Physics Commons^™

Anyonic Superconductivity In A Modified Large-U Hubbard Model, Asim Gangopadhyaya, Prasanta Panigrahi

Asim Gangopadhyaya

A modified large-U Hubbard model at half filling is analyzed by a mean-field approach. Preserving a local U(1) symmetry of the action, the fluctuations about half filling are studied in the spirit of the commensurate-flux-phase condition. The fluctuations then contribute a Chern-Simons term to the tree-level Lagrangian with a coefficient appropriate to that of a half fermion. With the Coulomb repulsion term, we study the low-energy excitations of the model and show the existence of superconductivity in the presence of a four-Fermi interaction term.

Methodology For Generating Simplified Cross Section Data Sets For Neutron Transport Calculations, Thomas Jay Harrison

Doctoral Dissertations

Neutron shielding problems involve radiation transport calculations over a wide range of energies. Fission neutrons have initial energy on the order of MeV, fusion neutrons have initial energy on the order of 10s of MeV, and space-origin neutrons have initial energy on the order of 100s of MeV or higher. Shielding calculations must track the neutrons from their initial energies until they are no longer of interest; for deep-penetration neutrons, this final energy can be on the order of eV before the neutron is no longer tracked. Thus, for deep-penetration space radiation shielding problems, the calculation may require tracking the …

Effective Field Theory Approach To Collective Motion In Atomic Nuclei, Eduardo Antonio Coello Perez

Doctoral Dissertations

Collective motion in heavy nuclei has been studied within collective and algebraic models, and within density functional theory. While they reproduce the energy spectra of these systems, their predictions for some electromagnetic transitions and moments do not lie within experimental uncertainty; in other words, these predictions are inconsistent with experimental data. An effective field theory approach to collective motion in heavy nuclei solves this long standing problem. Based on symmetry arguments only, the effective field theories, constructed as expansions in powers of a small parameter, consistently describe the energy spectra of nuclei exhibiting collective motion at low order in the …

Voxel-Level Absorbed Dose Calculations With A Deterministic Grid-Based Boltzmann Solver For Nuclear Medicine And The Clinical Value Of Voxel-Level Calculations, Justin Mikell

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Voxel-level absorbed dose (VLAD) is rarely calculated for nuclear medicine (NM) procedures involving unsealed sources or 90Y microspheres (YM). The current standard of practice for absorbed dose calculations in NM utilizes MIRD S-values, which 1) assume a uniform distribution in organs, 2) do not use patient specific geometry, and 3) lack a tumor model. VLADs overcome these limitations. One reason VLADs are not routinely performed is the difficulty in obtaining accurate absorbed doses in a clinically acceptable time. The deterministic grid-based Boltzmann solver (GBBS) was recently applied to radiation oncology where it was reported as fast and accurate for both …

Installation And Alignment Of The N3he Experiment, Eric Lee Plemons

Masters Theses

The n3He experiment is designed to probe the hadronic weak interaction by measuring the parity violating asymmetry between the spin of incoming neutrons and the momentum of outgoing protons following the nuclear break up of a helium three upon absorbing a neutron. Cold neutrons from the SNS are first polarized then allowed to impact a target chamber filled with helium three where the reaction occurs. Energetic particles resulting from the nuclear breakup ionize the helium three gas and are thereby detected as currents by an array of signal wires within the target chamber. In order to make a statistics limited …

Predictive Modeling Of Terrestrial Radiation Exposure From Geologic Materials, Daniel A. Haber

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Aerial gamma ray surveys are an important tool for national security, scientific, and industrial interests in determining locations of both anthropogenic and natural sources of radioactivity. There is a relationship between radioactivity and geology and in the past this relationship has been used to predict geology from an aerial survey. The purpose of this project

is to develop a method to predict the radiologic exposure rate of the geologic materials in an area by creating a model using geologic data, images from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), geochemical data, and pre-existing low spatial resolution aerial surveys …

Distributions Of Long-Lived Radioactive Nuclei Provided By Star-Forming Environments, Marco Fatuzzo, Fred Adams

Faculty Scholarship

Radioactive nuclei play an important role in planetary evolution by providing an internal heat source, which affects planetary structure and helps facilitate plate tectonics. A minimum level of nuclear activity is thought to be necessary—but not sufficient—for planets to be habitable. Extending previous work that focused on short-lived nuclei, this paper considers the delivery of long-lived radioactive nuclei to circumstellar disks in star forming regions. Although the long-lived nuclear species are always present, their abundances can be enhanced through multiple mechanisms. Most stars form in embedded cluster environments, so that disks can be enriched directly by intercepting ejecta from supernovae …

