-so-obvious stratagems, either singly or in combination, to determine whether they would make …