The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) operates a number of research and development (R&D) facilities for the U.S. Department of Energy at the Hanford Site, Washington. These facilities are subject to Clean Air Act regulations that require sampling of radionuclide air emissions from some of these facilities. A revision to an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard on sampling radioactive air emissions has recently been incorporated into federal and state regulations and a re-evaluation of affected facilities is being performed to determine the impact. The revised standard requires a well-mixed sampling location that must be demonstrated through tests specified in the standard. It also carries a number of maintenance requirements, including inspections and cleaning of the sampling system. Evaluations were performed in 2000 – 2002 on two PNNL facilities to determine the operational and design impacts of the new requirements. The evaluation included inspection and cleaning maintenance activities plus testing to determine if the current sampling locations meet criteria in the revised standard. Results show a wide range of complexity in inspection and cleaning activities depending on accessibility of the system, ease of removal, and potential impact on building operations (need for outages). As expected, these High Efficiency Particulate Air …

This dissertation presents results of experiment E94-010 performed at Jefferson Laboratory (simply known as JLab) in Hall A. The experiment aimed to measure the low Q{sup 2} evolution of the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn (GDH) integral from Q{sup 2} = 0.1 to 0.9 GeV{sup 2}. The GDH sum rule at the real photon point provides an important test of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). The low Q{sup 2} evolution of the GDH integral contests various resonance models, Chiral Perturbation Theory ({chi}#31;PT) and lattice QCD calculations, but more importantly, it helps us understand the transition between partonic and hadronic degrees of freedom. At high Q{sup 2}, beyond 1 GeV{sup 2}, the difference of the GDH integrals for the proton and the neutron is related to the Bjorken sum rule, another fundamental test of QCD. In addition, results of the measurements for the spin structure functions g{sub 1} and g{sub 2}, cross sections, and asymmetries are presented. E94-010 was the first experiment of its kind at JLab. It used a high-pressure, polarized {sup 3}He target with a gas pressure of 10 atm and average target polarization of 35%. For the first time, the polarized electron source delivered an average beam polarization of 70% with a beam current …

Exploration of the alkali metal/alkaline-earth metal/heavy tetrel (Sn or Pb) systems has revealed a vast array of new chemistry and novel structure types. The structures and properties of these new materials have been studied in an attempt to understand the chemistry of these and other related systems. The first phase reported is Rb{sub 4}Pb{sub 9} (K{sub 4}Pb{sub 9} type). The compound contains two different types of Pb{sub 9}{sup 4-} deltahedra, a monocapped square pyramid and a distorted tricapped trigonal prism. Both cluster geometries correspond to a nido assignment even though the tricapped trigonal prism is not the classic Wade's rules nido deltahedron expected for a monocapped square antiprism. Also, a series of compounds that contain square pyramidal Tt{sub 5} polyanions of tin and lead has been obtained in alkaline-earth or rare-earth metal-tetrel systems by direct fusion of the elements to yield Sr{sub 3}Sn{sub 5}, Ba{sub 3}Pb{sub 5}, and La{sub 3}Sn{sub 5}. These phases contain square pyramidal clusters of the tetrel elements that are weakly interlinked into chains via two types of longer intercluster interactions that are mediated by bridging cations and substantially influenced by cation size and the free electron count. Attempts at incorporating another main-group element to form heteroatomic …

This dissertation presents the development of the novel mechanical testing technique of in situ nanoindentation in a transmission electron microscope (TEM). This technique makes it possible to simultaneously observe and quantify the mechanical behavior of nano-scale volumes of solids.

