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An attempt has been made to derive a version of the virial integral that would describe average properties of the interstellar medium (ISM). It is suggested to eliminate the (large) contribution of stellar matter by introducing 'exclusion zones' surrounding stars. Such an approach leads to the appearance of several types of additional surface integrals in the general expression. Their contribution depends on the rate of energy and matter exchange between the stars and ISM. If this exchange is weak, one can obtain a desired virial integral for ISM. However, the presence of intermittent large-scale energetic events significantly constrains the applicability of the virial theorem. If valid, the derived virial integral is dominated by cold molecular/atomic clouds, with only minor contribution of the global magnetic field and low-density warm part.

We construct the microstates of near-extremal black holes in AdS_5 x S5 as gases of defects distributed in heavy BPS operators in the dual SU(N) Yang-Mills theory. These defects describe open strings on spherical D3-branes in the S5, and we show that they dominate the entropy by directly enumerating them and comparing the results with a partition sum calculation. We display new decoupling limits in which the field theory of the lightest open strings on the D-branes becomes dual to a near-horizon region of the black hole geometry. In the single-charge black hole we find evidence for an infrared duality between SU(N) Yang-Mills theories that exchanges the rank of the gauge group with an R-charge. In the two-charge case (where pairs of branes intersect on a line), the decoupled geometry includes an AdS_3 factor with a two-dimensional CFT dual. The degeneracy in this CFT accounts for the black hole entropy. In the three-charge case (where triples of branes intersect at a point), the decoupled geometry contains an AdS_2 factor. Below a certain critical mass, the two-charge system displays solutions with naked timelike singularities even though they do not violate a BPS bound. We suggest a string theoretic resolution of these …

Bacteria of the genus Deinococcus are extremely resistant to ionizing radiation (IR), ultraviolet light (UV) and desiccation. The mesophile Deinococcus radiodurans was the first member of this group whose genome was completely sequenced. Analysis of the genome sequence of D. radiodurans, however, failed to identify unique DNA repair systems. To further delineate the genes underlying the resistance phenotypes, we report the whole-genome sequence of a second Deinococcus species, the thermophile Deinococcus geothermalis, which at itsoptimal growth temperature is as resistant to IR, UV and desiccation as D. radiodurans, and a comparative analysis of the two Deinococcus genomes. Many D. radiodurans genes previously implicated in resistance, but for which no sensitive phenotype was observed upon disruption, are absent in D. geothermalis. In contrast, most D. radiodurans genes whose mutants displayed a radiation-sensitive phenotype in D. radiodurans are conserved in D. geothermalis. Supporting the existence of a Deinococcus radiation response regulon, a common palindromic DNA motif was identified in a conserved set of genes associated with resistance, and a dedicated transcriptional regulator was predicted. We present the case that these two species evolved essentially the same diverse set of gene families, and that the extreme stress-resistance phenotypes of the Deinococcus lineage emerged …

The 100-F-36 waste site is the location of the former 108-F Biological Laboratory. The building was closed in 1973, decontaminated, decommissioned, and eventually demolished in 1999. In accordance with this evaluation, the confirmatory sampling results support a reclassification of this site to No Action. The current site conditions achieve the remedial action objectives and the corresponding remedial action goals established in the Remaining Sites ROD. The results of confirmatory sampling show that residual contaminant concentrations do not preclude any future uses and allow for unrestricted use of shallow zone soils. The results also demonstrate that residual contaminant concentrations are protective of groundwater and the Columbia River.

