A report is given of the activities of the 1977 ISABELLE Summer Workshop, held from July 18 to 29, 1977 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. An abstract was prepared for each of the seventy-four separate presentations for inclusion in DOE Energy Research Abstracts (ERA). (PMA)

The absorption of intense laser light is found to be reduced when targets are irradiated by 1.06 ..mu..m light with long pulse widths (150-400 psec) and large focal spots (100-250 ..mu..m). Estimates of Brillouin scatter which account for the finite heat capacity of the underdense plasma predict this reduction. Spectra of the back reflected light show red shifts indicative of Brillouin scattering.

Plastic scintillators can be coupled to light fibers to make small, simple, and inexpensive x-ray detectors. These detectors have been developed for use at the Nevada Test Site (NTS) for the remote detection of x-rays. Light produced in the scintillator can be transmitted by the fiber for several hundred meters to a photodetector, which is usually a streak camera or a photomultiplier tube. The use of a streak camera allows many channels to be recorded simultaneously. A parameter study has been done to measure the sensitivity of these detectors as a function of scintillator geometry, type of scintillator, coupling geometry, and x-ray energy. The results can be qualitatively explained by simple geometric theory. A recent use of these detectors at NTS was the measurement of an x-ray spectrum. System performance for this measurement will be reviewed. 7 refs., 5 figs., 1 tab.

Inspection of United States-Department of Energy (US-DOE) model 9975 nuclear materials shipping package revealed corrosion of the lead shielding that was induced by off-gas constituents from organic components in the package. Experiments were performed to determine the corrosion rate of lead when exposed to off-gas or degradation products of these organic materials. The results showed that the room temperature vulcanizing (RTV) sealant was the most corrosive organic species used in the construction of the packaging, followed by polyvinyl acetate (PVAc) glue. Fiberboard material, also used in the construction of the packaging induced corrosion to a much lesser extent than the PVAc glue and RTV sealant, and only in the presence of condensed water. The results indicated faster corrosion at temperatures higher than ambient and with condensed water. In light of these corrosion mechanisms, the lead shielding was sheathed in a stainless steel liner to mitigate against corrosion.

The dynamics of water molecules near the protein surface are different from those of bulk water and influence the structure and dynamics of the protein itself. To elucidate the temperature dependence hydration dynamics of water molecules, we present results from the molecular dynamic simulation of the water molecules surrounding two proteins (Carboxypeptidase inhibitor and Ovomucoid) at seven different temperatures (T=273 to 303 K, in increments of 5 K). Translational diffusion coefficients of the surface water and bulk water molecules were estimated from 2 ns molecular dynamics simulation trajectories. Temperature dependence of the estimated bulk water diffusion closely reflects the experimental values, while hydration water diffusion is retarded significantly due to the protein. Protein surface induced scaling of translational dynamics of the hydration waters is uniform over the temperature range studied, suggesting the importance protein-water interactions.

Comets have long been proposed as a potential means for the transport of complex organic compounds to early Earth. For this to be a viable mechanism, a significant fraction of organic compounds must survive the high temperatures due to impact. We have undertaken three-dimensional numerical simulations to track the thermodynamic state of a comet during oblique impacts. The comet was modeled as a 1-km water-ice sphere impacting a basalt plane at 11.2 km/s; impact angles of 15{sup o} (from horizontal), 30{sup o}, 45{sup o}, 65{sup o}, and 90{sup o} (normal impact) were examined. The survival of organic cometary material, modeled as water ice for simplicity, was calculated using three criteria: (1) peak temperatures, (2) the thermodynamic phase of H{sub 2}O, and (3) final temperature upon isentropic unloading. For impact angles greater than or equal to 30{sup o}, no organic material is expected to survive the impact. For the 15{sup o} impact, most of the material survives the initial impact and significant fractions (55%, 25%, and 44%, respectively) satisfy each survival criterion at 1 second. Heating due to deceleration, in addition to shock heating, plays a role in the heating of the cometary material for nonnormal impacts. This effect is more …

An international experiment to demonstrate muon ionization cooling is scheduled for beam at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in 2007. The experiment comprises one cell of the Study II cooling channel [1], along with upstream and downstream detectors to identify individual muons and measure their initial and final 6D phase-space parameters to a precision of 0.1%. Magnetic design of the beam line and cooling channel are complete and portions are under construction. The experiment will be described, including cooling channel hardware designs, fabrication status, and running plans. Phase 1 of the experiment will prepare the beam line and provide detector systems, including time-of-flight, Cherenkov, scintillating-fiber trackers and their spectrometer solenoids, and an electromagnetic calorimeter. The Phase 2 system will add the cooling channel components, including liquid-hydrogen absorbers embedded in superconducting Focus Coil solenoids, 201-MHz normal-conducting RF cavities, and their surrounding Coupling Coil solenoids. The MICE Collaboration goal is to complete the experiment by 2010; progress toward this is discussed.

