Profile Monitor SEM's for the NuMI Beam at FNAL

The Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) project will extract 120 GeV protons from the FNAL Main Injector in 8.56usec spills of 4E13 protons every 1.9 sec. We have designed secondary emission monitor (SEM) detectors to measure beam profile and halo along the proton beam transport line. The SEM?s are Ti foils 5um in thickness segmented in either 1?mm or 0.5?mm pitch strips, resulting in beam loss ~5E-6. We discuss aspects of the mechanical design, calculations of expected beam heating, and results of a beam test at the 8 GeV transport line to MiniBoone at FNAL.Comment: to appear in proceedings of 11th Beam Instrumentation Workshop, Oak Ridge, T

Svestka's Research: Then and Now

Zdenek Svestka's research work influenced many fields of solar physics, especially in the area of flare research. In this article I take five of the areas that particularly interested him and assess them in a "then and now" style. His insights in each case were quite sound, although of course in the modern era we have learned things that he could not readily have envisioned. His own views about his research life have been published recently in this journal, to which he contributed so much, and his memoir contains much additional scientific and personal information (Svestka, 2010).Comment: Invited review for "Solar and Stellar Flares," a conference in honour of Prof. Zden\v{e}k \v{S}vestka, Prague, June 23-27, 2014. This is a contribution to a Topical Issue in Solar Physics, based on the presentations at this meeting (Editors Lyndsay Fletcher and Petr Heinzel

Microencapsulation of clove essential oil with gelatin and alginate

Content: Essential oils are of commercial interest primarily because of their potential antimicrobial, antifungal and antioxidant properties and for being of natural origin, which generally represents lower risk to the environment and human health. Clove essential oil not only contains many kinds of biological active compositions but also has highly effective and comprehensive antibacterial functions. Remarkably, clove has strong antimicrobial activities against a wide range of pathogenic microorganisms. To prevent chemical changes the oil is microencapsulated. The aim of this study is to develop essential oil microcapsules with gelatin and alginate. Various solutions were prepared for the capsule wall material at different concentrations. The encapsulation efficiency (%) was accessed and the microcapsules were characterized by oil content (%), oil charge (%), morphology, functional groups present, thermogravimetric analysis and by Fourier transform - infrared spectral analysis. FT-IR spectra of the clove oil shows some special peaks at 1148,01 and 1033,33 cm-1. The spectra of the capsule showed peaks 1148.34 and 1033.29 cm -1, the same peaks present in clove oil, showing that the encapsulation did not alter the structure of the oil's main assets. In case of the gelatin and alginate microcapsules containing clove oil, most of the characteristic peaks of clove oil remained unchanged, indicating the successful incorporation of clove oil into the microcapsules and the chemical stability of the clove oil after encapsulation. In otherwords, there was no significant chemical interaction between the oil and the wall of the microcapsule. Take-Away: The clove oil was microencapsulated according the FTIR spectra

Review Article: Molecular Mechanisms of Resistance to Potato virus X and Y in Potato

The most important viral pathogens of the cultivated potato are Potato virus X (PVX) and Potato virus Y (PVY), which can reduce potato production up to 80%. Thus resistance breeding is one of the major goals of plant breeders. Wild potato species are good sources of resistance (R) genes. The resistant plants respond to viral infection with hypersensitive reaction (HR) or extreme resistance (ER). HR is accompanied by programmed cell death, while ER localizes the virus at the primary infection site and limits virus replication without visible symptoms. While HR is generally strain-specific, ER can act against a broad spectrum of viral pathogens. This review aims to describe the molecular mechanisms of resistance against PVX and PVY in potato

Beam Test of a Segmented Foil SEM Grid

A prototype Secondary-electron Emission Monitor (SEM) was installed in the 8 GeV proton transport line for the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab. The SEM is a segmented grid made with 5 um Ti foils, intended for use in the 120 GeV NuMI beam at Fermilab. Similar to previous workers, we found that the full collection of the secondary electron signal requires a bias voltage to draw the ejected electrons cleanly off the foils, and this effect is more pronounced at larger beam intensity. The beam centroid and width resolutions of the SEM were measured at beam widths of 3, 7, and 8 mm, and compared to calculations. Extrapolating the data from this beam test, we expect a centroid and width resolutions of 20um and 25 um, respectively, in the NuMI beam which has 1 mm spot size.Comment: submitted to Nucl. Instr. Meth.

Signatures of photon localization

Signatures of photon localization are observed in a constellation of transport phenomena which reflect the transition from diffusive to localized waves. The dimensionless conductance, g, and the ratio of the typical spectral width and spacing of quasimodes, \delta, are key indicators of electronic and classical wave localization when inelastic processes are absent. However, these can no longer serve as localization parameters in absorbing samples since the affect of absorption depends upon the length of the trajectories of partial waves traversing the sample, which are superposed to create the scattered field. A robust determination of localization in the presence of absorption is found, however, in steady-state measurements of the statistics of radiation transmitted through random samples. This is captured in a single parameter, the variance of the total transmission normalized to its ensemble average value, which is equal to the degree of intensity correlation of the transmitted wave, \kappa. The intertwined effects of localization and absorption can also be disentangled in the time domain since all waves emerging from the sample at a fixed time delay from an exciting pulse, t, are suppressed equally by absorption. As a result, the relative weights of partial waves emerging from the sample, and hence the statistics of intensity fluctuations and correlation, and the suppression of propagation by weak localization are not changed by absorption, and manifest the growing impact of weak localization with t.Comment: RevTex 16 pages, 12 figures; to appear in special issue of J. Phys. A on quantum chaotic scatterin