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Nanoporous films for epitaxial growth of single crystal semiconductor materials : final LDRD report

Burckel, David B.; Fan, Hongyou; Koleske, Daniel; Williams, John D.; Steen, William A.; Rowen, Adam M.

This senior council Tier 1 LDRD was focused on exploring the use of porous growth masks as a method for defect reduction during heteroepitaxial crystal growth. Initially our goal was to investigate porous silica as a growth mask, however, we expanded the scope of the research to include several other porous growth masks on various size scales, including mesoporous carbon, photolithographically patterned SU-8 and carbonized SU-8 structures. Use of photolithographically defined growth templates represents a new direction, unique in the extensive literature of patterned epitaxial growth, and presents the possibility of providing a single step growth mask. Additional research included investigation of pore viability via electrochemical deposition into high aspect ratio photoresist. This project was a small footprint research effort which, nonetheless, produced significant progress towards both the stated goal as well as unanticipated research directions.

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Statistical coarse-graining of molecular dynamics into peridynamics

Lehoucq, Rich; Silling, Stewart

This paper describes an elegant statistical coarse-graining of molecular dynamics at finite temperature into peridynamics, a continuum theory. Peridynamics is an efficient alternative to molecular dynamics enabling dynamics at larger length and time scales. In direct analogy with molecular dynamics, peridynamics uses a nonlocal model of force and does not employ stress/strain relationships germane to classical continuum mechanics. In contrast with classical continuum mechanics, the peridynamic representation of a system of linear springs and masses is shown to have the same dispersion relation as the original spring-mass system.

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Resolving the sign ambiguity in the singular value decomposition

Kolda, Tamara G.

Many modern data analysis methods involve computing a matrix singular value decomposition (SVD) or eigenvalue decomposition (EVD). Principal components analysis is the time-honored example, but more recent applications include latent semantic indexing, hypertext induced topic selection (HITS), clustering, classification, etc. Though the SVD and EVD are well-established and can be computed via state-of-the-art algorithms, it is not commonly mentioned that there is an intrinsic sign indeterminacy that can significantly impact the conclusions and interpretations drawn from their results. Here we provide a solution to the sign ambiguity problem and show how it leads to more sensible solutions.

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Framework for Integrating Safety, Operations, Security, and Safeguards in the Design and Operation of Nuclear Facilities

Darby, John L.; Horak, Karl E.; Tolk, Keith M.; Whitehead, Donnie W.; Lachance, Jeffrey L.

The US is currently on the brink of a nuclear renaissance that will result in near-term construction of new nuclear power plants. In addition, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) ambitious new Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) program includes facilities for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and reactors for transmuting safeguards material. The use of nuclear power and material has inherent safety, security, and safeguards (SSS) concerns that can impact the operation of the facilities. Recent concern over terrorist attacks and nuclear proliferation led to an increased emphasis on security and safeguard issues as well as the more traditional safety emphasis. To meet both domestic and international requirements, nuclear facilities include specific SSS measures that are identified and evaluated through the use of detailed analysis techniques. In the past, these individual assessments have not been integrated, which led to inefficient and costly design and operational requirements. This report provides a framework for a new paradigm where safety, operations, security, and safeguards (SOSS) are integrated into the design and operation of a new facility to decrease cost and increase effectiveness. Although the focus of this framework is on new nuclear facilities, most of the concepts could be applied to any new, high-risk facility.

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The GNEMRE Dendro Tool

Merchant, Bion J.

The GNEMRE Dendro Tool provides a previously unrealized analysis capability in the field of nuclear explosion monitoring. Dendro Tool allows analysts to quickly and easily determine the similarity between seismic events using the waveform time-series for each of the events to compute cross-correlation values. Events can then be categorized into clusters of similar events. This analysis technique can be used to characterize historical archives of seismic events in order to determine many of the unique sources that are present. In addition, the source of any new events can be quickly identified simply by comparing the new event to the historical set.

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The role of Z-pinch fusion transmutation of waste in the nuclear fuel cycle

Cipiti, Benjamin B.; Martin, William J.; Mehlhorn, Thomas A.; Rochau, Gary E.; Smith, James D.; Guild-Bingham, Avery

The resurgence of interest in reprocessing in the United States with the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership has led to a renewed look at technologies for transmuting nuclear waste. Sandia National Laboratories has been investigating the use of a Z-Pinch fusion driver to burn actinide waste in a sub-critical reactor. The baseline design has been modified to solve some of the engineering issues that were identified in the first year of work, including neutron damage and fuel heating. An on-line control feature was added to the reactor to maintain a constant neutron multiplication with time. The transmutation modeling effort has been optimized to produce more accurate results. In addition, more attention was focused on the integration of this burner option within the fuel cycle including an investigation of overall costs. This report presents the updated reactor design, which is able to burn 1320 kg of actinides per year while producing 3,000 MWth.

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Manager-worker-based model for the parallelization of Quantum Monte Carlo on heterogeneous and homogeneous networks

Proposed for publication in the Journal of Computational Chemistry.

Muller, Richard P.

A manager-worker-based parallelization algorithm for Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC-MW) is presented and compared with the pure iterative parallelization algorithm, which is in common use. The new manager-worker algorithm performs automatic load balancing, allowing it to perform near the theoretical maximal speed even on heterogeneous parallel computers. Furthermore, the new algorithm performs as well as the pure iterative algorithm on homogeneous parallel computers. When combined with the dynamic distributable decorrelation algorithm (DDDA) [Feldmann et al., J Comput Chem 28, 2309 (2007)], the new manager-worker algorithm allows QMC calculations to be terminated at a prespecified level of convergence rather than upon a prespecified number of steps (the common practice). This allows a guaranteed level of precision at the least cost. Additionally, we show (by both analytic derivation and experimental verification) that standard QMC implementations are not perfectly parallel as is often claimed.

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Tools for characterizing biomembranes : final LDRD report

Alam, Todd M.; Mcintyre, Sarah K.; Stevens, Mark J.

A suite of experimental nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy tools were developed to investigate lipid structure and dynamics in model membrane systems. By utilizing both multinuclear and multidimensional NMR experiments a range of different intra- and inter-molecular contacts were probed within the membranes. Examples on pure single component lipid membranes and on the canonical raft forming mixture of DOPC/SM/Chol are presented. A unique gel phase pretransition in SM was also identified and characterized using these NMR techniques. In addition molecular dynamics into the hydrogen bonding network unique to sphingomyelin containing membranes were evaluated as a function of temperature, and are discussed.

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Delay locked loop integrated circuit

Brocato, Robert W.

This report gives a description of the development of a Delay Locked Loop (DLL) integrated circuit (IC). The DLL was developed and tested as a stand-alone IC test chip to be integrated into a larger application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), the Quadrature Digital Waveform Synthesizer (QDWS). The purpose of the DLL is to provide a digitally programmable delay to enable synchronization between an internal system clock and external peripherals with unknown clock skew. The DLL was designed and fabricated in the IBM 8RF process, a 0.13 {micro}m CMOS process. It was designed to operate with a 300MHz clock and has been tested up to 500MHz.

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Results 79901–80000 of 99,299
Results 79901–80000 of 99,299