LLE Review, Volume 78 93 Measurements of the charged-particle products of the fusion reactions from an imploding inertial fusion capsule can provide a direct means of characterizing key aspects of the implosion dynamics. Parameters such as the fusion yield, fuel ion temperature, capsule convergence, fuel and shell areal densities, and implosion asymmetry can be inferred by these measurements an...

Only in the radio-loud population of active galactic nuclei (AGN) does the production, collimation, and acceleration of powerful relativistic jets take place. We introduce here a concept of combined VLBI-and X-ray spectroscopic observations of sources with relativistic, broad iron lines. This approach has enormous potential to yield deep insights into the accretion/jet-production process in AGN...

We revisit the stochastic limited-memory BFGS (L-BFGS) algorithm. By proposing a new framework for analyzing convergence, we theoretically improve the (linear) convergence rates and computational complexities of the stochastic LBFGS algorithms in previous works. In addition, we propose several practical acceleration strategies to speed up the empirical performance of such algorithms. We also pr...

Intracellular substances released into the medium during rehydration of dry yeast cells can significantly improve the quality of a synthetic medium. Acceleration of yeast growth in this medium and increased yield of biomass are observed simultaneously. The change in the molecular arrangement of intracellular membranes as a result of the strong dehydration of live organisms is a negative phenome...

One of the more interesting observations by ACE is the ubiquitous presence of higher energy tails on the distribution functions of solar wind and pickup ions. The tails occur continuously in the slow solar wind, but less so in fast wind. Their presence is not correlated with the passage of shock waves. It is pointed out that statistical acceleration by transit-time damping of propagating magnit...

Observations of high-redshift supernovae indicate that the Universe is accelerating. Here we present a model-independent method for estimating the form of the potential V(phi) of the scalar field driving this acceleration, and the associated equation of state w(phi). Our method is based on a versatile analytical form for the luminosity distance D(L), optimized to fit observed distances to dista...

* Presented as Paper IEPC-01-49 at the 27 International Electric Propulsion Conference, Pasadena, CA, 15-19 October, 2001. † Copyright © 2001 by the authors. Published by the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society with permission. Modeling the Hall thruster for sputter yield prediction is of considerable interest to the electric propulsion community. This paper documents the status of a finite elem...

This work concerns the development of quantitative estimation techniques using the K edge-jump ratio of X-ray absorption spectrum recorded through total-electron-yield measurements. The three methods of calculation methods proposed here can be used to estimate (1) the bulk elemental composition of homogeneous solid materials, (2) the thickness of the thin layers, and (3) the amounts of atoms im...

A repetitive petawatt-class Ti:sapphire laser system operating with high spatial and temporal beam quality is demonstrated. Maximum pulse energy of 30 J is obtained via five multi-pass amplification stages. Closed-loop feedback control systems in the temporal and spatial domains are used to yield Fourier-transform-limited pulse duration (33.7 fs), and diffraction-limited focal spot sizes (with ...

introduction air pollution has harmful effect on human health and the environment. accordingly, considerable effort has been put to analyze the air pollutants. one important issue is the spatial distribution of these pollutants. dispersion of the pollutants released from sources on the ground is mostly driven by the planetary boundary layer where turbulent flow causes mixing of the content of t...