New Transitions And Feeding Of The JΠ=(8+) Isomer In 186Re, David A. Matters, Nikolaos Fotiades, James J. Carroll, Christopher J. Chiara, John W. Mcclory, Toshihiko Kawano, Ronald O. Nelson, Matthew Devlin

Faculty Publications

The spallation neutron source at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center Weapons Neutron Research facility was used to populate excited states in ¹⁸⁶Re via (n,2nγ) reactions on an enriched ¹⁸⁷Re target. Gamma rays were detected with the GErmanium Array for Neutron Induced Excitations spectrometer, a Compton-suppressed array of 18 HPGe detectors. Incident neutron energies were determined by the time-of-flight technique and used to obtain γ-ray excitation functions for the purpose of identifying γ rays by reaction channel. Analysis of the singles γ-ray spectrum gated on the neutron energy range 10≤E_n≤25MeV resulted in five transitions and one …

Hyperpolarized 129xe Magnetic Resonance Imaging Of Radiation-Induced Lung Injury, Ozkan Doganay

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Lung cancer is the largest contributor to cancer-related mortality worldwide. Only 20% of stage III non-small cell lung cancer patients survive after 5-years post radiation therapy (RT). Although RT is an important treatment modality for lung cancer, it is limited by Radiation-Induced Lung Injury (RILI). RILI develops in two phases: (i) the early phase (days-weeks) referred to radiation pneumonitis (RP), and (ii) the late phase (months). There is a strong interest in early detection of RP using imaging to improve outcomes of RT for lung cancer. This thesis describes a promising approach based on ¹²⁹Xe gas as a contrast …

Information Behaviors Of Nuclear Scientists At Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, Youngchoon Chun, Jiho Yi, Jung-Ran Park, Sangki Choi

Journal of East Asian Libraries

The goal of the study was to analyze the information use behaviors of researchers in the science and technology domain. A survey and interviews were conducted targeting nuclear scientists at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute. Study results indicate that the nuclear scientists mainly use the Institute library/information center and Internet portal/search engines during information acquisition. Easy access to information, accuracy, currency and cost are the most critical factors in selecting and obtaining information. The most frequently used database for executing research is the Institute’s electronic library (NUCLIS21) followed by the Citation Index SCOPUS. The results of the study indicate …

Low Intensity Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy Of The Lake Labyrinth Meteorite, Tristan C. Paul

Physics

A 23.7g fragment of the Lake Labyrinth Meteorite (fell in 1924, collected in 1934 at Lake Labyrinth in South Australia, Australia) was re-investigated for evidence of the presence of 98Tc using a two dimensional low-intensity gamma-ray spectrometer. A new calibration technique using 26Al sources found the gamma-rays previously thought to be due to 98Tc are more likely from 166Ho. The presence of 166Ho is most likely due to activation of the stable 165Ho in the meteorite from terrestrial background sources where it was stored.

Effects Of A Periodic Decay Rate On The Statistics Of Radioactive Decay: New Methods To Search For Violations Of The Law Of Radioactive Change, Mark P. Silverman

Faculty Scholarship

It is a long-held tenet of nuclear physics, from the early work of Rutherford and Soddy up to present times that the disintegration of each species of radioactive nuclide occurs randomly at a constant rate unaffected by interactions with the external environment. During the past 15 years or so, reports have been published of some 10 or more unstable nuclides with non-exponential, periodic decay rates claimed to be of geophysical, astrophysical, or cosmological origin. Deviations from standard exponential decay are weak, and the claims are controversial. This paper examines the effects of a periodic decay rate on the statistical distributions …

Effect Of Helium Ions Energy On Molybdenum Surfaces Under Extreme Conditions, Joseph Fiala, Jitendra K. Tripathi, Sean Gonderman, Ahmed Hassanein

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Plasma facing components (PFCs) in fusion devices must be able to withstand high temperatures and erosion due to incident energetic ion radiations. Tungsten has become the material of choice for PFCs due to its high strength, thermal conductivity, and low erosion rate. However, its surface deteriorates significantly under helium ion irradiation in fusion-like conditions and forms nanoscopic fiber-like structures, or fuzz. Fuzz is brittle in nature and has relatively lower thermal conductivity than that of the bulk material. Small amounts of fuzz may lead to excessive contamination of the plasma, preventing the fusion reaction from taking place. Despite recent efforts, …

Modern Study Of Environmental Pollution From The Emission Of Alpha Particles In Human Blood Samples In The City Of Najaf, Iraq, Basim A. Almayahi

21st International Conference on Environmental Indicators (ICEI 2015)

No abstract provided.

