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DOE OSTI2026

A Nonergodic Ground-Motion Model for the San Francisco Bay Area for Small-Magnitude Earthquakes

ABSTRACT Recently, generative models have become a computationally efficient alternative to physics-based numerical simulations of ground motions. Neural networks can learn from existing ground-motion data to generate unobserved ground-motion data at new source and site locations. A key challenge with generative models is ensuring that predicted ground motions remain within a physically realistic range. For this purpose, we developed an empirical, nonergodic ground-motion model (GMM) for small-magnitude earthquakes in the San Francisco Bay area based on about 5000 recordings per component for Mw ≤ 4 earthquakes. The nonergodic GMM predicts spatially varying median source, site, and path effects for both the Fourier amplitude spectrum (FAS) and the Fourier phase derivative (a proxy for duration), as well as the corresponding epistemic uncertainty for each term. For FAS, our model shows above-average source and site effects in the western part of the region and below-average effects in the eastern part, with regional effects exhibiting larger spatial correlation lengths with increasing frequency. For duration, the source term is negligible for small-magnitude earthquakes, and the site term leads to site-specific variations up to 5 s. Path effects for FAS and duration depend on the source–site pair and are extrapolated spatially using recent methods for path-effect modeling. The aleatory variability of the within-site within-path residuals is similar to the variability found in previous studies for other regions. The nonergodic model provides two key contributions: first, median adjustment terms that are transferable to larger magnitude earthquakes, further reducing aleatory variability in probabilistic seismic hazard analysis; second, region-specific criteria for validating machine learning-based ground-motion generators to evaluate whether synthetic ground motions exhibit physically realistic source, site, and path effects.

Lacour, Maxime↗

DOE OSTI2023

Infrasound Detections of Low-Magnitude Earthquakes: Preliminary Results of the West Texas Acoustic Experiment

Infrasound observations have grown increasingly important for the monitoring of earthquakes. While large earthquakes generate infrasound that can be detected thousands of kilometers away, there are few near-field observations of infrasound generated by low-magnitude events. We describe preliminary results of the West Texas Acoustic Experiment, during which infrasound sensors collected continuous data in the Permian Basin for a six-month period spanning January—June 2023. During this time, more than 1000 earthquakes with magnitudes between 1.2 and 4.2 occurred within 50 km of the network. We used spectral analysis, array processing, and manual inspection of waveforms to evaluate arrivals of infrasound signals following 84 events with magnitudes between 2.5 and 4.2. Here, we describe eight such events and the infrasound signals associated with each. We find detections of seismic-to-acoustic infrasound signals associated with seven events. We also find strong evidence of a laterally-propagating, purely acoustic wave generated by an M2.9 earthquake.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2021

Stress Controls Rupture Extent and Maximum Magnitude of Induced Earthquakes

Abstract Seismic hazard forecasts of induced seismicity often require estimates of the maximum possible magnitude ( M max ). Empirical models suggest that maximum magnitudes, or expected number of earthquakes, are related to the volume of injected fluid. We perform a suite of 3D physics‐based earthquake simulations with rate‐ and state‐dependent friction, systematically varying the area of the pressurized region and the amplitude of the initial homogeneous or heterogeneous shear stress. Using the resulting catalog we explore the conditions that result in pressure‐controlled versus runaway ruptures that extend outside the pressurized zone. We find that proposed empirical scaling laws correctly predict M max when shear stresses are further from failure (≤90% of maximum shear stress) and for high amplitude stress fields. Runaway ruptures are observed for higher initial shear stresses and smoother stress fields. In these cases, runaway ruptures occur early after the onset of injection and rarely preceded by foreshock activity.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2023

Earthquake Magnitude With DAS: A Transferable Data–Based Scaling Relation

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is a promising technique to improve the rapid detection and characterization of earthquakes. Previous DAS studies mainly focus on the phase information but less on the amplitude information. In this study, we compile earthquake data from two DAS arrays in California, USA, and one submarine array in Sanriku, Japan. We develop a data-driven method to obtain the first scaling relation between DAS amplitude and earthquake magnitude. Our results reveal that the earthquake amplitudes recorded by DAS in different regions follow a similar scaling relation. The scaling relation can provide a rapid earthquake magnitude estimation and effectively avoid uncertainties caused by the conversion to ground motions. Our results show that the scaling relation appears transferable to new regions with calibrations. The scaling relation highlights the great potential of DAS in earthquake source characterization and early warning.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2025

