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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Advancing Artificial Intelligence with Liquid Argon Neutrino Experiments (Technical Report)

The grant allowed two main contributions: 1) The development of a first successful demonstration of the employment of Optimal Transport in liquid argon time projection chamber neutrino detectors. Optimal Transport, used in other contexts and specifically with LHC calorimetric data, was adapted to address a key particle identification challenge in LArTPCs: the separation of pi0 backgrounds from single-electrons produced in charged-current electron neutrino interactions. The work, leveraging ML methods such as k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) and support-vector-machine (SVM), showed an increase in background rejection of a factor of two or more. Work is now ongoing to incorporate this development in physics analyses for LArTPC experiments and more broadly expand the use of OT in LArTPC detectors including DUNE. This work was done in collaboration with the phenomenology group led by Nathaniel Craig at UCSB. 2) The deployment of NuGraph2, a graph neural network developed for LArTPC reconstruction, in the MicroBooNE experiment. NuGraph2 uses novel graph-neural-network methods on the rather simple LArTPC inputs of reconstructed hits, greatly simplifying the workflow compared to the use of waveform or signal-deconvolved wire ROIs. The network performed particle classification and was shown to address many challenging problems in LArTPC imaging including track-shower separation and the identification of protons and charged pions from primary muons. Our group collaborated with Giuseppe Cerati (FNAL scientist) who is one of the core developers of NuGraph2 to integrate this tool in MicroBooNE’s analysis framework. This consisted in tow key contributions: a) Studying performance on real data, which came with several months of iterations because the MC-trained version of the network was found to show significant bias that our group investigated and addressed. b) Integrating the output hit labeling of NuGraph2 into the existing particle tracking and shower reconstruction code. As a result of this work led by our team NuGraph2 is now enabling a suite of new analyses which benefit from enhanced capabilities and thus broader physics reach. The grant supported primarily the salary of UCSB graduate student Chuyue “Michaelia” Fang as well as partial summer salary support for PI Caratelli. Some funds were used for travel by Michaelia to ML related schools and conferences.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Advances in High Resolution Ultrafast Scintillators for Fast timing Applications

Scintillation detectors exhibiting high spatial resolution and fast timing capabilities are of vital importance for synchrotron sources. These detectors may be exposed to a variety of X-ray energies (up to 140 keV) and used in high frame rate applications. Here, we describe the advances in the development of thin-film LuI3:Ce scintillators for higher energy X-ray imaging, with fast timing and high spatial resolution. When grown in a single crystalline form, these scintillators are bright, producing 115 000 photons/MeV. However, to achieve high spatial resolution, these scintillators are grown in thin-film form with a microcolumnar structure, controllable to column diameters of <1-30 mu m. Thus, a much thicker scintillator layer (10 mu m-3 mm or higher) may be grown, providing superior X-ray absorption while achieving high resolutions of 50 mu m or better, at the cost of reduced light yield. To study the timing characteristics of the scintillator, time-resolved X-ray excited optical luminescence (TR-XEOL) was performed on two different sets of three samples of LuI3 at the 1-BM beamline of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. Besides, we report timing measurements obtained using a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and oscilloscope at Radiation Monitoring Devices (RMD) Inc. Using the TR-XEOL, we determined the decay constants of LuI3 as a function of Ce doping, recording a fast decay component as low as 3.6 ns (39%), one of the fastest values recorded in inorganic scintillators. This fast decay opens up numerous novel applications, where ultrahigh frame rates are important using synchrotron X-rays. This article will discuss fabrication, characterization, and potential applications for this novel scintillator.

fast timing↗
DOE OSTI2022

Elementary Particle Interactions (Final Technical Report)

Neutrinos provide a promising window to probe a wide range of fundamental physics. The past two decades have brought several remarkable neutrino-related discoveries indicating that one may answer the most sought after question of our matter dominated universe from within the neutrino sector. The global neutrino physics program is currently focused on studying neutrino oscillations, and to understand the implications of this phenomena on the evolution of the universe. Addressing all of these open questions and completing the story of neutrino oscillations requires technological advances in neutrino detection. Liquid argon time projection chambers (LArTPCs) are imaging detectors that offer fine-grained tracking, calorimetry and scalability, and are increasingly favored for the next generation of large neutrino detectors. Through leading technical and scientific roles on MicroBooNE, Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) and the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) LArTPC neutrino experiments, the research program supported through this funding has significantly advanced the understanding of neutrino properties along with technical development of LArTPCs for both short- and long-baseline neutrino oscillations physics.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Basic parameter estimation of binary neutron star systems by the advanced LIGO/Vigro network