On The Spin Evolution Of Isolated Pulsars, Oliver Quinn Hamil

Doctoral Dissertations

Neutron stars are the remnants of supernova explosions, and harbor the densest matter found in the universe. Because of their extreme physical characteristics, neutron stars make superb laboratories from which to study the nature of matter under conditions of extreme density that are not reproducible on Earth. The understanding of QCD matter is of fundamental importance to modern physics, and neutron stars provide a means of probing into the cold, dense region of the QCD phase diagram.

Isolated pulsars are rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation into space which appear like lighthouses to observers on Earth. Observations …

Nucleosynthesis In Self-Consistent Core-Collapse Supernova Models Using Multidimensional Chimera Simulations, James Austin Harris

Doctoral Dissertations

Observations of nuclear abundances in core-collapse supernova (CCSN) ejecta, highlighted by γ-ray [gamma-ray] observations of the ⁴⁴Ti [titanium-44] spatial distribution in the nearby supernova remnants Cassiopeia A and SN 1987A, allow nucleosynthesis calculations to place powerful constraints on conditions deep in the interiors of supernovae and their progenitor stars. This ability to probe where direct observations cannot makes such calculations an invaluable tool for understanding the CCSN mechanism. Unfortunately, despite knowing for two decades that supernovae are intrinsically multi-dimensional events, discussions of CCSN nucleosynthesis have been predominantly based on spherically symmetric (1D) models, which employ a contrived energy source …

Design And Fabrication Of Liquid Scintillator Counter, Andrea Calderon Saucedo, John L. Orrell

STAR Program Research Presentations

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is currently developing an ultra-low background liquid scintillator counter (ULB LSC) in the shallow underground laboratory. At a depth of 35-meters water-equivalent, the underground laboratory has a multi-layered shielding to keep out cosmic-ray induced background. The ULB LSC, which is located in a clean room facility, is a multi-layered design made up of various materials, including plastic scintillator veto panels, borated polyethylene, lead and copper. These layers help lower the contributions of the terrestrial background and intrinsic background, resulting from the impurities present in the materials, to the overall background count rate observed by the …

Student Writing Competition

International Journal of Nuclear Security

No abstract provided.

Masthead

International Journal of Nuclear Security

No abstract provided.

Cover

International Journal of Nuclear Security

No abstract provided.

From The Editor

International Journal of Nuclear Security

No abstract provided.

Studies Of Two-Nucleon Interactions And Few-Body Electromagnetic Structure In Chiral Effective Field Theory, Maria Piarulli

Physics Theses & Dissertations

A coordinate-space nucleon-nucleon potential is constructed in chiral effective field theory (χEFT) retaining pions, nucleons and Δ-isobars as explicit degrees of freedom. The calculation of the potential is carried out by including one-and two-pion-exchange contributions up to next-to-next-to-leading order (N2LO) and contact interactions tip to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO). The low-energy constants multiplying these contact interactions are fitted to the 2013 Granada database in the laboratory-energy range 0–300 MeV. Three versions of this chiral potential, corresponding to three different cutoffs, have been developed. The cutoff regularizes the one- and two-pion exchange as well as the contact part of the potential. A …

Event Localization In Bulk Scintillator Crystals Using Optical Coded Apertures, Joshua Brian Braverman

Doctoral Dissertations

Scintillation-based radiation detectors provide an effective method to detect radioactive materials. In medical physics, astrophysics, and national security technology oftentimes it is optimal to have the ability to localize a radioactive interaction in a scintillator to as small a region as possible within the crystal. Current methods rely on the ability to centroid a light spot as read onto a phototransducer (commonly a photomultiplier tube), and due to the typical width of the light spot when it reaches the phototransducer, the resolution is generally limited to several millimeters. One method to achieve a finer resolution is to use a segmented …

Computational Framework For Small Animal Spect Imaging: Simulation And Reconstruction, Sang Hyeb Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

Small animal Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) has been an invaluable asset in biomedical science since this non-invasive imaging technique allows the longitudinal studies of animal models of human diseases. However, the image degradation caused by non-stationary collimator-detector response and single photon emitting nature of SPECT makes it difficult to provide a quantitative measure of 3D radio-pharmaceutical distribution inside the patient. Moreover, this problem exacerbates when an intra-peritoneal X-ray contrast agent is injected into a mouse for low-energy radiotracers.

