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At least 253 records · Page 14

Results of Routine Strip Effluent Hold Tank and Decontaminated Salt Solution Hold Tank Samples from Modular Caustic-Side Solvent Extraction Unit during Macrobatch 5 Operations

Strip Effluent Hold Tank (SEHT) and Decontaminated Salt Solution Hold Tank (DSSHT) samples from several of the "microbatches" of Integrated Salt Disposition Project (ISDP) Salt Batch ("Macrobatch") 5 have been analyzed for 238 Pu, 90 Sr, 137 Cs, and by Inductively Coupled Plasma Emission Spectroscopy (ICPES). The results indicate good decontamination performance within process design expectations. While the data set is sparse, the results of this set and the previous set of results for Macrobatch 4 samples indicate generally consistent operations. The DSSHT samples show continued presence of titanium, likely from leaching of the monosodium titanate in the Actinide Removal process (ARP).

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

A new synchrotron rapid-scanning X-ray fluorescence (SRS-XRF) imaging station at SSRL beamline 6-2

This paper describes a new large-range rapid-scan X-ray fluorescence (XRF) imaging station at beamline 6-2 at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. This station uses a continuous rapid-scan system with a scan range of 1000 × 600 mm and a load capacity of up to 25 kg, capable of 25–100 µm resolution elemental XRF mapping and X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) of a wide range of objects. XRF is measured using a four-element Hitachi Vortex ME4 silicon drift detector coupled to a Quantum Detectors Xspress3 multi-channel analyzer system. A custom system allows the X-ray spot size to be changed quickly and easily via pinholes ranging from 25 to 100 µm, and the use of a poly-capillary or axially symmetric achromatic optic may achieve a <10 µm resolution in the future. The instrument is located at wiggler beamline 6-2 which has an energy range of 2.1–17 keV, creating K emission for elements up to strontium, and L or M emission for all other elements. XAS can also be performed at selected sample positions within the same experiment, allowing for a more detailed chemical characterization of the elements of interest. Furthermore, sparse excitation energy XRF imaging can be performed over a wide range of incident X-ray energies. User friendliness has been emphasized in all stages of the experiment, including versatile sample mounts, He purged chambers for low- Z analyses, and intuitive visualization hardware and software. The station provides analysis capabilities for a wide range of materials and research fields including biological, chemical, environmental and materials science, paleontology, geology and cultural heritage.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Sparse modeling of space- and time-varying diffraction response of a progressively loaded aluminum alloy

Highlights: • Plasticity induces crystal orientation and lattice spacing heterogeneity. • High energy x-ray diffraction spot broadening typically accompanies plasticity. • Method quantifies spot broadening in difficult, mixed microstructure data. • Algorithm finds sparse combination of entries from dictionary of peak functions. • Approach showed asymmetric plastic response in preprocessed AA7075 T651 sample. - Abstract: High energy X-ray diffraction data collected in situ during loading experiments permits probing of the crystal structure of a plastically deforming material sample. An elastoplastic deformation is associated with heterogeneity in both crystal orientation and lattice spacing—each manifesting as azimuthal broadening and radial broadening of diffraction peaks respectively. Quantifying the spreading effect is challenging, especially in cases where the sample has a granularity between that of a single crystal and fine grain or powder material. The approach developed in this paper begins by modeling the intensity signal in the vicinity of a Debye-Scherrer ring as a sparse, nonnegative superposition of Gaussian basis functions drawn from an over-complete dictionary. Processing automatically selects from the dictionary basis functions whose widths and amplitudes are representative of the data. The chosen basis functions are used to compute scalar measures of radial and azimuthal broadening for the set of diffraction peaks composing a Debye-Scherrer ring. To demonstrate the utility of the approach, we show that analysis of diffraction peak shape information from an aluminum alloy 7075 T651 (AA7075 T651) sample provides insight into the origin of material state that would have otherwise have been difficult if not impossible to extract using conventional methods. Furthermore, the extracted information revealed a deformation response linked to the processing history of the sample.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Graph decomposition techniques for solving combinatorial optimization problems with variational quantum algorithms