Within the next five years, it is expected that the Advanced LIGO/Virgo network will have reached a sensitivity sufficient to enable the routine detection of gravitational waves. Beyond the initial detection, the scientific promise of these instruments relies on the effectiveness of our physical parameter estimation capabilities. A major part of this effort has been toward the detection and characterization of gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence, e.g., the coalescence of binary neutron stars. While several previous studies have investigated the accuracy of parameter estimation with advanced detectors, the majority have relied on approximation techniques such as the Fisher Matrix which are insensitive to the non-Gaussian nature of the gravitational wave posterior distribution function. Here we report average statistical uncertainties that will be achievable for strong detection candidates (S/N = 20) over a comprehensive sample of source parameters. We use the Markov Chain Monte Carlo based parameter estimation software developed by the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration with the goal of updating the previously quoted Fisher Matrix bounds. We find the recovery of the individual masses to be fractionally within 9% (15%) at the 68% (95%) credible intervals for equal-mass systems, and within 1.9% (3.7%) for unequal-mass systems. We also find that the Advanced LIGO/Virgo network will constrain the locations of binary neutron star mergers to a median uncertainty of 5.1 deg{sup 2} (13.5 deg{sup 2}) on the sky. This region is improved to 2.3 deg{sup 2} (6 deg{sup 2}) with the addition of the proposed LIGO India detector to the network. We also report the average uncertainties on the luminosity distances and orbital inclinations of strong detections that can be achieved by different network configurations.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Status Report on Design of In-situ Thermomechanical Testing at LANSCE

Nuclear fuel encounters severe thermomechanical environments in which its mechanical response is determined by its microstructure, temperature and stress level histories. Simulating the response of such microstructures is crucial for predicting both performance and transient fuel mechanical responses and experimental verification of such predictions is therefore of great interest. While most of the deformation in a nuclear fuel rod occurs in the cladding, deformation of the fuel itself is still of interest with deformation mechanisms at operating temperature and above including creep, swelling, cracking as well as pellet-clad interaction. Characterization of these properties and understanding of the underlying deformation phenomena at operating or excursion temperatures is therefore of great importance for development and ultimately licensing of improved and novel nuclear fuel forms. Diffraction techniques offer unique insight on the atomistic (e.g. crystal structure) and microstructure (e.g. phase transformations, texture, defects) length scales and have a long history of providing unique data to inform relevant deformation models that enable the required predictive capabilities. For example, dislocations lead to diffraction peak broadening that can be characterized to estimate the dislocation density and study the role of dislocations on the deformation while measuring lattice strains allows to studie load sharing in two phase materials. In this report the requirements for a sample environment for high temperature deformation of nuclear fuels are defined. The HIPPO neutron time-of-flight diffractometer at LANSCE will host this sample environment and is also described. This instrument covers diffraction angles from 140° to 40° and is also equipped with an event-mode neutron imaging detector system, enabling energy-resolved neutron imaging in parallel with the diffraction that could measure sample temperature from Doppler broadening of neutron absorption resonances or measure pore densities from changes in the attenuation. Designs of devices to characterize thermomechanical properties of nuclear fuel without diffraction are also considered to guide the design. While this report is focused on applications for nuclear fuels, the device can also characterize cladding, moderator or structural materials and therefore contribute to other fields of research and development for advanced reactors. The temperatures planned to be reached are above 2000℃, thus enabling characterization of LWR reactor fuels under accident scenarios but also reaching temperatures of fuels developed for nuclear thermal propulsion and providing opportunities to characterize those. In conjunction with the energy-resolved neutron imaging detector, this setup would allow to measure neutron cross-sections at high temperatures, filling a gap towards development of reactors operating at high temperatures.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Performance characterization of 5×5×12 mm 3 virtual Frisch-grid TlBr detectors

