Scintillation detector for carbon-14

Detector consists of plastic, cylindrical double-wall scintillation cell, which is filled with gas to be analyzed. Thin, inner cell wall is isolated optically from outer (guard) scintillator wall by evaporated-aluminum coating. Bonding technique provides mechanical support to cell wall when device is exposed to high temperatures

Implementation of structural response sensitivity calculations in a large-scale finite-element analysis system

The implementation includes a generalized method for specifying element cross-sectional dimensions as design variables that can be used in analytically calculating derivatives of output quantities from static stress, vibration, and buckling analyses for both membrane and bending elements. Limited sample results for static displacements and stresses are presented to indicate the advantages of analytically calclating response derivatives compared to finite difference methods. Continuing developments to implement these procedures into an enhanced version of the system are also discussed

Central Charge and the Andrews-Bailey Construction

From the equivalence of the bosonic and fermionic representations of finitized characters in conformal field theory, one can extract mathematical objects known as Bailey pairs. Recently Berkovich, McCoy and Schilling have constructed a `generalized' character formula depending on two parameters \ra and $\r2$, using the Bailey pairs of the unitary model $M(p-1,p)$. By taking appropriate limits of these parameters, they were able to obtain the characters of model $M(p,p+1)$, $N=1$ model $SM(p,p+2)$, and the unitary $N=2$ model with central charge $c=3(1-{\frac{2}{p}})$. In this letter we computed the effective central charge associated with this `generalized' character formula using a saddle point method. The result is a simple expression in dilogarithms which interpolates between the central charges of these unitary models.Comment: Latex2e, requires cite.sty package, 13 pages. Additional footnote, citation and reference

Consensus Acceleration in Multiagent Systems with the Chebyshev Semi-Iterative Method

We consider the fundamental problem of reaching consensus in multiagent systems; an operation required in many applications such as, among others, vehicle formation and coordination, shape formation in modular robotics, distributed target tracking, and environmental modeling. To date, the consensus problem (the problem where agents have to agree on their reported values) has been typically solved with iterative decentralized algorithms based on graph Laplacians. However, the convergence of these existing consensus algorithms is often too slow for many important multiagent applications, and thus they are increasingly being combined with acceleration methods. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art acceleration techniques require parameters that can be optimally selected only if complete information about the network topology is available, which is rarely the case in practice. We address this limitation by deriving two novel acceleration methods that can deliver good performance even if little information about the network is available. The first proposed algorithm is based on the Chebyshev semi-iterative method and is optimal in a well defined sense; it maximizes the worst-case convergence speed (in the mean sense) given that only rough bounds on the extremal eigenvalues of the network matrix are available. It can be applied to systems where agents use unreliable communication links, and its computational complexity is similar to those of simple Laplacian-based methods. This algorithm requires synchronization among agents, so we also propose an asynchronous version that approximates the output of the synchronous algorithm. Mathematical analysis and numerical simulations show that the convergence speed of the proposed acceleration methods decrease gracefully in scenarios where the sole use of Laplacian-based methods is known to be impractical

Analysis of secondary cells with lithium anodes and immobilized fused-salt electrolytes

Secondary cells with liquid lithium anodes, liquid bismuth or tellurium cathodes, and fused lithium halide electrolytes immobilized as rigid pastes operate between 380 and 485 degrees. Applications include power sources in space, military vehicle propulsion and special commercial vehicle propulsion