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) has the potential to approximately solve complex combinatorial optimization problems in polynomial time. However, current noisy quantum devices cannot solve large problems due to hardware constraints. In this work, we develop an algorithm that decomposes the QAOA input problem graph into a smaller problem and solves MaxCut using QAOA on the reduced graph. The algorithm requires a subroutine that can be classical or quantum—in this work, we implement the algorithm twice on each graph. One implementation uses the classical solver Gurobi in the subroutine and the other uses QAOA. We solve these reduced problems with QAOA. On average, the reduced problems require only approximately 1/10 of the number of vertices than the original MaxCut instances. Furthermore, the average approximation ratio of the original MaxCut problems is 0.75, while the approximation ratios of the decomposed graphs are on average of 0.96 for both Gurobi and QAOA. With this decomposition, we are able to measure optimal solutions for ten 100-vertex graphs by running single-layer QAOA circuits on the Quantinuum trapped-ion quantum computer H1-1, sampling each circuit only 500 times. This approach is best suited for sparse, particularly k-regular graphs, as k-regular graphs on n vertices can be decomposed into a graph with at most $\frac{nk}{k+1}$ vertices in polynomial time. Further reductions can be obtained with a potential trade-off in computational time. In conclusion, while this paper applies the decomposition method to the MaxCut problem, it can be applied to more general classes of combinatorial optimization problems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Minimal multi-element stochastic collocation for uncertainty quantification of discontinuous functions

We propose a multi-element stochastic collocation method that can be applied in high-dimensional parameter space for functions with discontinuities lying along manifolds of general geometries. The key feature of the method is that the parameter space is decomposed into multiple elements defined by the discontinuities and thus only the minimal number of elements are utilized. On each of the resulting elements the function is smooth and can be approximated using high-order methods with fast convergence properties. The decomposition strategy is in direct contrast to the traditional multi-element approaches which define the sub-domains by repeated splitting of the axes in the parameter space. Such methods are more prone to the curse-of-dimensionality because of the fast growth of the number of elements caused by the axis based splitting. The present method is a two-step approach. Firstly a discontinuity detector is used to partition parameter space into disjoint elements in each of which the function is smooth. The detector uses an efficient combination of the high-order polynomial annihilation technique along with adaptive sparse grids, and this allows resolution of general discontinuities with a smaller number of points when the discontinuity manifold is low-dimensional. After partitioning, an adaptive technique based on the least orthogonal interpolant is used to construct a generalized Polynomial Chaos surrogate on each element. The adaptive technique reuses all information from the partitioning and is variance-suppressing. We present numerous numerical examples that illustrate the accuracy, efficiency, and generality of the method. When compared against standard locally-adaptive sparse grid methods, the present method uses many fewer number of collocation samples and is more accurate.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Spatially resolved microlensing time-scale distributions across the Galactic bulge with the VVV survey

ABSTRACT We analyse 1602 microlensing events found in the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) near-infrared (NIR) survey data. We obtain spatially resolved, efficiency-corrected time-scale distributions across the Galactic bulge (|ℓ| < 10°, |b| < 5°), using a Bayesian hierarchical model. Spatially resolved peaks and means of the time-scale distributions, along with their marginal distributions in strips of longitude and latitude, are in agreement at a 1σ level with predictions based on the Besançon model of the Galaxy. We find that the event time-scales in the central bulge fields (|ℓ| < 5°) are on average shorter than the non-central (|ℓ| > 5°) fields, with the average peak of the lognormal time-scale distribution at 23.6 ± 1.9 d for the central fields and 29.0 ± 3.0 d for the non-central fields. Our ability to probe the structure of the bulge with this sample of NIR microlensing events is limited by the VVV survey’s sparse cadence and relatively small number of detected microlensing events compared to dedicated optical surveys. Looking forward to future surveys, we investigate the capability of the Roman telescope to detect spatially resolved asymmetries in the time-scale distributions. We propose two pairs of Roman fields, centred on (ℓ = ±9, 5°, b = −0.125°) and (ℓ = −5°, b = ±1.375°) as good targets to measure the asymmetry in longitude and latitude, respectively.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Towards A Geo-Data Science Method for Assessing Rare Earth Element and Critical Mineral Occurrences in Coal and Other Sedimentary Systems

While preliminary analyses of data from open-source resources (Ekmann, 2012) show promising concentrations of REE in individual coal samples from a number of sites and basins in the U.S., other sparse data for REE in domestic coal-related strata suggest that many occurrences are low, “subeconomic” concentrations. At present, there is no method for systematically assessing potential sedimentary occurrences of REE. However, the geologic processes responsible for REE occurrences in coal-related strata are systematic; the unpredictability of REE resources in coal-related strata is due to poorly quantified spatial resource trends and the lack of an exploration method tailored to these resources. Thus, there exists a need for a systematic assessment approach that incorporates knowledge of geological variation in the mechanisms of REE enrichment within coal basins to help minimize geologic uncertainty and reduce commercial exploration risk.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗

Compressed Sensing with Sparse Corruptions: Fault-Tolerant Sparse Collocation Approximations

