Ultra-high molecular sink vacuum chamber

Double-wall vacuum chamber can be separated from the remainder of the system and pumped by ultra-clean techniques. Ultrahigh vacuum is maintained by the cryogenic effect of a cold wall and titanium chemisorption

Diffusion algorithms and data reduction routine for onsite launch predictions for the transport of Titan 3 C exhaust effluents

The NASA/MSFC multilayer diffusion algorithms have been specialized for the prediction of the surface impact for the dispersive transport of the exhaust effluents from the launch of a Titan 3 vehicle. This specialization permits these transport predictions to be made at the launch range in real time so that the effluent monitoring teams can optimize their monitoring grids. Basically, the data reduction routine requires just the meteorology profiles for the thermodynamics and kinematics of the atmosphere as an input. These profiles are graphed along with the resulting exhaust cloud rise history, the center line concentrations and dosages, and the hydrogen chloride isopleths

Open source Internet research tool

Open source research on the Internet has become an everyday requirement for law enforcement officials. The special requirements of such activity include keeping a useable audit trail, screen capture of static and dynamic content, and document capture. All of these artefacts need to be stored in an evidential container and captured content should be suitably hashed. A report must then be generated from the evidence gathered. At the moment police in the UK use a number of different tools to carry out this process but there is no one tool that meets all of the requirements in an integrated way. This research seeks to fill this gap by creating a bespoke tool in collaboration with the College of Policing that allows one tool to carry out all tasks required for law enforcement to carry out open source internet research as part of a single tool and an integrated process. Written in C#, this early iteration of the tool automatically logs all websites visited, hashes all screenshots and downloaded files using MD5 for validation, and generates reports in PDF format detailing all activities within the case; allowing for dissemination to other departments/individuals. Presently, there are no overall guidelines within the UK of which we are aware for how Internet evidence should be gathered. For example, when a website makes an external call to download a JavaScript file, or access the Facebook API, should that be documented within the audit log? How should a tool of this nature deal with dynamic content, such as AJAX? Future plans for this project include a browser ‘hot-swap’ facility, addition of the ability to screen record browser activity, and to make the tool suitable for international use on multiple-platforms

The impact of uncertainty in satellite data on the assessment of flood inundation models

The performance of flood inundation models is often assessed using satellite observed data; however these data have inherent uncertainty. In this study we assess the impact of this uncertainty when calibrating a flood inundation model (LISFLOOD-FP) for a flood event in December 2006 on the River Dee, North Wales, UK. The flood extent is delineated from an ERS-2 SAR image of the event using an active contour model (snake), and water levels at the flood margin calculated through intersection of the shoreline vector with LiDAR topographic data. Gauged water levels are used to create a reference water surface slope for comparison with the satellite-derived water levels. Residuals between the satellite observed data points and those from the reference line are spatially clustered into groups of similar values. We show that model calibration achieved using pattern matching of observed and predicted flood extent is negatively influenced by this spatial dependency in the data. By contrast, model calibration using water elevations produces realistic calibrated optimum friction parameters even when spatial dependency is present. To test the impact of removing spatial dependency a new method of evaluating flood inundation model performance is developed by using multiple random subsamples of the water surface elevation data points. By testing for spatial dependency using Moran’s I, multiple subsamples of water elevations that have no significant spatial dependency are selected. The model is then calibrated against these data and the results averaged. This gives a near identical result to calibration using spatially dependent data, but has the advantage of being a statistically robust assessment of model performance in which we can have more confidence. Moreover, by using the variations found in the subsamples of the observed data it is possible to assess the effects of observational uncertainty on the assessment of flooding risk

Regge Behaviour from an Environmentally Friendly Renormalization Group

The asymptotic behaviour of cubic field theories is investigated in the Regge limit using the techniques of environmentally friendly renormalization, environmentally friendly in the present context meaning asymmetric in its momentum dependence. In particular we consider the crossover between large and small energies at fixed momentum transfer for a model scalar theory of the type phi^2 psi. The asymptotic forms of the crossover scaling functions are exhibited for all two particle scattering processes in this channel to one loop in a renormalization group improved perturbation theory.Comment: 9 pages text, one figure, LaTeX, uses psfig.sty. Revised version submitted to Phys. Lett. B., besides minor changes a figure to illustrate the conventions and a discussion of the full crossover function have been adde

Spin accumulation in forward-biased MnAs/GaAs Schottky diodes

We describe a new means for electrically creating spin polarization in semiconductors. In contrast to spin injection of electrons by tunneling through a reverse-biased Schottky barrier, we observe spin accumulation at the metal/semiconductor interface of forward-biased ferromagnetic Schottky diodes, which is consistent with a theory of spin-dependent reflection off the interface. Spatiotemporal Kerr microscopy is used to image the electron spin and the resulting dynamic nuclear polarization that arises from the non equilibrium carrier polarization.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, submitted for publicatio