The computational part of the thesis is the investigation of titanium chloride (II) as a potential catalyst for the bis-silylation reaction of ethylene with hexaclorodisilane at different levels of theory. Bis-silylation is an important reaction for producing bis(silyl) compounds and new C-Si bonds, which can serve as monomers for silicon containing polymers and silicon carbides. Ab initio calculations on the steps involved in a proposed mechanism are presented. This choice of reactants allows them to study this reaction at reliable levels of theory without compromising accuracy. The calculations indicate that this is a highly exothermic barrierless reaction. The TiCl{sub 2} catalyst removes a 50 kcal/mol activation energy barrier required for the reaction without the catalyst. The first step is interaction of TiCl{sub 2} with ethylene to form an intermediate that is 60 kcal/mol below the energy of the reactants. This is the driving force for the entire reaction. Dynamic correlation plays a significant role because RHF calculations indicate that the net barrier for the catalyzed reaction is 50 kcal/mol. They conclude that divalent Ti has the potential to become an important industrial catalyst for silylation reactions. In the programming part of the thesis, parallelization of different quantum chemistry methods is …

Magneto resistive memories (MRAM) are non-volatile memories which use magnetic instead of electrical structures to store data. These memories, apart from being non-volatile, offer a possibility to achieve densities better than DRAMs and speeds faster than SRAMs. MRAMs could potentially replace all computer memory RAM technologies in use today, leading to future applications like instan-on computers and longer battery life for pervasive devices. Such rapid development was made possible due to the recent discovery of large magnetoresistance in Spin tunneling junction devices. Spin tunneling junctions (STJ) are composite structures consisting of a thin insulating layer sandwiched between two magnetic layers. This thesis research is targeted towards these spin tunneling junction based Magnetic memories. In any memory, some kind of an interface circuit is needed to read the logic states. In this thesis, four such circuits are proposed and designed for Magnetic memories (MRAM). These circuits interface to the Spin tunneling junctions and act as sense amplifiers to read their magnetic states. The physical structure and functional characteristics of these circuits are discussed in this thesis. Mismatch effects on the circuits and proper design techniques are also presented. To demonstrate the functionality of these interface structures, test circuits were designed and …

Three papers are included in this dissertation. The first paper: ''Structural aspects of the fivefold quasicrystalline Al-Cu-Fe surface from STM and dynamical LEED studies'', is in press with ''Surface Science''. The second paper: ''An STM study of the atomic structure of the icosahedral Al-Cu-Fe fivefold surface'' is submitted to ''Physical Review B, Rapid Communication''. The third paper: ''Pseudomorphic starfish: arrangement of extrinsic metal atoms on a quasicrystalline substrate'' is submitted to ''Nature''. Following the third paper are general conclusions and appendices that document the published paper ''Structural aspects of the three-fold surface of icosahedral Al-Pd-Mn'' (appearing in volume 461, issue 1-3 of ''Surface Science'' on page L521-L527, 2000), the design as well as the specifications of the aluminum evaporator used in the aluminum deposition study in this dissertation, an extended discussion of the aluminum deposition on the quasicrystalline surface, and the STM database.

MP{_}Lite is a light weight message-passing library designed to deliver the maximum performance to applications in a portable and user friendly manner. The Virtual Interface (VI) architecture is a user-level communication protocol that bypasses the operating system to provide much better performance than traditional network architectures. By combining the high efficiency of MP{_}Lite and high performance of the VI architecture, they are able to implement a high performance message-passing library that has much lower latency and better throughput. The design and implementation of MP{_}Lite for M-VIA, which is a modular implementation of the VI architecture on Linux, is discussed in this thesis. By using the eager protocol for sending short messages, MP{_}Lite M-VIA has much lower latency on both Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet. The handshake protocol and RDMA mechanism provides double the throughput that MPICH can deliver for long messages. MP{_}Lite M-VIA also has the ability to channel-bonding multiple network interface cards to increase the potential bandwidth between nodes. Using multiple Fast Ethernet cards can double or even triple the maximum throughput without increasing the cost of a PC cluster greatly.