The recovery of approximately sparse or compressible coefficients in a polynomial chaos expansion is a common goal in many modern parametric uncertainty quantification (UQ) problems. However, relatively little effort in UQ has been directed toward theoretical and computational strategies for addressing the sparse corruptions problem, where a small number of measurements are highly corrupted. Such a situation has become pertinent today since modern computational frameworks are sufficiently complex with many interdependent components that may introduce hardware and software failures, some of which can be difficult to detect and result in a highly polluted simulation result. In this paper we present a novel compressive sampling--based theoretical analysis for a regularized $\ell^1$ minimization algorithm that aims to recover sparse expansion coefficients in the presence of measurement corruptions. Our recovery results are uniform (the theoretical guarantees hold for all compressible signals and compressible corruptions vectors) and prescribe algorithmic regularization parameters in terms of a user-defined a priori estimate on the ratio of measurements that are believed to be corrupted. We also propose an iteratively reweighted optimization algorithm that automatically refines the value of the regularization parameter and empirically produces superior results. Lastly, our numerical results test our framework on several medium to high dimensional examples of solutions to parameterized differential equations and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Ultrashort XUV pulse absorption spectroscopy of partially oxidized cobalt nanoparticles

High-order harmonic generation (HHG) based transient extreme ultraviolet (XUV) absorption spectroscopy is an emerging technique to trace photoinduced charge carrier dynamics in condensed phase materials with femtosecond and even attosecond temporal resolution and elemental specificity. However, its application to nanoparticulate samples that are relevant, for example, for novel photocatalytic light harvesting concepts, has been limited. This is in part due to the challenge to produce residual-free samples on ultrathin, XUV-transparent substrates as well as a widespread understanding that sparsely distributed nanoparticles do not provide sufficient contrast for XUV absorption measurements. Here, we present static XUV absorption spectra of partially oxidized Co nanowire-structures with diameters of approximately 4.5 nm and lengths between 10 and 40 nm, recorded with an ultrashort pulse HHG light source. Nanoparticles are synthesized by the agglomeration of Co atoms inside superfluid helium droplets, followed by surface deposition and oxidation in ambient air. The method is uniquely suited for residual-free synthesis of transition metal nanowires and their deposition on ultrathin substrates. Analysis by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy reveals the formation of CoO nanowires with regions of unoxidized Co in their interior. The nanoparticle samples are investigated in an HHG-driven ultrafast XUV absorption setup. Despite the low surface coverage of only 23%, the recorded spectrum exhibits a distinct absorption feature at the Co M 2,3 (2p) edge near 60 eV with a peak height of about 40 mOD. Finally, the results support the feasibility of table-top ultrafast transient XUV absorption studies of photoinduced dynamics in transition metal oxide nanoparticles with sub-monolayer surface coverage.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗

High-resolution source imaging and moment tensor estimation of acoustic emissions during brittle creep of basalt undergoing carbonation

SUMMARY As the high-frequency analogue to field-scale earthquakes, acoustic emissions (AEs) provide a valuable complement to study rock deformation mechanisms. During the load-stepping creep experiments with CO2-saturated water injection into a basaltic sample from Carbfix site in Iceland, 8791 AE events are detected by at least one of the seven piezoelectric sensors. Here, we apply a cross-correlation-based source imaging method, called geometric-mean reverse-time migration (GmRTM) to locate those AE events. Besides the attractive picking-free feature shared with other waveform-based methods (e.g. time-reversal imaging), GmRTM is advantageous in generating high-resolution source images with reduced imaging artefacts, especially for experiments with relatively sparse receivers. In general, the imaged AE locations are found to be scattered across the sample, suggesting a complicated fracture network rather than a well-defined major shear fracture plane, in agreement with X-ray computed tomography imaging results after retrieval of samples from the deformation apparatus. Clustering the events in space and time using the nearest-neighbour approach revealed a group of ‘repeaters’, which are spatially co-located over an elongated period of time and likely indicate crack, or shear band growth. Furthermore, we select 2196 AE events with high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) and conduct moment tensor estimation using the adjoint (backpropagated) strain tensor fields at the locations of AE sources. The resulting AE locations and focal mechanisms support our previously assertion that creep of basalt at the experimental conditions is accommodated dominantly by distributed microcracking.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Systematic parameter inference in stochastic mesoscopic modeling