Light-driven oxidation of water to dioxygen in plants, algae and cyanobacteria iscatalyzed within photosystem II (PS II) by a Mn4Ca cluster. Although the cluster has been studied by many different methods, the structure and the mechanism have remained elusive. X-ray absorption and emission spectroscopy and EXAFS studies have been particularly useful in probing the electronic and geometric structure, and the mechanism of the water oxidation reaction. Recent progress, reviewed here, includes polarized X-ray absorption spectroscopy measurements of PS II single crystals. Analysis of those results has constrained the Mn4Ca cluster geometry to a setof three similar high-resolution structures. The structure of the cluster from the present study is unlike either the 3.0 or 3.5 Angstrom-resolution X-ray structures or other previously proposed models. The differences between the models derived from X-rayspectroscopy and crystallography are predominantly because of damage to the Mn4Ca cluster by X-rays under the conditions used for structure determination by X-ray crystallography. X-ray spectroscopy studies are also used for studying the changes in the structure of the Mn4Ca catalytic center as it cycles through the five intermediate states known as the Si-states (i=0-4). The electronic structure of the Mn4Ca cluster has been studied more recently using resonant inelastic X-ray …

We report on design studies for a seeded FEL light source that is responsive to the scientific needs of the future. The FEL process increases radiation flux by several orders of magnitude above existing incoherent sources, and offers the additional enhancements attainable by optical manipulations of the electron beam: control of the temporal duration and bandwidth of the coherent output, reduced gain length in the FEL, utilization of harmonics to attain shorter wavelengths, and precise synchronization of the x-ray pulse with seed laser systems. We describe an FEL facility concept based on a high repetition rate RF photocathode gun, that would allow simultaneous operation of multiple independent FEL's, each producing high average brightness, tunable over the VUV-soft x-ray range, and each with individual performance characteristics determined by the configuration of the FEL. SASE, enhanced-SASE (ESASE), seeded, harmonic generation, and other configurations making use of optical manipulations of the electron beam may be employed, providing a wide range of photon beam properties to meet varied user demands.

In this report we derive a model for a highly scattering medium, implemented as a set of MATLAB functions. This model is used to analyze an approach for using time-reversal to enhance the detection of a single frequency source in a highly scattering medium. The basic approach is to apply the singular value decomposition to the multistatic response matrix for a time-reversal array system. We then use the array in a purely passive mode, measuring the response to the presence of a source. The measured response is projected onto the singular vectors, creating a time-reversal pseudo-spectrum. We can then apply standard detection techniques to the pseudo-spectrum to determine the presence of a source. If the source is close to a particular scatterer in the medium, then we would expect an enhancement of the inner product between the array response to the source with the singular vector associated with that scatterer. In this note we begin by deriving the Foldy-Lax model of a highly scattering medium, calculate both the field emitted by the source and the multistatic response matrix of a time-reversal array system in the medium, then describe the initial analysis approach.

If carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technologies areimplemented on a large scale, the amounts of CO2 injected and sequesteredunderground could be extremely large. The stored CO2 then replaces largevolumes of native brine, which can cause considerable pressureperturbation and brine migration in the deep saline formations. Ifhydraulically communicating, either directly via updipping formations orthrough interlayer pathways such as faults or imperfect seals, theseperturbations may impact shallow groundwater or even surface waterresources used for domestic or commercial water supply. Possibleenvironmental concerns include changes in pressure and water table,changes in discharge and recharge zones, as well as changes in waterquality. In compartmentalized formations, issues related to large-scalepressure buildup and brine displacement may also cause storage capacityproblems, because significant pressure buildup can be produced. Toaddress these issues, a three-year research project was initiated inOctober 2006, the first part of which is summarized in this annualreport.

Currently, most of our thinking about the defects responsible for initiating laser damage considers them as featureless absorbers. However, an increasing body of evidence, particularly involving multi-wavelength irradiation, suggests electronic structure of damage initiators is important in determining both initiation and conditioning behaviors in KDP. The effective absorption coefficient of energy under multi-wavelength irradiation cannot be accounted for by a structureless absorber, but is consistent with an initiator with a multi-level structure. We outline the evidence and assess the ability of such a simple multi-level model to explain these and other experimentally observed behaviors.

