Gas-injection valve operates at high speed

Fast acting gas valve is used for injecting a short pulse of gas into a vacuum chamber during plasma acceleration experiments. It contains a lightweight closure disk that is forced away from the valve seat when an electromagnetic coil is momentarily energized and immediately rebounds from a stop back onto the seat

An experiment to measure the energy spectrum of cosmic ray antiprotons from 100 to 1000 MeV

Production models were developed and the confirmation of each one had significant astrophysical impact. These include radical modifications of propagation models, cosmic ray antiprotons injection from neighboring domains of antimatter, p production by evaporating primordial black holes, and cosmic ray p's as annihilation products of supersymmetry particles that might make up the dark dynamical mass of the Galaxy. It is that p's originating from supersymmetric parents might have distinct spectral features that would survive solar modulation; in one model, higgsino annihilation proceeds through the bb quark-antiquark channel, producing a spectral bump at approx. 0.3 GeV in the p spectrum

Watching My Mind Unfold versus Yours: An fMRI Study Using a Novel Camera Technology to Examine Neural Differences in Self-projection of Self versus Other Perspectives

Self-projection, the capacity to re-experience the personal past and to mentally infer another person's perspective, has been linked to medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In particular, ventral mPFC is associated with inferences about one's own self, whereas dorsal mPFC is associated with inferences about another individual. In the present fMRI study, we examined self-projection using a novel camera technology, which employs a sensor and timer to automatically take hundreds of photographs when worn, in order to create dynamic visuospatial cues taken from a first-person perspective. This allowed us to ask participants to self-project into the personal past or into the life of another person. We predicted that self-projection to the personal past would elicit greater activity in ventral mPFC, whereas self-projection of another perspective would rely on dorsal mPFC. There were three main findings supporting this prediction. First, we found that self-projection to the personal past recruited greater ventral mPFC, whereas observing another person's perspective recruited dorsal mPFC. Second, activity in ventral versus dorsal mPFC was sensitive to parametric modulation on each trial by the ability to relive the personal past or to understand another's perspective, respectively. Third, task-related functional connectivity analysis revealed that ventral mPFC contributed to the medial temporal lobe network linked to memory processes, whereas dorsal mPFC contributed to the fronto-parietal network linked to controlled processes. In sum, these results suggest that ventral–dorsal subregions of the anterior midline are functionally dissociable and may differentially contribute to self-projection of self versus other

Plasmas and Controlled Nuclear Fusion

Contains reports on two research projects.U. S. Atomic Energy Commission (Contract AT(11-1)-3070

A novel research definition of bladder health in women and girls: Implications for research and public health promotion

BACKGROUND:Bladder health in women and girls is poorly understood, in part, due to absence of a definition for clinical or research purposes. This article describes the process used by a National Institutes of Health funded transdisciplinary research team (The Prevention of Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms [PLUS] Consortium) to develop a definition of bladder health. METHODS:The PLUS Consortium identified currently accepted lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) and outlined elements of storage and emptying functions of the bladder. Consistent with the World Health Organization's definition of health, PLUS concluded that absence of LUTS was insufficient and emphasizes the bladder's ability to adapt to short-term physical, psychosocial, and environmental challenges for the final definition. Definitions for subjective experiences and objective measures of bladder dysfunction and health were drafted. An additional bioregulatory function to protect against infection, neoplasia, chemical, or biologic threats was proposed. RESULTS:PLUS proposes that bladder health be defined as: "A complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being related to bladder function and not merely the absence of LUTS. Healthy bladder function permits daily activities, adapts to short-term physical or environmental stressors, and allows optimal well-being (e.g., travel, exercise, social, occupational, or other activities)." Definitions for each element of bladder function are reported with suggested subjective and objective measures. CONCLUSIONS:PLUS used a comprehensive transdisciplinary process to develop a bladder health definition. This will inform instrument development for evaluation of bladder health promotion and prevention of LUTS in research and public health initiatives

Updating time-to-failure distributions based on field observations and sensor data.

Enterprise level logistics and prognostics and health management (PHM) modeling efforts use reliability focused failure distributions to characterize the probability of failure over the lifetime of a component. This research characterized the Sandia National Laboratories developed combined lifecycle (CMBL) distribution and explored methods for updating this distribution as systems age and new failure data becomes available. The initial results obtained in applying a Bayesian sequential updating methodology to the CMBL distribution shows promise. This research also resulted in the development of a closed-form full life cycle (CFLC) distribution similar to the CMBL distribution but with slightly different, yet commonly recognized, input parameters. Further research is warranted to provide additional theoretical validation of the distributions, complete the updating methods for the CMBL distribution, evaluate a Bayesian updating methodology for the CFLC distribution, and determine which updating methods would be most appropriate for enterprise level logistics and PHM modeling

Some general properties of stimulated Raman propagation with pump depletion, transiency and dispersion

This note considers some of the properties of the Stokes pulse that grows from a specified seed pulse in the presence of a strong pump pulse as it propagates through a dispersive atomic vapor. We first present an generic dimensionless form for the coupled equations that govern the propagation of pump and Stokes fields or collinear plane-wave pulses. By treating the two fields we permit pump depletion. We include transient atomic response (as embodied in the Raman coherence), but neglect changes in atomic populations. (Thus our equations pertain to the regime in which atoms are more numerous than photons). The equations employ a gain length, a dispersion time {tau}{sub dis}, and a Raman coherence time (or memory time) {tau}{sub R} as basic parameters: these two times, together with a single-photon stationary-atom detuning {Delta}, subsume the details of a particular atomic Raman transition and particular operating conditions. (The effects of Doppler shifts enters the equations through the coherence time). We discuss some general properties of these generic Raman propagation equations, and present illustrations of their solutions in the absence of dispersion. We comment on departures from exponential growth. We than show examples of behavior when dispersion is present and the pump pulse has a bandwidth that exceeds the transform limit. The illustrations presented here do not pertain to any specific atom (i.e. specific wavelengths and oscillator strengths) or to specific experimental conditions (i.e. number densities and pulse intensities). To permit the connection between the present generic results and particular experiments we conclude by providing expressions for the gain length and dispersion time in terms of atomic number density, polarizabilities, oscillator strengths, statistical weights, transition frequencies, and polarization directions. 11 figs

Strangelets: Who is Looking, and How?

It has been over 30 years since the first suggestion that the true ground state of cold hadronic matter might be not nuclear matter but rather strange quark matter (SQM). Ever since, searches for stable SQM have been proceeding in various forms and have observed a handful of interesting events but have neither been able to find compelling evidence for stable strangelets nor to rule out their existence. I will survey the current status and near future of such searches with particular emphasis on the idea of SQM from strange star collisions as part of the cosmic ray flux.Comment: Talk given at International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter, 2006. 8 pages. 1 figur

Test of Antiproton Apparatus

This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation Grant NSF PHY 87-1440