We propose a method to efficiently determine the optimal coarse-grained force field in mesoscopic stochastic simulations of Newtonian fluid and polymer melt systems modeled by dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) and energy conserving dissipative particle dynamics (eDPD). The response surfaces of various target properties (viscosity, diffusivity, pressure, etc.) with respect to model parameters are constructed based on the generalized polynomial chaos (gPC) expansion using simulation results on sampling points (e.g., individual parameter sets). To alleviate the computational cost to evaluate the target properties, we employ the compressive sensing method to compute the coefficients of the dominant gPC terms given the prior knowledge that the coefficients are “sparse”. The proposed method shows comparable accuracy with the standard probabilistic collocation method (PCM) while it imposes a much weaker restriction on the number of the simulation samples especially for systems with high dimensional parametric space. Fully access to the response surfaces within the confidence range enables us to infer the optimal force parameters given the desirable values of target properties at the macroscopic scale. Moreover, it enables us to investigate the intrinsic relationship between the model parameters, identify possible degeneracies in the parameter space, and optimize the model by eliminating model redundancies. The proposed method provides an efficient alternative approach for constructing mesoscopic models by inferring model parameters to recover target properties of the physics systems (e.g., from experimental measurements), where those force field parameters and formulation cannot be derived from the microscopic level in a straight forward way.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Communication-avoiding optimization methods for distributed massive-scale sparse inverse covariance estimation

Across a variety of scientific disciplines, sparse inverse covariance estimation is a popular tool for capturing the underlying dependency relationships in multivariate data. Unfortunately, most estimators are not scalable enough to handle the sizes of modern high-dimensional data sets (often on the order of terabytes), and assume Gaussian samples. To address these deficiencies, we introduce HP-CONCORD, a highly scalable optimization method for estimating a sparse inverse covariance matrix based on a regularized pseudolikelihood framework, without assuming Gaussianity. Our parallel proximal gradient method uses a novel communication-avoiding linear algebra algorithm and runs across a multi-node cluster with up to 1k nodes (24k cores), achieving parallel scalability on problems with up to ≈819 billion parameters (1.28 million dimensions); even on a single node, HP-CONCORD demonstrates scalability, outperforming a state-of-the-art method. We also use HP-CONCORD to estimate the underlying dependency structure of the brain from fMRI data, and use the result to identify functional regions automatically. The results show good agreement with a clustering from the neuroscience literature.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Communication-Avoiding Optimization Methods for Distributed Massive-Scale Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation.

Across a variety of scientific disciplines, sparse inverse covariance estimation is a popular tool for capturing the underlying dependency relationships in multivariate data. Unfortunately, most estimators are not scalable enough to handle the sizes of modern high-dimensional data sets (often on the order of terabytes), and assume Gaussian samples. To address these deficiencies, we introduce HP-CONCORD, a highly scalable optimization method for estimating a sparse inverse covariance matrix based on a regularized pseudolikelihood framework, without assuming Gaussianity. Our parallel proximal gradient method uses a novel communication-avoiding linear algebra algorithm and runs across a multi-node cluster with up to 1k nodes (24k cores), achieving parallel scalability on problems with up to ~819 billion parameters (1.28 million dimensions); even on a single node, HP-CONCORD demonstrates scalability, outperforming a state-of-the-art method. We also use HP-CONCORD to estimate the underlying dependency structure of the brain from fMRI data, and use the result to identify functional regions automatically. The results show good agreement with a clustering from the neuroscience literature.

Koanantakool, Penporn↗

Characterization of Acoustic Emissions From Analogue Rocks Using Sparse Regression‐DMDc

Abstract Moisture loss in rock is known to generate acoustic emissions (AE). Phenomena that result in AE during drying are related to the movement of fluids through the pores and induced‐cracks that arise from differential mineral shrinkage, especially in clay‐bearing rock. AE from the movement of fluids occurs from the reconfiguration of fluid interfaces during drying, while AE from mineral shrinkage involves the debonding within or between minerals. Here, analogue rock samples were used to examine the differences in the AE signatures when one or both AE source‐types are present. An unsupervised sparse regression model, Dynamic Mode Decomposition with control, that extends Dynamic Mode Decomposition is used to characterize the AE signals recorded during the drying of porous analogue rock samples fabricated with ordinary Portland cement, with and without clay. This method can effectively and accurately reconstruct acoustic signals emitted from samples that only experience moisture loss without cracking. However, the method struggles to reconstruct signals from samples with intricate crack networks that formed during drying because AE generating mechanisms can emit contemporaneously, and the resulting waves propagate through drying‐induced cracks that can lead to multiple internal reflections. Thus, the differential reconstruction accuracy of time series generated by different underlying physical processes provides a robust filter for reducing large data catalogs. In general, both dynamics and sparse initiating events are learned directly from data and this method exposes a data hierarchy based on the complexity of the intrinsic dynamics.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