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Calculations have been performed for postulated transients in the VVR-SM Reactor at the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) of the Academy of Sciences in the Republic of Uzbekistan. (The reactor designation in Cyrillic is BBP-CM; transliterating characters to English gives VVRSM but translating words gives WWR-SM.) These calculations have been performed at the request of staff of the INP who are performing similar calculations. The transients considered were established during working meetings between Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and INP staff during summer 2006 [Ref. 1], subsequent email correspondence, and subsequent staff visits. Calculations were performed for the current high-enriched uranium (HEU) core, the proposed low-enriched uranium (LEU) core, and one mixed HEU-LEU core during the transition. These calculations have been performed independently from those being performed by INP and serve as one step in the verification process.

We study the evolution and saturation of the gluondistribution function in the quark-gluon plasma as probed by apropagating parton and its effect on the computation of jet quenching ortransport parameter $\hat q $. For thermal partons, the saturation scale$Q2_s$ is found to be proportional to the Debye screening mass $\mu_D2$.For hard probes, evolution at small $x=Q2_s/6ET$ leads to jet energydependence of hat q. We study this dependence for both a conformal gaugetheory in weak and strong coupling limit and for (pure gluon) QCD. Theenergy dependence can be used to extract the shear viscosity $\eta$ ofthe medium since $\eta$ can be related to the transport parameter forthermal partons in a transport description. We also derive upper boundson the transport parameter for both energetic and thermal partons. Thelater leads to a lower bound on shear viscosity-to-entropy density ratiowhich is consistent with the conjectured lower bound $\eta/s\geq 1/4\pi$.Implications on the study of jet quenching at RHIC and LHC and the bulkproperties of the dense matter are discussed.

It is well known that large Nb3Sn Cable-in-Conduit Conductors (CICC) do not always completely utilize current carrying capacity of the strands they are made of. The modern state of theory is not accurate enough to eliminate CICC full scale testing. Measuring properties of large CICC is not a simple task due to variety of parameters that need to be controlled, like temperature, exposure of all the strands to the peak magnetic field, mass flow and particular nonuniform current distribution. The paper presents some measurement issues of CICC testing in a short sample test facility, particularly, conditions for uniform current distribution and effect of twist pitches on the critical current.

This month's issue has the following articles: (1) Homeland Security Begins Abroad--Commentary by John C. Doesburg; (2) Out of Harm's Way--New physical protection and accountability systems, together with a focus on security, safeguard nuclear materials in the Russian Federation; (3) A Calculated Journey to the Center of the Earth--Determining the permeability of partially melted metals in a mineral matrix unlocks secrets about the formation of Earth's core; (4) Wireless That Works--Communication technologies using ultrawideband radar are improving national security; and (5) Power to the People--Edward Teller envisioned safe and plentiful nuclear power for peaceful applications.

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) will produce photon pulses with a unique and desirable combination of properties. Their short X-ray wavelengths allow penetration into materials and the ability to probe structure at and below the nanometer scale. Their ultra-short duration gives information about this structure at the fundamental time-scales of atoms and molecules. The extreme intensity of the pulses will allow this information to be acquired in a single shot, so that these studies can be carried out on non-repeatable processes or on weakly-scattering objects that will be modified by the pulse. A fourth property of XFEL pulses is their high transverse coherence, which brings the promise of decades of innovation in visible optics to the X-ray regime, such as holography, interferometry, and laser-based imaging. Making an effective use of XFEL pulses, however, will benefit from innovations that are new to both X-ray science and coherent optics. One such innovation is the new method of time-delay X-ray holography [1], recently demonstrated at the FLASH FEL at DESY in Hamburg, to measure the evolution of objects irradiated by intense pulses. One of the pressing questions about the high-resolution XFEL imaging and characterization of non-periodic or weakly-scattering objects is the effect of the …

In this talk, I summarize a recent study showing that the large-x parton distributions contain important information on the quark orbital angular momentum of nucleon. This contribution could explain the conflict between the experimental data and the theory predictions for the polarized quark distributions. Future experiments at JLab shall provide further test for our predictions.

An Access Grid Venue Server provides access to individual Virtual Venues, virtual spaces where users can collaborate using the Access Grid Venue Client software. This manual describes the Venue Server component of the Access Grid Toolkit, version 2.3. Covered here are the basic operations of starting a venue server, modifying its configuration, and modifying the configuration of the individual venues.