Driving rapid atomic order in MnAl via low-magnitude magnetic field annealing

Application of a mild (60 mT), uniform magnetic field during short-term thermal treatment of kinetically retained, atomically disordered (paramagnetic) ε-MnAl was found to deliver a significant ~50 % increase in the formation of L1 0 atomically ordered (ferromagnetic) τ-MnAl product phase, compared to that produced by conventional (i.e., zero-field) annealing under identical thermal conditions. The magnetic field, applied in a passive closed-circuit configuration during annealing, induced significant changes in the structural, magnetic, and phase evolution of the material. Computational results based on electronic structure calculations demonstrate that the effective magnetic susceptibility of τ-MnAl is sensitive to the orientation, rather than the magnitude, of an applied magnetic field in the vicinity of the Curie temperature. The uniaxial magnetocrystalline anisotropy of the L1 0 structure is proposed to act as a filter for selective propagation of the population of τ-MnAl variants that are favorably aligned with the applied field. In this manner, crystallographic “gridlock” is alleviated that would otherwise arise from the coexistence of multiple, energetically equivalent τ-phase variants within the parent ε-phase matrix. These results confirm that static, low-magnitude magnetic field annealing is able to accelerate L1 0 atomic ordering in the MnAl system and likely can exert similar influences in relevant magnetic systems, facilitating efficient tailoring of structure-sensitive magnetic properties for the manufacture of magnetic materials.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2023

Using machine learning to predict the correlation of spectra using SDSS magnitudes as an improvement to the Locus Algorithm

The Locus Algorithm is a new technique to improve the quality of differential photometry by optimising the choices of reference stars. At the heart of this algorithm is a routine to assess how good each potential reference star is by comparing its SDSS magnitude values to those of the target star. In this way, the difference in wavelength-dependent effects of the Earth’s atmospheric scattering between target and reference can be minimised. This paper sets out a new way to estimate the quality of each reference star using machine learning. A random subset of stars from SDSS with spectra was chosen. For each one, a suitable reference star, also with a spectrum, was chosen. The correlation between the two spectra in the SDSS r band (between 550 nm and 700 nm) was taken to be the gold-standard measure of how well they match up for differential photometry. The five SDSS magnitude values for each of these stars were used as predictors. A number of supervised machine learning models were constructed on a training set of the stars and were each evaluated on a testing set. The model using Support Vector Regression had the best performance of these models. It was then tested on a final, hold-out, validation set of stars to get an unbiased measure of its performance. With an R 2 of 0.62, the SVR model presents enhanced performance for the Locus Algorithm technique.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2025

Real-time reconstruction of ground motion during small magnitude earthquakes: A pilot study

This study presents a pilot investigation into a novel method for reconstructing real-time ground motion during small magnitude earthquakes (M < 4.5), removing the need for computationally expensive source characterization and simulation processes to assess ground shaking. Small magnitude earthquakes, which occur frequently and can be modeled as point sources, provide ideal conditions for evaluating real-time reconstruction methods. Utilizing sparse observation data, the method applies the Gappy Auto-Encoder (Gappy AE) algorithm for efficient field data reconstruction. This is the first study to apply the Gappy AE algorithm to earthquake ground motion reconstruction. Numerical experiments conducted with SW4 simulations demonstrate the method’s accuracy and speed across varying seismic scenarios. The reconstruction performance is further validated using real seismic data from the Berkeley area in California, USA, demonstrating the potential for practical application of real-time earthquake data reconstruction using Gappy AE. As a pilot investigation, it lays the groundwork for future applications to larger and more complex seismic events.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2020

The influence of environmental microseismicity on detection and interpretation of small-magnitude events in a polar glacier setting

