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Klasky, Marc Louis

Publications and source records attributed to Klasky, Marc Louis.

Reconstructing Richtmyer–Meshkov instabilities from noisy radiographs using low dimensional features and attention-based neural networks

We develop an ML-based approach for density reconstruction based on transformer neural networks. This approach is demonstrated in the setting of ICF-like double shell hydrodynamic simulations wherein the parameters related to material properties and initial conditions are varied. The new method can robustly recover the complex topologies given by the Richtmyer-Meshkoff instability (RMI) from a sequence of hydrodynamic features derived from radiographic images corrupted with blur, scatter, and noise. A noise model is developed to characterize errors in extracting features from synthetic radiographs of the simulated density field. The key component of the network is a transformer encoder that acts on a sequence of features extracted from noisy radiographs. This encoder includes numerous self-attention layers that act to learn temporal dependencies in the input sequences and increase the expressiveness of the model. This approach is shown to exhibit an excellent ability to accurately recover the RMI growth rates, despite the gas-metal interface being greatly obscured by radiographic noise. Our approach can be applied in a broad array of fields involving shock physics and material science.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Isotopic gamma lines for identification of shielding materials

Identifying the constituting materials of concealed objects is crucial in a wide range of sectors, such as medical imaging, geophysics, nonproliferation, national security investigations, and so on. Existing methods face limitations, particularly when multiple materials are involved or when there are challenges posed by scattered radiation and large areal mass. Here we introduce a novel brute-force statistical approach for material identification using high spectral resolution detectors, such as HPGe. The method relies upon updated semianalytic formulae for computing uncollided flux from source of gamma radiation, shielded by a sequence of nested spherical or cylindrical materials. These semianalytical formulae make possible rapid flux estimation for material characterization via combinatorial search through all possible combinations of materials, using a high-resolution HPGe counting detector. An important prerequisite for the method is that the geometry of the objects is known (for example, from X-ray radiography). We demonstrate the viability of this material characterization technique in several use cases with both simulated and experimental data in spherical geometry.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗

Comparison of Supervised and Un-Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms for Threat Detection and Scintillator Performance for Radiation Portal Monitoring

Following the events of September 11, 2001, international border crossing have been equipped with radiation portal monitors (RPMs) to identify illicit radioactive material. Polyvinyl toluene (PVT) scintillators are commonly used due to their low cost and reasonable maintainability, however they offer low spectral resolution. Despite the fact that over twenty years has transpired since this event, radioisotopes are still typically identified by hand-crafted classification algorithms, e.g., total counts or energy windowing, and exhibit relatively poor performance in detecting threats at the low false alarm rates required to support the stream of commerce. While some improvement to performance has been realized via the use of supervised machine learning, these classification algorithms typically utilize simulations in lieu of real data due to the sparsity of data for one or more classes. Accordingly, the performance of these algorithms is somewhat less than optimal when examining experiments or simulations with model mismatch. Consequently, in this work, we examine the application of a number of unsupervised machine learning, anomaly detection based algorithms, to circumvent the inverse crime when analyzing spectroscopy data for RPMs. We also compare anomaly detection results with those obtained via the use of supervised classification detection ML algorithms when model mismatch is introduced between the simulated threat items utilized for training/testing. Finally, we compared the performance of the PVT scintillators to those obtained with higher resolution detectors using both anomaly detection and supervised classification algorithms.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗

Machine Learning technique for isotopic determination of radioisotopes using HPGe γ-ray spectra

γ-ray spectroscopy is a quantitative, non-destructive technique that may be utilized for the identification and quantitative isotopic estimation of radionuclides. Traditional methods of isotopic determination have various challenges that contribute to statistical and systematic uncertainties in the estimated isotopics. Furthermore, these methods typically require numerous pre-processing steps, and have only been rigorously tested in laboratory settings with limited shielding. Here, in this work, we examine the application of a number of machine learning based regression algorithms as alternatives to conventional approaches for analyzing γ-ray spectroscopy data in the Emergency Response arena. This approach not only eliminates many steps in the analysis procedure, and therefore offers potential to reduce this source of systematic uncertainty, but is also shown to offer comparable performance to conventional approaches in the Emergency Response Application.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