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Scintillating Cocktail Mixtures and the Role of Water on the Optophysical Properties

Cordaro, Joseph G.; Feng, Patrick L.; Mengesha, Wondwosen; Bays, Nathan R.; Anstey, Mitchell

Two types of water - containing liquid scintillation mixtures were prepared in the present work. In the first, m ixtures of 2 - phenylethanol, water, diphenyl phosphate, sodium phenyl phosphate dibasic dihydrate, and the dye 2,5 - diphenyloxazole (PPO) have been investigated as liquid scintillators. In the second system, nonionic and mixed surfactant systems were investigated in conjunction with water and small amounts of toluene. In both cases, increasing amounts of water led to reductions in the scintillation light yield. Understanding what factors contr ibute to this phenomenon is the focus of this report. Changes in the solution microphase structure, diminishing aromatic content of the cocktail mixtures, and inefficient energy transfer to the dye a ppear to be responsible for the decreased light yield as more water is added . In the 2 - phenylethanol system, the observed experimental results are consistent with the formation of a bicontinuous microemulsion at higher water concentrations, which incorporates PPO and shields it from the quenching effects of the increasing polar matrix. Evidence for this proposed phase change comes from light scattering data, photo - and x - ray luminescence measurements, and optical transparency measurements . In the surfactant - based system, the quenching effect of water was found to be less than both commercially - available dioxane - naphthalene mixtures used for scintillation counting as well as the 2 - phenylethanol mixtures described above. The effect of different surfactant mixtures and concentrations were studied, revealing a benefic ial effect upon the scintillation light yield for mixed surfactant mixtures. These results are interpreted in the context of reactive radical species formation following water ionization , which leads to light - yield quenching in aqueous systems . The presence of surfactant(s) in these mixtures enables the formation of organic - rich regions that are spatially separated from the reactive radicals. This hypothesis is consistent with subsequent experiments that showed reduced light - yield quenching in the presence of radical - trapping additives. A notable result from these surfactant studies was the preparation of an aqueous scintillator that was transparent and showed neutron/gamma pulse - shape discrimination. Section II below provides background information on the significance of this finding. The combined work described herein has implications on other efforts to make water - based solution scintillators -- without aromatic content an efficient mechanism for ionizing radiation to sensitize emission from a dye is limited.

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Time Series Discord Detection in Medical Data using a Parallel Relational Database

Woodbridge, Diane M.; Bays, Nathan R.; Wilson, Andrew T.; Goldstein, Richard

Recent advances in sensor technology have made continuous real-time health monitoring available in both hospital and non-hospital settings. Since data collected from high frequency medical sensors includes a huge amount of data, storing and processing continuous medical data is an emerging big data area. Especially detecting anomaly in real time is important for patients’ emergency detection and prevention. A time series discord indicates a subsequence that has the maximum difference to the rest of the time series subsequences, meaning that it has abnormal or unusual data trends. In this study, we implemented two versions of time series discord detection algorithms on a high performance parallel database management system (DBMS) and applied them to 240 Hz waveform data collected from 9,723 patients. The initial brute force version of the discord detection algorithm takes each possible subsequence and calculates a distance to the nearest non-self match to find the biggest discords in time series. For the heuristic version of the algorithm, a combination of an array and a trie structure was applied to order time series data for enhancing time efficiency. The study results showed efficient data loading, decoding and discord searches in a large amount of data, benefiting from the time series discord detection algorithm and the architectural characteristics of the parallel DBMS including data compression, data pipe-lining, and task scheduling.

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Transport through an impurity tunnel coupled to a Si/SiGe quantum dot

Applied Physics Letters

Foote, Ryan H.; Ward, Daniel R.; Prance, J.R.; Bays, Nathan R.; Nielsen, Erik N.; Thorgrimsson, Brandur; Savage, D.E.; Friesen, Mark; Coppersmith, S.N.; Eriksson, M.A.

Achieving controllable coupling of dopants in silicon is crucial for operating donor-based qubit devices, but it is difficult because of the small size of donor-bound electron wavefunctions. Here, we report the characterization of a quantum dot coupled to a localized electronic state and present evidence of controllable coupling between the quantum dot and the localized state. A set of measurements of transport through the device enable the determination that the most likely location of the localized state is consistent with a location in the quantum well near the edge of the quantum dot. Our results are consistent with a gate-voltage controllable tunnel coupling, which is an important building block for hybrid donor and gate-defined quantum dot devices.

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A Process and Environment Aware Sierra/SolidMechanics Cohesive Zone Modeling Capability for Polymer/Solid Interfaces

Bays, Nathan R.; Hughes, Lindsey; Kropka, Jamie M.; Stavig, Mark E.; Stevens, Mark J.; Chambers, Robert S.

The performance and reliability of many mechanical and electrical components depend on the integrity of po lymer - to - solid interfaces . Such interfaces are found in adhesively bonded joints, encapsulated or underfilled electronic modules, protective coatings, and laminates. The work described herein was aimed at improving Sandia's finite element - based capability to predict interfacial crack growth by 1) using a high fidelity nonlinear viscoelastic material model for the adhesive in fracture simulations, and 2) developing and implementing a novel cohesive zone fracture model that generates a mode - mixity dependent toughness as a natural consequence of its formulation (i.e., generates the observed increase in interfacial toughness wi th increasing crack - tip interfacial shear). Furthermore, molecular dynamics simulations were used to study fundamental material/interfa cial physics so as to develop a fuller understanding of the connection between molecular structure and failure . Also reported are test results that quantify how joint strength and interfacial toughness vary with temperature.

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PANTHER. Trajectory Analysis

Bays, Nathan R.; Wilson, Andrew T.; Valicka, Christopher G.; Kegelmeyer, William P.; Shead, Timothy M.; Czuchlewski, Kristina R.; Newton, Benjamin D.

We want to organize a body of trajectories in order to identify, search for, classify and predict behavior among objects such as aircraft and ships. Existing compari- son functions such as the Fr'echet distance are computationally expensive and yield counterintuitive results in some cases. We propose an approach using feature vectors whose components represent succinctly the salient information in trajectories. These features incorporate basic information such as total distance traveled and distance be- tween start/stop points as well as geometric features related to the properties of the convex hull, trajectory curvature and general distance geometry. Additionally, these features can generally be mapped easily to behaviors of interest to humans that are searching large databases. Most of these geometric features are invariant under rigid transformation. We demonstrate the use of different subsets of these features to iden- tify trajectories similar to an exemplar, cluster a database of several hundred thousand trajectories, predict destination and apply unsupervised machine learning algorithms.

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Results 2251–2275 of 2,510
Results 2251–2275 of 2,510
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