Glacial environments exhibit temporally variable microseismicity. To investigate how microseismicity influences event detection, we implement two noise-adaptive digital power detectors to process seismic data from Taylor Glacier, Antarctica. We add scaled icequake waveforms to the original data stream, run detectors on the hybrid data stream to estimate reliable detection magnitudes and compare analytical magnitudes predicted from an ice crack source model. We find that detection capability is influenced by environmental microseismicity for seismic events with source size comparable to thermal penetration depths. When event counts and minimum detectable event sizes change in the same direction (i.e. increase in event counts and minimum detectable event size), we interpret measured seismicity changes as ‘true’ seismicity changes rather than as changes in detection. Generally, one detector (two degree of freedom (2dof)) outperforms the other: it identifies more events, a more prominent summertime diurnal signal and maintains a higher detection capability. We conclude that real physical processes are responsible for the summertime diurnal inter-detector difference. One detector (3dof) identifies this process as environmental microseismicity; the other detector (2dof) identifies it as elevated waveform activity. Our analysis provides an example for minimizing detection biases and estimating source sizes when interpreting temporal seismicity patterns to better infer glacial seismogenic processes.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2020

Preseismic Fault Creep and Elastic Wave Amplitude Precursors Scale With Lab Earthquake Magnitude for the Continuum of Tectonic Failure Modes

Tectonic faults fail in a continuum of modes from slow earthquakes to elastodynamic rupture. Precursory variations in elastic wavespeed and amplitude, interpreted as indicators of imminent failure, have been observed in limited natural settings and lab experiments where they are thought to arise from contact rejuvenation and microcracking within and around the fault zone. However, the physical mechanisms and connections to fault creep are poorly understood. Here we vary loading stiffness during frictional shear to generate a range of slip modes and measure fault zone properties using transmitted elastic waves. We find that elastic wave amplitudes show clear changes before fault failure. The temporal onset of amplitude reduction scales with lab earthquake magnitude and the magnitude of this reduction varies with fault slip. Our data provide clear evidence of precursors to lab earthquakes and suggest that continuous seismic monitoring could be useful for assessing fault state and seismic hazard potential.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2025

Multitaper Magnitude‐Squared Coherence for Time Series With Missing Data: Understanding Oscillatory Processes Traced by Multiple Observables

To explore the hypothesis of a common source of variability in two time series, observers may estimate the magnitude-squared coherence (MSC), which is a frequency-domain view of the cross correlation. For time series that do not have uniform observing cadence, MSC can be estimated using Welch's overlapping segment averaging. However, multitaper has superior statistical properties to Welch's method in terms of the tradeoff between bias, variance, and bandwidth. The classical multitaper technique has recently been extended to accommodate time series with underlying uniform observing cadence from which some observations are missing. This situation is common for solar and geomagnetic data sets, which may have gaps due to breaks in satellite coverage, instrument downtime, or poor observing conditions. We demonstrate the scientific use of missing-data multitaper magnitude-squared coherence by detecting known solar mid-term oscillations in simultaneous, missing-data time series of solar Lyman α flux and geomagnetic Disturbance Storm Time index. Due to their superior statistical properties, we recommend that multitaper methods be used for all heliospheric time series with underlying uniform observing cadence.

Astro-statistics techniques (1886)↗

DOE OSTI2021

Constraining maximum event magnitude during injection-triggered seismicity

Abstract Understanding mechanisms controlling fluid injection-triggered seismicity is key in defining strategies to ameliorate it. Recent triggered events (e.g. Pohang, Mw 5.5) have exceeded predictions of average energy release by a factor of >1000x, necessitating robust methodologies to both define critical antecedent conditions and to thereby constrain anticipated event size. We define maximum event magnitudes resulting from triggering as a function of pre-existing critical stresses and fluid injection volume. Fluid injection experiments on prestressed laboratory faults confirm these estimates of triggered moment magnitudes for varied boundary conditions and injection rates. In addition, observed ratios of shear slip to dilation rates on individual faults signal triggering and may serve as a measurable proxy for impending rupture. This new framework provides a robust method of constraining maximum event size for preloaded faults and unifies prior laboratory and field observations that span sixteen decades in injection volume and four decades in length scale.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2021

Order-of-magnitude laser imprint reduction using pre-expanded high-Z coatings on targets driven by a third harmonic Nd:glass laser

