Science and Technology Review April/May 2012

This month's issue has the following articles: (1) Lawrence Livermore as the 'Go-To' National Security Laboratory - Commentary by Penrose (Parney) C. Albright; (2) Launching Traffic Cameras into Space - The Space-Based Telescopes for Actionable Refinement of Ephemeris project is designing nanosatellites to more accurately determine the trajectory of space objects orbiting Earth; (3)An Improved Tool for Nuclear Forensics - Resonance ionization mass spectrometry provides rapid isotopic analysis for studying materials derived from nuclear events; (4) A Simple Way to Better Protect Soldiers against Head Trauma - A modest increase in the foam padding used in Army helmets could significantly reduce brain injuries; and (5) Shocking Aluminum for Greater Understanding - Experiments using a laser beam to hit a thin film of aluminum provide an unprecedented look into the physics of shock waves traveling through a metal

Science & Technology Review June 2012

This month's issue has the following articles: (1) A New Era in Climate System Analysis - Commentary by William H. Goldstein; (2) Seeking Clues to Climate Change - By comparing past climate records with results from computer simulations, Livermore scientists can better understand why Earth's climate has changed and how it might change in the future; (3) Finding and Fixing a Supercomputer's Faults - Livermore experts have developed innovative methods to detect hardware faults in supercomputers and help applications recover from errors that do occur; (4) Targeting Ignition - Enhancements to the cryogenic targets for National Ignition Facility experiments are furthering work to achieve fusion ignition with energy gain; (5) Neural Implants Come of Age - A new generation of fully implantable, biocompatible neural prosthetics offers hope to patients with neurological impairment; and (6) Incubator Busy Growing Energy Technologies - Six collaborations with industrial partners are using the Laboratory's high-performance computing resources to find solutions to urgent energy-related problems

Predictive wavefront control for Adaptive Optics with arbitrary control loop delays

We present a modification of the closed-loop state space model for AO control which allows delays that are a non-integer multiple of the system frame rate. We derive the new forms of the Predictive Fourier Control Kalman filters for arbitrary delays and show that they are linear combinations of the whole-frame delay terms. This structure of the controller is independent of the delay. System stability margins and residual error variance both transition gracefully between integer-frame delays