Thallium bromide (TlBr) is a promising material for semiconductor gamma-ray detectors due to its high atomic number (Tl = 81, Br = 35), high density (7.56 g/cm 3 ), and relatively low melting point (460 °C). These properties give TlBr several competitive features, including high detection efficiency, good energy resolution, and lower fabrication costs, making it suitable for applications requiring compact, highly sensitive gamma-ray detection systems. Recent developments of TlBr detectors have progressed toward thicker crystals, up to 10–20 mm, configured as pixelated or virtual Frisch-grid (VFG) devices with volumes >1 cm 3 . Despite these advances, challenges remain in practical implementation, including material and fabrication issues that affect energy resolution, device stability, performance, and longevity. These challenges are similar to those faced by HgI 2 and lead-halide perovskite detectors. Here, this study presents results from characterizing over 100 position-sensitive 5×5×12 mm 3 virtual Frisch-grid detectors fabricated by Radiation Monitoring Devices Inc. For a prototype Radioisotope Identification Device (RIID). The work identified factors limiting the performance and longevity of TlBr detectors, including stochastic response variations that limit the energy resolution to 2–3 % (at 662 keV) for most devices, performance degradation associated with defect decoration, and contact delamination. Addressing these issues advances the use of TlBr and similar materials for reliable, high-resolution gamma-ray spectroscopy.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2019

Advances in terahertz solid-state physics and devices

Terahertz (THz) science and technology have attracted tremendous attention owing to their potential applications in areas including high-speed communications, nondestructive evaluation, biological and medical sensing, and national security.1,2 Terahertz waves bridge electronics and photonics, as well as classical and quantum physics, making them equally attractive for fundamental studies of novel physical phenomena. To realize a broad range of real terahertz applications, it is essential to develop compact solid- state devices for terahertz sources, detectors, modulators, and compact systems. These devices often employ quantum materials and heterostructures and can incorporate other features including carrier transfer using atomic layer epitaxy, micro- and electromechanical systems, plasmonic resonators, and metamaterials. To optimize these devices, we have to understand and control ultrafast carrier dynamics in these advanced materials. Furthermore, we have organized a Special Topic in the Journal of Applied Physics to highlight the state-of-the-art in terahertz solid-state devices while also unveiling the properties of these materials on an ultrafast timescale.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2019

Ex-Core Radiation Transport Modeling with VERA User Manual

It is important to be able to accurately predict the neutron flux outside the immediate reactor core for a variety of safety and material analyses. Monte Carlo radiation transport calculations are required to produce these high–fidelity ex-core responses. The Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) provides the automated capability to launch independent Shift fixed-source and eigenvalue Monte Carlo (MC) calculations for user-specified state points during a standard Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) calculation. VERA couples MPACT with COBRA-TF (CTF) to Shift to perform ex-core tallies for multiple state points concurrently, with each component capable of parallel execution on independent processor domains. In these ex-core calculations, MPACT is coupled to CTF and performs the in-core depletion and heat transfer calculation, followed by a fixed-source Shift transport calculation including ex-core regions to produce ex-core responses. The fission source, fuel pin temperatures, moderator temperature and density, boron concentration, and fuel pin depleted isotopic compositions can be transferred to Shift from the MPACT calculation. Specifically, VERA performs fluence calculations in the core barrel outward to the end of the pressure vessel and detector response calculations in ex-core detectors. It also performs the requested tallies in any user-defined ex-core regions. VERA takes advantage of the General Geometry (GG) package in Shift. This gives VERA the flexibility to explicitly model features outside the core barrel, including detailed vessel models, detectors, and power plant details. A very limited set of experimental and numerical benchmarks is available for ex-core simulation comparison. The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors has developed a set of ex-core benchmark problems to include as part of the VERA verification and validation set of problems. The ex-core capability in VERA has been tested on small representative assembly problems, multi-assembly problems, as well as quarter-core and full-core problems. VERA View has also been extended to visualize these vessel fluence results from VERA. This manual serves to present a guide to VERA users about the methodology behind ex-core calculations and the details of input, output, and analysis of results from these calculations. Details in this version of the manual are based on features in VERA 4.0.1.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2013

