A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

This report looks at considerations of the 112th Congress in furthering encouragement of broadband deployment and adoption so as decrease the "digital divide" between "information haves and have-nots."

This report describes the progress that New Chrysler has made since it was created from the sale of the Old Chrysler assets in July 2009 and the path of the divestment of the federal government's stake in Chrysler.

Report that discusses the National Labor Relations Act, the coverage it provides, unfair labor practices that the act prohibits, pre-election communications with employees, and several legal cases regarding the Act.

Report that explores the history of the Purple Heart and changes in eligibility over time as well as several current issues facing Congress.

Report that describes the state variations student disqualification from Unemployment Compensation benefits while they attend school.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "According to 2010 data from the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General (HHS-OIG) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), 10,187 subjects--individuals and entities involved in fraud cases--were investigated for health care fraud, including fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). These subjects included different types of providers and suppliers--such as physicians, hospitals, durable medical equipment suppliers, home health agencies, and pharmacies--that serve Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP beneficiaries. For criminal cases in 2010, medical facilities--including medical centers, clinics, or practices--and durable medical equipment suppliers were the most-frequent subjects investigated. Hospitals and medical facilities were the most-frequent subjects investigated in civil fraud cases, including cases that resulted in judgments or settlements."

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This report is on the Availability of Injunctive Relief for StandardEssential Patent Holders.

This report provides a short history of the federal excise tax on gasoline and the highway trust fund.

Dynamic Quantum Clustering (DQC) is an unsupervised, high visual data mining technique. DQC was tested as an analysis method for X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) data from the Transmission X-ray Microscopy (TXM) group. The TXM group images hierarchically heterogeneous materials with nanoscale resolution and large field of view. XANES data consists of energy spectra for each pixel of an image. It was determined that DQC successfully identifies structure in data of this type without prior knowledge of the components in the sample. Clusters and sub-clusters clearly reflected features of the spectra that identified chemical component, chemical environment, and density in the image. DQC can also be used in conjunction with the established data analysis technique, which does require knowledge of components present.

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The goal of any particle accelerator is to optimize the transport of a charged particle beam along a set path by confining the beam to a small region close to the design trajectory and directing it accurately along the beamline. To do so in the simplest fashion, accelerators use a system of magnets that exert approximately linear electromagnetic forces on the charged beam. These electromagnets bend the beam along the desired path, in the case of bending magnets, and constrain the beam to the desired area through alternating focusing and defocusing effects, in the case of quadrupole magnets. We can model the transport of such a beam through transfer matrices representing the actions of the various beamline elements. However, space charge effects, produced from self electric fields within the beam, defocus the beam and must be accounted for in the calculation of beam emittance. We present below the preliminary results of a MATLAB code built to model the transport of a charged particle beam through an accelerator and measure the emittance under the influence of space charge effects. We demonstrate the method of correctly calculating the emittance of a beam under space charge effects using a least square fit to …

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For the grand challenge of reducing our energy and carbon footprint, the development of renewable energy and energy efficient technologies offer a potential solution. Energy technologies can reduce our dependence on foreign oil as well as the energy consumed by the petroleum industry, the leading consumer of energy by a U.S. industry sector. Nonetheless, the manufacturing processes utilized to manufacture equipment for alternative energy technologies often involve energy-intensive processes. This undermines some of the advantages to moving to 'green' technologies in the first place. Our answer to the Industrial Technology Program's (ITP) Grand Challenge FOA was to develop a transformational low cost manufacturing process for plastic-based photovoltaics that will lower by over 50% both energy consumption and greenhouse emissions and offer a return-of-investment of over 20%. We demonstrated a Luminescent Solar Concentrator fabricated on a plastic acrylic substrate (i.e. no glass) that increases the power output of the PV cell by 2.2x with a 2% power efficiency as well as an LSC with a 7% power efficiency that increased the power output from the PV cells by 35%. S large area 20-inch x 60-inch building-integrated photovoltaic window was fabricated using contract manufacturing with a 4% power efficiency which improved the …

The X-Band Test Area (XTA) is being assembled in the NLCTA tunnel at SLAC to serve as a test facility for new RF guns. The first gun to be tested will be an upgraded version of the 5.6 cell, 200 MV/m peak field X-band gun designed at SLAC in 2003 for the Compton Scattering experiment run in ASTA. This new version includes some features implemented in 2006 on the LCLS gun such as racetrack couplers, increased mode separation and elliptical irises. These upgrades were developed in collaboration with LLNL since the same gun will be used in an injector for a LLNL Gamma-ray Source. Our beamline includes an X-band acceleration section which takes the electron beam up to 100 MeV and an electron beam measurement station. Other X-Band guns such as the UCLA Hybrid gun will be characterized at our facility.