InfiniBand (IB) is a popular network technology for modern high-performance computing systems. MPI implementations traditionally support IB using a reliable, connection-oriented (RC) transport. However, per-process resource usage that grows linearly with the number of processes, makes this approach prohibitive for large-scale systems. IB provides an alternative in the form of a connectionless unreliable datagram transport (UD), which allows for near-constant resource usage and initialization overhead as the process count increases. This paper describes a UD-based implementation for IB in Open MPI as a scalable alternative to existing RC-based schemes. We use the software reliability capabilities of Open MPI to provide the guaranteed delivery semantics required by MPI. Results show that UD not only requires fewer resources at scale, but also allows for shorter MPI startup times. A connectionless model also improves performance for applications that tend to send small messages to many different processes.

Aqueous solutions (mixed waste) generated from various LLNL operations, such as debris washing, sample preparation and analysis, and equipment maintenance and cleanout, were combined for storage in the B695 tank farm. Prior to combination the individual waste streams had different codes depending on the particular generating process and waste characteristics. The largest streams were CWC 132, 791, 134, 792. Several smaller waste streams were also included. This combined waste stream was treated at LLNL's waste treatment facility using a vacuum filtration and cool vapor evaporation process in preparation for discharge to sanitary sewer. Prior to discharge, the treated waste stream was sampled and the results were reviewed by LLNL's water monitoring specialists. The treated solution was discharged following confirmation that it met the discharge criteria. A major source, accounting for 50% for this waste stream, is metal machining, cutting and grinding operations in the engineering machine shops in B321/B131. An additional 7% was from similar operations in B131 and B132S. This waste stream primarily contains metal cuttings from machined parts, machining coolant and water, with small amounts of tramp oil from the machining and grinding equipment. Several waste reduction measures for the B321 machine shop have been taken, including the …

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The zeroth theorem of the history of science, enunciated byE. P. Fischer, states that a discovery (rule,regularity, insight) namedafter someone (often) did not originate with that person. I present fiveexamples from physics: the Lorentz condition partial muAmu = 0 definingthe Lorentz gauge of the electromagnetic potentials; the Dirac deltafunction, delta(x); the Schumann resonances of the earth-ionospherecavity; the Weizsacker-Williams method of virtual quanta; the BMTequation of spin dynamics. I give illustrated thumbnail sketches of boththe true and reputed discoverers and quote from their "discovery"publications.

Discussion of space-charge effects in a photoluminescence cell that will be used as a non-disruptive total energy monitor at the LCLS facility is presented. Regimes where primary photoelectrons will be confined within the X-ray beam aperture are identified. Effects of the space-charge on the further evolution of the electron and ion populations are discussed. Parameters of the afterglow plasma are evaluated. Conditions under which the detector output will be proportional to the pulse energy are defined.

Residual fallout contamination from the nuclear test program in the Marshall Islands is a concern to Marshall Islanders because of the potential health risks associated with exposure to residual fallout contamination in the environment. Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have been monitoring the amount of fallout radiation delivered to Utrok Atoll residents over the past 4 years. This briefing document gives an outline of our findings from the whole body counting and plutonium bioassay monitoring programs. Additional information can be found on the Marshall Islands web site (http://eed.lnl.gov/mi/). Cesium-137 is an important radioactive isotope produced in nuclear detonations and can be taken up from coral soils into locally grown food crop products that form an important part of the Marshallese diet. The Marshall Islands whole body counting program has clearly demonstrated that the majority of Utrok Atoll residents acquire a very small but measurable quantity of cesium-137 in their bodies (Hamilton et al., 2006; Hamilton et. al., 2007a; 2007b;). During 2006, a typical resident of Utrok Atoll received about 3 mrem of radiation from internally deposited cesium-137 (Hamilton et al., 2007a). The population-average dose contribution from cesium-137 is around 2% of the total radiation dose that people normally …