A practical, functional group tolerant method for the Rh-catalyzed direct arylation of a variety of pharmaceutically important azoles with aryl bromides is described. Many of the successful azole and aryl bromide coupling partners are not compatible with methods for the direct arylation of heterocycles using Pd(0) or Cu(I) catalysts. The readily prepared, low molecular weight ligand, Z-1-tert-butyl-2,3,6,7-tetrahydrophosphepine, which coordinates to Rh in a bidentate P-olefin fashion to provide a highly active yet thermally stable arylation catalyst, is essential to the success of this method. By using the tetrafluoroborate salt of the corresponding phosphonium, the reactions can be assembled outside of a glove box without purification of reagents or solvent. The reactions are also conducted in THF or dioxane, which greatly simplifies product isolation relative to most other methods for direct arylation of azoles employing high-boiling amide solvents. The reactions are performed with heating in a microwave reactor to obtain excellent product yields in two hours.

Linked CHEETAH is a thermo-chemical code coupled to a 2-D hydrocode. Initially, a quadratic-pressure dependent kinetic rate was used, which worked well in modeling prompt detonation of explosives of large size, but does not work on other aspects of explosive behavior. The variable-pressure Tarantula reactive flow rate model was developed with JWL++ in order to also describe failure and initiation, and we have moved this model into Linked CHEETAH. The model works by turning on only above a pressure threshold, where a slow turn-on creates initiation. At a higher pressure, the rate suddenly leaps to a large value over a small pressure range. A slowly failing cylinder will see a rapidly declining rate, which pushes it quickly into failure. At a high pressure, the detonation rate is constant. A sequential validation procedure is used, which includes metal-confined cylinders, rate-sticks, corner-turning, initiation and threshold, gap tests and air gaps. The size (diameter) effect is central to the calibration.

More than 200 million liters (53 million gallons) of highly radioactive and hazardous waste is stored at the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State. The DOE's Hanford Site River Protection Project (RPP) mission includes tank waste retrieval, waste treatment, waste disposal, and tank farms closure activities. This mission will largely be accomplished by the construction and operation of three large treatment facilities at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP): (1) a Pretreatment (PT) facility intended to separate the tank waste into High Level Waste (HLW) and Low Activity Waste (LAW); (2) a HLW vitrification facility intended to immobilize the HLW for disposal at a geologic repository in Yucca Mountain; and (3) a LAW vitrification facility intended to immobilize the LAW for shallow land burial at Hanford's Integrated Disposal Facility (IDF). The LAW facility is on target to be completed in 2014, five years prior to the completion of the rest of the WTP. In order to gain experience in the operation of the LAW vitrification facility, accelerate retrieval from single-shell tank (SST) farms, and hasten the completion of the LAW immobilization, it has been proposed to begin treatment of the low-activity waste five years before …

In a well managed project, Quality Assurance is an integral part of the management activities performed on a daily basis. Management assures successful performance within budget and on schedule by using all the good business, scientific, engineering, quality assurance, and safety practices available. Quality assurance and safety practices employed on Nova are put in perspective by integrating them into the overall function of good project management. The Nova assurance management system was developed using the quality assurance (QA) approach first implemented at LLNL in early 1978. The LLNL QA program is described as an introduction to the Nova assurance management system. The Nova system is described pictorially through the Nova configuration, subsystems and major components, interjecting the QA techniques which are being pragmatically used to assure the successful completion of the project.

More than four years after the initial proposal of the Plasma Wake-field Accelerator (PWFA), it continues to be the object of much investigation, due to the promise of the ultra-high accelerating gradients that can exist in relativistic plasma waves driven in the wake of charged particle beams. These large amplitude plasma wake-fields are of interest in the laboratory, both for the wealth of basic nonlinear plasma wave phenomena which can be studied, as well as for the applications of acceleration of focusing of electrons and positrons in future linear colliders. Plasma wake-field waves are also of importance in nature, due to their possible role in direct cosmic ray acceleration. The purpose of the present work is to review the recent experimental advances made in PWFA research at Argonne National Laboratory, in which many interesting beam and plasma phenomena have been observed. Emphasis is given to discussion of the nonlinear aspects of the PWFA beam-plasma interaction. 29 refs., 13 figs.