Boosting Big National Lab Data

Introduction: Big data. Love it or hate it, solving the world’s most intractable problems requires the ability to make sense of huge and complex sets of data and do it quickly. Speeding up the process – from hours to minutes or from weeks to days – is key to our success. One major source of such big data are physical experiments. As many will know, these physical experiments are commonly used to solve challenges in fields such as energy security, manufacturing, medicine, pharmacology, environmental protection and national security. Experiments use different instruments and sensor types to research for example the validity of new drugs, the base cause for diseases, more efficient energy sources, new materials for every day goods, effective methods for environmental cleanup, the optimal ingredients composition for chocolate or determine how to preserve valuable antics. This is done by experimentally determining the structure, properties and processes that govern biological systems, chemical processes and materials. The speed and quality at which we can acquire new insights from experiments directly influences the rate of scientific progress, industrial innovation and competitiveness. And gaining new groundbreaking insights, faster, is key to the economic success of our nations. Recent years have seen incredible advances in sensor technologies, from house size detector systems in large experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider and the ‘Eye of Gaia’ billion pixel camera detector to high throughput genome sequencing. These developments have led to an exponential increase in data volumes, rates and variety produced by instruments used for experimental work. This increase is coinciding with a need to analyze the experimental results at the time they are collected. This speed is required to optimize the data taking and quality, and also to enable new adaptive experiments, where the sample is manipulated as it is observed, e.g. a substance is injected into a tissue sample and the gradual effect is observed as more of the substance is injected, providing better insights into the natural processes that are occurring, as well as result driven sampling adjustment to capture particularly interesting features --- as they emerge. The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is recognized for it’s expertise in the development of new measurement techniques and their application to challenges of national importance. So it was obvious to us to address the need for in-situ analysis of large scale experimental data. We have a wide range of experimental instruments on site, in facilities such as DOE’s national scientific user facility, the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL). Commonly, scientists would create an individual analysis pipeline for each of those instruments; but even the same type of instrument would not necessarily share the same analysis tools. With the rapid increase of data volumes and rates we were facing two key challenges: how to bring a wider set of capabilities to bear to achieve in-situ analysis, and how to do so across a wide range of heterogeneous instruments at affordable costs and in a reasonable timeframe. We decided to take an unconventional approach to the problem, rather than developing customized, one-off solutions for specific instruments we wanted to explore if a more common solution could be found that would go beyond shared, basic infrastructures such as data movement and workflow engines.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2019

Initial assessment of multilayer silicon detectors for hard X-ray imaging

Silicon detectors with lower material budget, ultrafast readout and radiation hardness are under developments. These unique features make pixelized silicon sensors a good option for hard X-ray imaging. To verify the performance of spatial resolution and energy sensitivity of silicon sensors to hard X-rays, a two layer setup of Pixelink PL-D725MU sensors has been tested at the Argonne National Laboratory Advanced Photon Source (APS) ID-10 sector with 29.2 keV high photon flux (4.5 x 10(8) to 4.5 x 10(10) photons per second) X-rays. Better than 3 mu m spatial resolution and clear energy characterization have been achieved by both layers. Commercial CMOS sensors with superior spatial resolution could be used for phase contrast imaging in current synchrotrons. These studies pave the path for future multilayer ultrafast silicon sensor development with ns to sub-ns readout speeds in hard X-ray imaging at synchrotrons and XFEL beamlines.

Hard X-ray imaging↗
DOE OSTI2025

Performance Evaluation of Vertical Federated Machine Learning Against Adversarial Threats on Wide-Area Control System: Preprint

Federated machine learning (FL) is gaining significant popularity to develop cybersecurity solutions in power grids because of its advanced capability to support decentralized data handing at local devices, its privacy preservation, and its low-bandwidth requirement. However, the evolving adversarial machine learning (AML) threats raise significant concerns for the cybersecurity of FL architectures. The FL-based split neural network (SplitNN) achieves high performance through the decentralized training of local neural network models while preserving data privacy across multiple entities. In this paper, we propose a methodology for evaluating the performance of a vertical FLbased anomaly detector against different types of AML attacks, including denial-of-service attacks, adversarial data injection attacks, and replay attacks on the trained local models deployed in the grid network. For a case study, we consider the modified IEEE 13-bus system, and we develop SplitNN-based binary and multiclass classification models to detect, locate, and identify different types of data integrity attacks on the volt-watt control with two pooling layers: maximum pooling and AvgPool. Our experimental results, computed through performance metrics, reveal that the severity of these AML attacks varies with the integrated pooling mechanism, the type of classification model, and the nature of the cyberattack. Further, the AML attacks negatively impacted the prediction time per sample for the pretrained SplitNN during the online testing.