In this dissertation, we design and develop a complete computational framework for the entire SPECT scan procedure from the radio-pharmaceutical …

Beta Decay Of Neutron-Rich Isotopes Of Zinc And Gallium, Mohammad Faleh M. Al-Shudifat

Doctoral Dissertations

Beta-decays of neutron-rich nuclei near the doubly magic ⁷⁸Ni [78Ni] were studied at the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility. The half-life and the gamma-gamma coincidence spectra were used to study the nuclear structure. A new ^82,83Zn [82Zn, 83Zn] decay-scheme was built, where a 71±7% beta-delayed neutron branching ratio was assigned in ⁸²Zn [82Zn] decay. New gamma-ray lines and energy levels observed in ^82,83Ga [82Ga, 83Ga] beta-decay were used to update previously reported decay-schemes. The experimental results were compared to shell model calculations, which postulate the existence of Gamow-Teller transitions in these decays. The half-lives of 155±17 …

Relativistic And Non-Relativistic Proton-Nucleus Scattering, Kinsey Ann Elisabeth Zarske-Williamson

Honors Theses

Calculations for proton-nucleus scattering often rely on transition amplitudes. We implement new transition amplitudes [7] with the relativistic equations. We can find the matrix elements of the operators between the usual Dirac spinor basis or the helicity spinor basis. The operators can also be written as a linear combination of non-relativistic spin operators. To transform from one basis to another, we need to find a transformation matrix. We must establish what one of the factors that appears in the transformed expression means in order to correctly complete our transformation matrix. Once this is resolved, our transformation matrix will be complete.

Mass Table Calculations With Nuclear Density Functional Theory, Noah Watson Birge

Masters Theses

To better understand nuclei and the strong nuclear force, it is useful to analyze global nuclear properties and trends across the nuclear chart. To this end, we utilized Nuclear Density Functional Theory with Skyrme Energy Density Functionals in conjunction with high-performance computing to perform large-scale mass table calculations for even-even nuclei. Using the binding energy, pairing gap, root-mean-square radius, and deformation data from these tables we were able to analyze the two-proton and two-neutron drip lines, neutron skin depth, two-proton radioactivity, and the effect of nuclear deformation on mass filters. We used numerous energy density functionals to assess the statistical …

An Investigation Into The Phenomenological Relation Between Solar Activity And Nuclear Beta-Decay Rates, Tasneem M. Mohsinally

Open Access Dissertations

We investigate experimental evidence for time-varying nuclear decay rates, in contrast to the widely-accepted view that nuclear decaying isotopes disintegrate at a constant rate unaffected by external conditions. We study several past cases of radioactive isotopes exhibiting annual periodicities in their decay rates, presumably related to the annual variation in Earth-Sun distance. Following recent indications of shorter-lived anomalies in ⁵⁴Mn decay rates concomitant with an X-class flare in 2006, we attempt to design and develop a series of unique signal detection algorithms to identify regions of anomalous activity in a nuclear decay signal. With stringent threshold cut-offs and filtering …

Fission Fragment Tracking And Identification In The Neutron-Induced Fission Fragment Tracking Experiment’S Time Projection Chamber, Eric Song

Physics

The Neutron-Induced Fission Fragment Tracking Experiment (NIFFTE) built a novel Time Projection Chamber (TPC), the FissionTPC, for measuring neutron-induced fission cross-sections to unprecedented precision. We investigated data from a 2014 run (400010151) at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) with a double-sided U235/Pu239 target. Our particle identification studies will aid in the development of improved tracking algorithms.

Theories In Spin Dynamics Of Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, Eugene S. Mananga, Jalil Moghaddasi, Ajaz Sana, Mostafa Sadoqi

Publications and Research

This short review article presents theories used in solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Main theories used in NMR include the average Hamiltonian theory, the Floquet theory and the developing theories are the Fer expansion or the Floquet-Magnus expansion. These approaches provide solutions to the time-dependent Schrodinger equation which is a central problem in quantum physics in general and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance in particular. Methods of these expansion schemes used as numerical integrators for solving the time dependent Schrodinger equation are presented. The action of their propagator operators is also presented. We highlight potential future theoretical and numerical directions such …