Eu(Ba{sub 1-x}Nd{sub x}){sub 2}Cu{sub 3}O{sub 7+{delta}} were systematically studied in order to understand how the valence of the rear earth elements, ionic sizes and magnetic moment affect the crystal structure and magnetic and electrical properties. Differential thermal analyses were carried out to check the phase purity, X-ray data were least-squares fitted to determine the lattice parameters, and DC-SQUID magnetometry was used to characterize the superconducting properties. These results showed that the crystallography is consistent with other EuLR123ss series, LR = La, Pr, Eu. The lattice parameters vary with the ionic radii of the rare earth ions. Unlike the uniform change in lattice parameter, the superconducting transition did not vary systematically with the ionic size of the dopants. Although the general trend was for T{sub c} to decrease with decreasing ionic size of the dopant, for the same doping level, Pr was anomalous, depressing T{sub c} faster. Although the exact mechanism is not clear, this result is consistent with the depression of T{sub c} for Pr substitution for the rare earth in R123. The critical current J{sub c} was determined using the Bean model from magnetization versus field measurements as a function of temperature and field. The effect of the dopants …

Understanding nuclear level densities and radiative strength functions is important for pure and applied nuclear physics. Recently, the Oslo Cyclotron Group has developed an experimental method to extract level densities and radiative strength functions simultaneously from the primary {gamma} rays after a light-ion reaction. A primary {gamma}-ray spectrum represents the {gamma}-decay probability distribution. The Oslo method is based on the Axel-Brink hypothesis, according to which the primary {gamma}-ray spectrum is proportional to the product of the level density at the final energy and the radiative strength function. The level density and the radiative strength function are fit to the experimental primary {gamma}-ray spectra, and then normalized to known data. The method works well for heavy nuclei. The present measurements extend the Oslo method to the lighter mass nuclei {sup 56}Fe and {sup 57}Fe. The experimental level densities in {sup 56}Fe and {sup 57}Fe reveal step structure. This step structure is a signature for nucleon pair breaking. The predicted pairing gap parameter is in good agreement with the step corresponding to the first pair breaking. Thermodynamic quantities for {sup 56}Fe and {sup 57}Fe are derived within the microcanonical and canonical ensembles using the experimental level densities. Energy-temperature relations are considered using …

The amount of information on the world wide web has grown enormously since its creation in 1990. Duplication of content is inevitable because there is no central management on the web. Studies have shown that many similar versions of the same text documents can be found throughout the web. This redundancy problem is more severe for multimedia content such as web video sequences, as they are often stored in multiple locations and different formats to facilitate downloading and streaming. Similar versions of the same video can also be found, unknown to content creators, when web users modify and republish original content using video editing tools. Identifying similar content can benefit many web applications and content owners. For example, it will reduce the number of similar answers to a web search and identify inappropriate use of copyright content. In this dissertation, they present a system architecture and corresponding algorithms to efficiently measure, search, and organize similar video sequences found on any large database such as the web.

Metal-to-insulator transitions are generally linked to two phenomena: electron-electron correlations and disorder. Although real systems are usually responding to a mixture of both, they can be classified as undergoing a Mott-transition, if the former process dominates, or an Anderson-transition, if the latter dominates. High-T{sub c} superconductors, e.g., are a candidate for the first class. Materials in which disorder drives the metal-to-insulator transition include doped semiconductors and amorphous materials. After briefly reviewing the previous research on transport in disordered materials and the disorder-induced metal-to-insulator transition, a summary of the model and the methods used in subsequent chapters is given.

The consideration of compliant mechanisms as Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) is the focus of this research endeavor. MEMS are micron to millimeter devices that combine electrical, mechanical, and information processing capabilities on the same device. These MEMS need some mechanical motion or parts that move relative to each other. This relative motion, using multiple parts, is not desired because of the assembly requirement and the friction introduced. Compliant devices limits or eliminates friction and the need for multi-component assembly. Compliant devices improve designs by creating single piece mechanisms. The purpose of this research is to validate surface micromachining as a viable fabrication process for compliant MEMS designs. Specifically, this research has sought to fabricate a micro-compliant gripper and a micro-compliant clamp to illustrate the process. While other researchers have created compliant MEMs, most have used comb-drive actuation methods and bulk micromachining processes. This research focused on fully-compliant devices that use device flexibility for motion and actuation. Validation of these compliant MEMS is achieved by structural optimization of device design and functional performance testing. This research contributes to the ongoing research in MEMS by evaluating the potential of using surface micromachining as a process for fabricating compliant micro-mechanisms.

