Overview of Tabletop X-ray Laser Development at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

It is almost a decade since the first tabletop x-ray laser experiments were implemented at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The decision to pursue the picosecond-driven schemes at LLNL was largely based around the early demonstration of the tabletop Ne-like Ti x-ray laser at the Max Born Institute (MBI) as well as the established robustness of collisional excitation schemes. These picosecond x-ray lasers have been a strong growth area for x-ray laser research. Rapid progress in source development and characterization has achieved ultrahigh peak brightness rivaling the previous activities on the larger facilities. Various picosecond soft-x-ray based applications have benefited from the increased repetition rates. We will describe the activities at LLNL in this area

COOL-2: an object oriented support platform built above the Chorus micro-kernel

The Chorus Object Oriented Layer (COOL) is a layer built above the Chorus micro-kernel designed to extend the micro-kernel abstractions with support for object oriented systems. COOL-02, the second iteration of this layer provides generic support for clusters objects, in a distributed virtual memory model. The authors discuss experiences with COOL-1 that have had to their current model and in particular, with their decision to build a two layer system where the lowest layer supports only clusters and the upper layers supports objects. They describe a number of problems that they are addressing with this new design and present the current statu

Deiphering genetic variations of proteome responses to water deficit in maize leaves

International audienc

Abiotic formation of organic biomorphs under diagenetic conditions

International audienceThe most ancient fossil record contains fundamentally important information on both the diversity and disparity of ancient life. Yet this ancient record is not that easy to decode, due to difficulties mainly pertaining to the impact of the geological history. Thus, the convergence of multiple lines of evidence is seen as necessary to build a robust demonstration of the biogenicity of putative traces of life. Yet, we experimentally show here that abiotic organic cell-like microstructures meeting all the criteria of biogenicity may form in cherts under classical conditions of diagenesis. These organic biomorphs produced from a mixture of RNA and quartz in water exposed to temperature and pressure conditions (200°C, ∼15 bars) exhibit morphological, chemical and isotopic signatures typical of organic microfossils. The results of this study exemplify the pitfalls that Archean palaeontologists may encounter when searching for traces of life in ancient rocks

SATELLITE LINES OF NEON-LIKE RESONANCE LINES, FOR 17<Z<48

The dielectronic satellite lines of the neon-like resonance lines 1s22s22p53d - 1s22s22p6 have been observed in the spectra obtained during the Limeil X-ray Laser experiments under collisional dense plasma conditions (102