adversarial threats↗
DOE OSTI2026

Development Status of the KIPM Detector Consortium

A kinetic inductance phonon-mediated detector is a calorimeter that uses kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) to read out phonon signals from the device substrate. We have established a consortium comprising university and national lab groups dedicated to advancing the state of the art in these detectors, with the ultimate goal of designing a detector with sub-eV threshold on energy deposited in the substrate, enabling searches for both light dark matter and low-energy neutrino interactions. This consortium brings together experts in KID design, phonon and quasi-particle dynamics, and noise modeling, along with specialized fabrication facilities, test platforms, and unique calibration capabilities. Recently, our consortium has demonstrated a resolution on energy absorbed by the sensor of 2.1 eV, the current record for phonon-sensitive KIDs. However, due to ∼ 1% phonon collection efficiency, the overall detector resolution was limited to 320 eV. Finally, the current focus of the consortium is modeling and improving the phonon collection efficiency and implementing low-T c superconductors, both of which serve to improve the overall energy resolution and threshold of the detectors.

Temples, Dylan J. [Fermi National Accelerator Labo↗
DOE OSTI2015

Strain mapping at nanometer resolution using advanced nano-beam electron diffraction

In this work, we report on the development of a nanometer scale strain mapping technique by means of scanning nano-beam electron diffraction. Only recently possible due to fast acquisition with a direct electron detector, this technique allows for strain mapping with a high precision of 0.1% at a lateral resolution of 1 nm for a large field of view reaching up to 1 μm. We demonstrate its application to a technologically relevant strain-engineered GaAs/GaAsP hetero-structure and show that the method can even be applied to highly defected regions with substantial changes in local crystal orientation. Strain maps derived from atomically resolved scanning transmission electron microscopy images were used to validate the accuracy, precision and resolution of this versatile technique.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2014

Fission Yields and Other Diagnostics for Nuclear Performance

I summarize advances in our understanding of basic nuclear physics cross sections and decay properties that are needed to characterize the magnitude and energy-dependence of a neutron flux, and to determine the amount of fission burnup in plutonium fuel. The number of fissions that have occurred in a neutron environment can be deduced from measurements of the fission products created, providing that the fission product yields are known accurately. I describe how our understanding of plutonium fission product yields has improved in recent years through a meta-analysis of various measured data, and through identification of fission product yield incident-energy dependencies over the 0.2-2 MeV fast energy region. This led to the resolution of a previous discrepancy between the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in their plutonium yield assessments in the fast energy region, although more experimental work is still needed to resolve discrepancies at 14 MeV. Work is also described that has improved our understanding of (n,2n) cross sections that are used as diagnostics of the high-energy neutron spectrum – both on plutonium and americium, and on the radiochemical detectors yttrium, iridium, and thulium. Finally, some observations are made on the importance of continuing to develop our Evaluated Nuclear Data Files (ENDF) database using physics insights from differential cross section and integral laboratory experiments and from nuclear theory advances.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Picosecond UV single photon detectors with lateral drift field: Concept and technologies

Group III–V semiconductor materials are being considered as a Si replacement for advanced logic devices for quite some time. Advances in III–V processing technologies, such as interface and surface passivation, large area deep submicron lithography with high-aspect ratio etching primarily driven by the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor development can also be used for other applications. In this paper we will focus on photodetectors with the drift field parallel to the surface. We compare the proposed concept to the state-of-the-art Si-based technology and discuss requirements which need to be satisfied for such detectors to be used in a single photon counting mode in blue and ultraviolet spectral region with about 10 ps photon timing resolution essential for numerous applications ranging from high-energy physics to medical imaging.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2024

Toward an integrated multi-gigahertz ionizing particle diagnostic

Needs arising at both current and future accelerator facilities call for the development of radiation-hardened position-sensing diagnostics that can operate with multi-GHz repetition rates. Such instruments are likely to also have applications in the diagnosis of rapid plasma behavior. Here, building on the recent work of our Advanced Accelerator Diagnostics Collaboration, we are exploring the development of integrated multi-GHz ionizing particle detection systems based on chemical-vapor deposition diamond sensors, with the initial goal of producing a quadrant detector that can determine the intensity and centroid position of a particle beam at a repetition rate between 5 and 10 GHz. Results from our initial high-speed characterization work are presented, including those from a single-channel sensor with a GHz response. Approaches to achieving multi-GHz (5–10 GHz) rate capability, including the design of a dedicated Application Specific Integrated Circuit and the use of 3D RF-solver computer aided design software, are presented and discussed in more detail. 3D RF simulations suggest clean pulses of duration less than 250 ps (FWHM less than 125 ps) can be achieved with the approaches developed by this work.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