In this paper we explore the possibility of building a tau-charm-factory at the Argonne National Laboratory. A tau-charm-factory is an e{sup +}e{sup {minus}} collider with a center-of-mass energy between 3.0 GeV and 5.0 GeV and a luminosity of at least 1 {times} 10{sup 33}cm{sup {minus}2}s{sup {minus}1}. Once operational, the facility will produce large samples of {tau} pairs, charm mesons, and charmonium with either negligible or well understood backgrounds. This will lead to high precision measurements in the second generation quark and the third generation lepton sectors that cannot be done at other facilities. Basic physical properties and processes, such as the tau neutrino mass, rare tau decays, charm decay constants, rare charm meson decays, neutral D{sup 0} -- meson mixing, and many more will be studied with unique precision. An initial design of the collider including the injector system is described. The design shows that a luminosity of at least 1 {times} 10{sup 33}cm{sup {minus}2}s{sup {minus}1} can be achieved over the entire center-of-mass energy range of the factory.

Our identification research for the past several years has focused on the problem of correctly discriminating small-magnitude explosions from a background of earthquakes, mining tremors, and other events. Small magnitudes lead to an emphasis on regional waveforms. The goal is to reduce the variance within the population of each type of event, while increasing the separation between the explosions and the other event types. We address this problem for both broad categories of seismic waves, body waves, and surface waves. First, we map out the effects of propagation and source size in advance so that they can be accounted for and removed from observed events. This can dramatically reduce the population variance. Second, we try to optimize the measurement process to improve the separation between population types. For body waves we focus on the identification power of the short-period regional phases Pn, Pg, Sn and Lg, and coda that can often be detected down to very small magnitudes. It is now well established that particular ratios of these phases, such as 6- to 8-Hz Pn/Lg, can effectively discriminate between closely located explosions and earthquakes. To extend this discrimination power over broad areas, we developed a revised Magnitude and Distance Amplitude …

This project has built a unique historic database of regional distance nuclear explosion, earthquake, and mine-related digital broadband seismograms for the western United States (US). The emphasis is on data from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)-managed stations MNA, ELK, KNB and LAC that recorded many nuclear tests and nearby earthquakes in broadband digital form since 1980, along with a small number of earlier events that were digitized from tapes. Through the generous cooperation of Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) we have also included waveforms from their Leo Brady network (BMN, DWN, LDS, NEL,TON). In addition we include data from other open broadband stations in the western US with long operating histories and/or ties to the International Monitoring System (IMS) (e.g. PFO, YKA, CMB, NEW, DUG, ANMO, TUC). These waveforms are associated with a reconciled catalog of events and station response information to facilitate analysis. The goal is to create a high-quality database that can be used in the future to analyze fundamental regional monitoring issues such as detection, location, magnitude, and discrimination. In the first stage of the project, we collected six different regional network catalogs from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), to provide accurate independent location information for events …

It is shown that recently published observations of angle- and polarization-dependent absorption of intense laser light are consistent with computer simulations of resonance absorption in a steepened plasma profile, with the additional assumption of a modestly rippled critical surface. About 10% absorption seems to be due to mechanisms not addressed in the simulations.

Technical nuclear forensics (TNF) refers to the collection, analysis and evaluation of pre- and post-detonation radiological or nuclear materials, devices, and/or debris. TNF is an integral component, complementing traditional forensics and investigative work, to help enable the attribution of discovered radiological or nuclear material. Research is needed to improve the capabilities of TNF. One research area of interest is determining the isotopic signatures of research reactors. Research reactors are a potential source of both radiological and nuclear material. Research reactors are often the least safeguarded type of reactor; they vary greatly in size, fuel type, enrichment, power, and burn-up. Many research reactors are fueled with highly-enriched uranium (HEU), up to {approx}93% {sup 235}U, which could potentially be used as weapons material. All of them have significant amounts of radiological material with which a radioactive dispersal device (RDD) could be built. Therefore, the ability to attribute if material originated from or was produced in a specific research reactor is an important tool in providing for the security of the United States. Currently there are approximately 237 operating research reactors worldwide, another 12 are in temporary shutdown and 224 research reactors are reported as shut down. Little is currently known about the …