During this period, our research was concentrated on the study of beam-beam effects in large storage-ring colliders and coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) effect in light sources. Our group was involved in and made significant contribution to several international accelerator projects such as the US-LHC project for the design of the LHC interaction regions, the luminosity upgrade of Tevatron and HERA, the design of eRHIC, and the U.S. LHC Accelerator Research Program (LARP) for the future LHC luminosity upgrade.

The heat loading on plasma facing components (PFCs) provides a critical limitation for design and operation of the first wall, divertor, and other special components. Power plants will have high power entering the scrape-off layer and transporting to the first wall and divertor. Although the design for steady heat loads is understood, the approach for transient and offnormal loading is not. The characterization of heat loads developed for ITER1 can be applied to power plants to better develop the operating space of viable solutions and point to research focus areas.

The electron pulses generated by the Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory occur on the order of tens of femtoseconds and cannot be directly measured by conventional means. The length of the pulses can instead be reconstructed by measuring the spectrum of optical transition radiation emitted by the electrons as they move toward a conducting foil. Because the emitted radiation occurs in the mid-infrared from 0.6 to 30 microns a novel optical layout is required. Using a helium-neon laser with wavelength 633 nm, a series of gold-coated off-axis parabolic mirrors were positioned to direct a beam through a zinc selenide prism and to a focus at a CCD camera for imaging. Constructing this layout revealed a number of novel techniques for reducing the aberrations introduced into the system by the off-axis parabolic mirrors. The beam had a recorded radius of less than a millimeter at its final focus on the CCD imager. This preliminary setup serves as a model for the spectrometer that will ultimately measure the LCLS electron pulse duration.

In a proton therapy beamline, the range compensator modulates the beam energy, which subsequently controls the depth at which protons deposit energy. In this paper, we introduce two computational representations of range compensator. One of our compensator representations, which we refer to as a subtraction solid-based range compensator, precisely represents the compensator. Our other representation, the 3D hexagon-based range compensator, closely approximates the compensator geometry. We have implemented both of these compensator models in a proton therapy Monte Carlo simulation called TOPAS (Tool for Particle Simulation). In the future, we will present a detailed study of the accuracy and runtime performance trade-offs between our two range compensator representations.

Based on existing sources, I compile parameters for the RF systems for a neutrino factory which accelerates to 10 GeV.

The Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), a division of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, is a synchrotron light source that provides x-rays for experimental use. As electrons are bent in the storage ring, they emit electromagnetic radiation. There are 372 different buckets which electrons can be loaded into. Different filling patterns produce different types of x-rays. What is the bunch pattern at a given time? Which filling pattern is better? Are there any flaws to the current injection system? These questions can be answered with this single photon counting experiment.

Bent crystals have demonstrated potential for use in beam collimation. A process called channeling is when accelerated particle beams are trapped by the nuclear potentials in the atomic planes within a crystal lattice. If the crystal is bent then the particles can follow the bending angle of the crystal. There are several different effects that are observed when particles travel through a bent crystal including dechanneling, volume capture, volume reflection and channeling. With a crystal placed at the edge of a particle beam, part of the fringe of the beam can be deflected away towards a detector or beam dump, thus helping collimate the beam. There is currently FORTRAN code by Igor Yazynin that has been used to model the passage of particles through a bent crystal. Using this code, the effects mentioned were explored for beam energy that would be seen at the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) at a range of crystal orientations with respect to the incoming beam. After propagating 5 meters in vacuum space past the crystal the channeled particles were observed to separate from most of the beam with some noise due to dechanneled particles. Progressively smaller bending radii, with corresponding shorter crystal …

Presented is the current progress of a search for the signature of a dark photon or new particle using the BaBar data set. We search for the processes e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} {gamma}{sub ISR}A{prime},A{prime} {yields} e{sup +}e{sup -} and e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} {gamma}{sub ISR}{gamma}, {gamma} {yields} A{prime},A{prime} {yields} e{sup +}e{sup -}, where {gamma}{sub ISR} is an initial state radiated photon of energy E{sub {gamma}} >= 1 GeV. Twenty-five sets of Monte Carlo, simulating e{sup +}e{sup -} collisions at an energy of 10.58 GeV, were produced with different values of the A{prime} mass ranging from 100 MeV to 9.5 GeV. The mass resolution is calculated based on Monte Carlo simulations. We implement ROOT's Toolkit for Multivariate Analysis (TMVA), a machine learning tool that allows us to evaluate the signal character of events based on many of discriminating variables. TMVA training is conducted with samples of Monte Carlo as signal and a small portion of Run 6 as background. The multivariate analysis produces additional cuts to separate signal and background. The signal efficiency and sensitivity are calculated. The analysis will move forward to fit the background and scan the residuals for the narrow resonance peak of a new particle.