SUPERNOVA 2003ie WAS LIKELY A FAINT TYPE IIP EVENT

We present new photometric observations of supernova (SN) 2003ie starting one month before discovery, obtained serendipitously while observing its host galaxy. With only a weak upper limit derived on the mass of its progenitor (<25 M{sub Sun }) from previous pre-explosion studies, this event could be a potential exception to the ''red supergiant (RSG) problem'' (the lack of high-mass RSGs exploding as Type IIP SNe). However, this is true only if SN2003ie was a Type IIP event, something which has never been determined. Using recently derived core-collapse SN light-curve templates, as well as by comparison to other known SNe, we find that SN2003ie was indeed a likely Type IIP event. However, with a plateau magnitude of {approx} - 15.5 mag, it is found to be a member of the faint Type IIP class. Previous members of this class have been shown to arise from relatively low-mass progenitors (<12 M{sub Sun }). It therefore seems unlikely that this SN had a massive RSG progenitor. The use of core-collapse SN light-curve templates is shown to be helpful in classifying SNe with sparse coverage. These templates are likely to become more robust as large homogeneous samples of core-collapse events are collected.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Sparse measurement medical CT reconstruction using multi-fused block matching denoising priors

A major challenge for medical X-ray CT imaging is reducing the number of X-ray projections to lower radiation dosage and reduce scan times without compromising image quality. However these under-determined inverse imaging problems rely on the formulation of an expressive prior model to constrain the solution space while remaining computationally tractable. Traditional analytical reconstruction methods like Filtered Back Projection (FBP) often fail with sparse measurements, producing artifacts due to their reliance on the Shannon-Nyquist Sampling Theorem. Consensus Equilibrium, which is a generalization of Plug and Play, is a recent advancement in Model-Based Iterative Reconstruction (MBIR), has facilitated the use of multiple denoisers are prior models in an optimization free framework to capture complex, non-linear prior information. However, 3D prior modelling in a Plug and Play approach for volumetric image reconstruction requires long processing time due to high computing requirement. Instead of directly using a 3D prior, this work proposes a BM3D Multi Slice Fusion (BM3D-MSF) prior that uses multiple 2D image denoisers fused to act as a fully 3D prior model in Plug and Play reconstruction approach. Our approach does not require training and are thus able to circumvent ethical issues related with patient training data and are readily deployable in varying noise and measurement sparsity levels. In addition, reconstruction with the BM3D-MSF prior achieves similar reconstruction image quality as fully 3D image priors, but with significantly reduced computational complexity. We test our method on clinical CT data and demonstrate that our approach improves reconstructed image quality.

Hossain, Maliha [ORNL]↗

Exploration with Scalable Gaussian Process Reinforcement Learning

Exploration is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL), especially in environments with sparse rewards. Quantifying and utilizing the parametric uncertainty has been shown to be paramount for successful exploration [Osband et al., 2018]. Bayesian, or approximately Bayesian, methods present a principled means of estimating the parametric uncertainty in RL problems. Gaussian processes, nonparametric Bayesian models, are often impractical due to poor scalability and computational bottlenecks. We introduce a scalable Gaussian process RL (GPRL) method which directly induces sparsity in the covariance matrix to facilitate faster computation. This is a departure from previous GPRL methods which instead rely on data reduction and subsampling. We compare various covariance-based exploration techniques (Thompson sampling, upper confidence bound, and probabilistic maximum variance) which leverage our scalable GP framework in sparse reward environments. Finally, we show favorable comparison against the bootstrapped deep Q-Network.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Bayesian model for multivariate discrete data using spatial and expert information with application to inferring building attributes

When modeling sparsely observed multivariate data, strong prior information elicited from experts can be used to bolster predictive accuracy and counteract sampling bias. Similarly, modeling autocorrelation in space can help make use of co-occurrence patterns present in many types of spatial data. To make use of both expert prior information and spatial structure, we propose a novel graphical model for a spatial Bayesian network developed specifically to address challenges in inferring the attributes of buildings from geographically sparse observational data. This model is implemented as the sum of a spatial multivariate Gaussian random field and a tabular conditional probability function in real-valued space prior to projection onto the probability simplex. This modeling form is especially suitable for the usage of prior information in the form of sets of atomic rules obtained from experts. To perform inference with missing data, we implement a Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme composed of alternating steps of Gibbs sampling of missing entries and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for model parameters. A case study in building attribution is presented to highlight the advantages and limitations of this approach.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