Graviton Production in Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

We study the feasibility of producing the graviton of the novel Kaluza-Klein theory in which there are d large compact dimensions in addition to the 4 dimensions of Minkowski spacetime. We calculate the cross section for producing such a graviton in nucleus-nucleus collisions via t-channel photon-photon fusion using the semiclassical Weizsacker-Williams method and show that it can exceed the cross section for graviton production in electron-positron scattering by several orders of magnitude.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

An Analysis of the Tradeoffs between Policy Instruments to Induce Dairy Producers in California to Participate in a Centralized Digester

Tradeoff between different utility rates and policy intervention to induce dairy producer to join a regional digester are studied. Results demonstrate that a regional digester for the dairy industry in California is feasible given the digester receives $0.05 per kWh and government intervention or$0.0925 per kWh with no intervention.Agricultural and Food Policy, Livestock Production/Industries,

Excited Delirium

Excited (or agitated) delirium is characterized by agitation, aggression, acute distress and sudden death, often in the pre-hospital care setting. It is typically associated with the use of drugs that alter dopamine processing, hyperthermia, and, most notably, sometimes with death of the affected person in the custody of law enforcement. Subjects typically die from cardiopulmonary arrest, although the cause is debated. Unfortunately an adequate treatment plan has yet to be established, in part due to the fact that most patients die before hospital arrival. While there is still much to be discovered about the pathophysiology and treatment, it is hoped that this extensive review will provide both police and medical personnel with the information necessary to recognize and respond appropriately to excited delirium

Contrasting Climate Ensembles: A Model-based Visualization Approach for Analyzing Extreme Events

AbstractThe use of increasingly sophisticated means to simulate and observe natural phenomena has led to the production of larger and more complex data. As the size and complexity of this data increases, the task of data analysis becomes more challeng- ing. Determining complex relationships among variables requires new algorithm development. Addressing the challenge of handling large data necessitates that algorithm implementations target high performance computing platforms. In this work we present a technique that allows a user to study the interactions among multiple variables in the same spatial extents as the underlying data. The technique is implemented in an existing parallel analysis and visualization framework in order that it be applicable to the largest datasets. The foundation of our approach is to classify data points via inclusion in, or distance to, multivariate representations of relationships among a subset of the variables of a dataset. We abstract the space in which inclusion is calculated and through various space transformations we alleviate the necessity to consider variables’ scales and distributions when making comparisons. We apply this approach to the problem of highlighting variations in climate model ensembles

An Electroweak Weizsacker-Williams Method

The Weizsacker-Williams method is a semiclassical approximation scheme used to analyze a wide variety of electromagnetic interactions. It can greatly simplify calculations that would otherwise be impractical or impossible to carry out using the standard route of the Feynman rules. With a few reasonable assumptions, the scope of the method was generalized so as to accommodate weak, as well as the usual electromagnetic, interactions. The results are shown to be in excellent agreement, in the high energy limit of interest, with other methods, and the generalized scheme is shown to still work in regimes of analysis where those methods break down.Comment: PhD thesis, 239 pages, 36 figures, LaTe

Modern Scientific Visualization is more than Just Pretty Pictures

While the primary product of scientific visualization is images and movies, its primary objective is really scientific insight. Too often, the focus of visualization research is on the product, not the mission. This paper presents two case studies, both that appear in previous publications, that focus on using visualization technology to produce insight. The first applies"Query-Driven Visualization" concepts to laser wakefield simulation data to help identify and analyze the process of beam formation. The second uses topological analysis to provide a quantitative basis for (i) understanding the mixing process in hydrodynamic simulations, and (ii) performing comparative analysis of data from two different types of simulations that model hydrodynamic instability

Application of High-performance Visual Analysis Methods to Laser Wakefield Particle Acceleration Data

Our work combines and extends techniques from high-performance scientific data management and visualization to enable scientific researchers to gain insight from extremely large, complex, time-varying laser wakefield particle accelerator simulation data. We extend histogram-based parallel coordinates for use in visual information display as well as an interface for guiding and performing data mining operations, which are based upon multi-dimensional and temporal thresholding and data subsetting operations. To achieve very high performance on parallel computing platforms, we leverage FastBit, a state-of-the-art index/query technology, to accelerate data mining and multi-dimensional histogram computation. We show how these techniques are used in practice by scientific researchers to identify, visualize and analyze a particle beam in a large, time-varying dataset