This work is a theoretical investigation on the physical properties of semiconductor-based two-dimensional photonic crystals, in particular for what concerns systems embedded in planar dielectric waveguides (GaAs/AlGaAs, GaInAsP/InP heterostructures, and self-standing membranes) or based on macro-porous silicon. The photonic-band structure of photonic crystals and photonic-crystal slabs is numerically computed and the associated light-line problem is discussed, which points to the issue of intrinsic out-of-lane diffraction losses for the photonic bands lying above the light line. The photonic states are then classified by the group theory formalism: each mode is related to an irreducible representation of the corresponding small point group. The optical properties are investigated by means of the scattering matrix method, which numerically implements a variable-angle-reflectance experiment; comparison with experiments is also provided. The analysis of surface reflectance proves the existence of selection rules for coupling an external wave to a certain photonic mode. Such rules can be directly derived from symmetry considerations. Lastly, the control of wave propagation in weak-index contrast photonic-crystal slabs is tackled in view of designing building blocks for photonic integrated circuits. The proposed designs are found to comply with the major requirements of low-loss propagation, high and single-mode transmission. These notions are then collected …

The driving force behind much of the work in this dissertation was to gain further understanding of the unique olefin to carbene isomerization observed in the thermolysis of 1,1-dimethyl-2-methylenesilacyclobutane by finding new examples of it in other silicon and germanium compounds. This lead to the examination of a novel phenylmethylenesilacyclobut-2-ene, which did not undergo olefin to carbene rearrangement. A synthetic route to methylenegermacyclobutanes was developed, but the methylenegermacyclobutane system exhibited kinetic instability, making the study of the system difficult. In any case the germanium system decomposed through a complex mechanism which may not include olefin to carbene isomerization. However, this work lead to the study of the gas phase thermochemistry of a series of dialkylgermylene precursors in order to better understand the mechanism of the thermal decomposition of dialkylgermylenes. The resulting dialkylgermylenes were found to undergo a reversible intramolecular {beta} C-H insertion mechanism.

Doping experiments on La{sub 2}CuO{sub 4}, Sr{sub 2}CuO{sub 3} and SrCu{sub 2}(BO{sub 3}){sub 2} were performed with the intent of synthesizing new metallic low-=dimensional cuprate oxide compounds. Magnetic susceptibility {chi}(T) measurements on a polycrystalline La{sub 2}CuO{sub 4} sample chemically oxidized at room temperature in aqueous NaClO showed superconductivity with a superconducting transition temperature T{sub c} of 42.6 K and a Meissner fraction of 26%. They were unable to electrochemically oxidize La{sub 2}CuO{sub 4} in a nonaqueous solution of tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAOH) and methanol. Sr{sub 2}CuO{sub 3} was found to decompose upon exposure to air and water. Electron paramagnetic resonance, isothermal magnetization M(H), and {chi}(T) measurements on the primary decomposition product, Sr{sub 2}Cu(OH){sub 6}, were consistent with a nearly isolated, spin S = 1/2, local moment model for the Cu{sup +2} spins. From a fit of {chi}(T) by the Curie-Weiss law and of the M(H) isotherms by a modified Brillouin function, the weakly antiferromagnetic exchange interaction between adjacent Cu{sup +2} spins in Sr{sub 2}Cu(OH){sub 6} was found to be J/k{sub B} = 1.06(4) K. Doping studies on SrCu{sub 2}(BO{sub 3}){sub 2} were inconclusive. {chi}(T) measurements on an undoped polycrystalline sample of SrCu{sub 2}(BO{sub 3}){sub 2}, a sample treated with distilled water, …