The design and evaluation of media based hydrogen storage systems requires the use of detailed numerical models and experimental studies, with significant amount of time and monetary investment. Thus a scoping tool, referred to as the Acceptability Envelope, was developed to screen preliminary candidate media and storage vessel designs, identifying the range of chemical, physical and geometrical parameters for the coupled media and storage vessel system that allow it to meet performance targets. The model which underpins the analysis allows simplifying the storage system, thus resulting in one input-one output scheme, by grouping of selected quantities. Two cases have been analyzed and results are presented here. In the first application the DOE technical targets (Year 2010, Year 2015 and Ultimate) are used to determine the range of parameters required for the metal hydride media and storage vessel. In the second case the most promising metal hydrides available are compared, highlighting the potential of storage systems, utilizing them, to achieve 40% of the 2010 DOE technical target. Results show that systems based on Li-Mg media have the best potential to attain these performance targets.

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Numerical methods are capable of solving very difficult problems in solid mechanics and gas dynamics. In the design of engineering structures, critical decisions are possible if the behavior of materials is correctly described in the calculation. Problems of current interest require accurate analysis of stress-strain fields that range from very small elastic displacement to very large plastic deformation. A finite difference program is described that solves problems over this range and in two and three space-dimensions and time. A series of experiments and calculations serve to establish confidence in the plasticity formulation. The program can be used to design high pressure systems where plastic flow occurs. The purpose is to identify material properties, strength and elongation, that meet the operating requirements. An objective is to be able to perform destructive testing on a computer rather than on the engineering structure. Examples of topical interest are given.

There are many uses of predictions of ITER plasma performance. One is assessing requirements of different plasma regimes. For instance, what current drive and control are needed for steady state. The heating, current drive, and torque systems planned for initial DT operation are negative ion neutral beam injection (NB), ion cyclotron resonance (IC), and electron cyclotron resonance (EC). Which combinations of heating are optimal. What are benefits of the torques, current drive, and fueling using NB. What are the shine-through power and optimum voltage for the NB? What are optimal locations and aiming of the EC launchers? Another application is nuclear licensing (e.g. System integrity, how many neutrons).

This paper presents an experimental study of natural convection heat transfer for an Ionic Liquid. The experiments were performed for 1-butyl-2, 3-dimethylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide, ([C{sub 4}mmim][NTf{sub 2}]) at a Raleigh number range of 1.26 x 10{sup 7} to 8.3 x 10{sup 7}. In addition to determining the convective heat transfer coefficients, this study also included experimental determination of thermophysical properties of [C{sub 4}mmim][NTf{sub 2}] such as, density, viscosity, heat capacity, and thermal conductivity. The results show that the density of [C{sub 4}mmim][NTf{sub 2}] varies from 1.437-1.396 g/cm{sup 3} within the temperature range of 10-50 C, the thermal conductivity varies from 0.105-0.116 W/m.K between a temperature of 10 to 60 C, the heat capacity varies from 1.015 J/g.K - 1.760 J/g.K within temperature range of 25-340 C and the viscosity varies from 18cp-243cp within temperature range 10-75 C. The results for density, thermal conductivity, heat capacity, and viscosity were in close agreement with the values in the literature. Measured dimensionless Nusselt number was observed to be higher for the ionic liquid than that of DI water. This is expected as Nusselt number is the ratio of heat transfer by convection to conduction and the ionic liquid has lower thermal conductivity (approximately 18%) …

Modern scientific datasets present numerous data management and analysis challenges. State-of-the-art index and query technologies are critical for facilitating interactive exploration of large datasets, but numerous challenges remain in terms of designing a system for process- ing general scientific datasets. The system needs to be able to run on distributed multi-core platforms, efficiently utilize underlying I/O infrastructure, and scale to massive datasets. We present FastQuery, a novel software framework that address these challenges. FastQuery utilizes a state-of-the-art index and query technology (FastBit) and is designed to process mas- sive datasets on modern supercomputing platforms. We apply FastQuery to processing of a massive 50TB dataset generated by a large scale accelerator modeling code. We demonstrate the scalability of the tool to 11,520 cores. Motivated by the scientific need to search for inter- esting particles in this dataset, we use our framework to reduce search time from hours to tens of seconds.

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