A hybrid early time x-ray drive followed by conventional laser direct drive obtained by utilizing a thin high-Z overcoat on plastic ablator targets has proven to be very effective at reducing laser imprint in experiments driven by the Nike krypton-fluoride laser. An inherent low level laser prepulse from that laser system heated and expanded the coating prior to the main pulse. Here, we report on results using a frequency tripled Nd:glass laser system (Omega EP) where the inherent prepulse was several orders of magnitude smaller. By applying a separate prepulse, these experiments allowed us to test if the prepulse is important for mitigating imprint with the high-Z layer. The results show that the high-Z coating is much more effective at reducing laser imprint when it is pre-expanded, in this case, by an externally generated low level soft x-ray prepulse of ∼10 J/cm2. With the x-ray prepulse, laser imprint at spatial wavelengths below 100 μm was reduced by an order of magnitude, similar to that observed with the laser prepulse on Nike. Furthermore, the experiments here establish that high-Z coating is effective in reducing imprint even in the case of a fixed speckle pattern. Rayleigh–Taylor-amplified laser imprint and high-Z layer dynamics were measured using through-foil and side-on x-ray radiography. Pre-expansion times from 30 down to 6 ns were effective, potentially compatible with laser prepulse generation using existing NIF and OMEGA front ends; however, temporal beam smoothing appears to be necessary for the laser prepulse that directly illuminates the high-Z coating. The highest imprint reduction is observed for Pd and Au coatings of at least 400 Å thickness; thicknesses down to 200 Å show a reduction in imprint with an adjusted prepulse.

Karasik, Max (ORCID:0000000162354670)↗

DOE OSTI2020

The distribution of neutral hydrogen in the colour–magnitude plane of galaxies

ABSTRACT We present the conditional H i (neutral hydrogen) mass function (HIMF) conditioned on observed optical properties, Mr (r-band absolute magnitude), and Cur (u − r colour), for a sample of 7709 galaxies from Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (40 per cent data release – α.40) which overlaps with a common volume in SDSS DR7. Based on the conditional HIMF, we find that the luminous red, luminous blue, and faint blue populations dominate the total HIMF at the high-mass end, knee, and the low-mass end, respectively. We use the conditional HIMF to derive the underlying distribution function of ΩH i (H i density parameter), p(ΩH i), in the colour–magnitude plane of galaxies. The distribution, p(ΩH i), peaks in the blue cloud at $\mathit{ M_{{r}}}^{\text{max}}=-19.25, \mathit{ C_{{ur}}}^{\text{max}}=1.44$ but is skewed. It has a long tail towards faint blue galaxies, and luminous red galaxies. We argue that p(ΩH i) can be used to reveal the underlying relation between cold gas, stellar mass, and the star formation rate in an unbiased way, that is, the derived relation does not suffer from survey or sample selection.

Dutta, Saili (ORCID:0000000288585845)↗

DOE OSTI2022

Deblurring galaxy images with Tikhonov regularization on magnitude domain

Abstract We propose a regularization-based deblurring method that works efficiently for galaxy images. The spatial resolution of a ground-based telescope is generally limited by seeing conditions and is much worse than space-based telescopes. This circumstance has generated considerable research interest in the restoration of spatial resolution. Since image deblurring is a typical inverse problem and often ill-posed, solutions tend to be unstable. To obtain a stable solution, much research has adopted regularization-based methods for image deblurring, but the regularization term is not necessarily appropriate for galaxy images. Although galaxies have an exponential or Sérsic profile, the conventional regularization assumes the image profiles to behave linearly in space. The significant deviation between the assumption and real situations leads to blurring of the images and smoothing out the detailed structures. Clearly, regularization on logarithmic domain, i.e., magnitude domain, should provide a more appropriate assumption, which we explore in this study. We formulate a problem of deblurring galaxy images by an objective function with a Tikhonov regularization term on a magnitude domain. We introduce an iterative algorithm minimizing the objective function with a primal–dual splitting method. We investigate the feasibility of the proposed method using simulation and observation images. In the simulation, we blur galaxy images with a realistic point spread function and add both Gaussian and Poisson noise. For the evaluation with the observed images, we use galaxy images taken by the Subaru HSC-SSP. Both of these evaluations show that our method successfully recovers the spatial resolution of the deblurred images and significantly outperforms the conventional methods. The code is publicly available from the GitHub 〈https://github.com/kzmurata-astro/PSFdeconv_amag〉.

Murata, Kazumi↗

DOE OSTI2023

Observation of flow angle and flow magnitude fluctuations in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{S_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV at the CERN Large Hadron Collider

This Letter reports on the first measurements of transverse momentum dependent flow angle Ψ n and flow magnitude v n fluctuations determined using new four-particle correlators. The measurements are performed for various centralities in Pb–Pb collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of $\sqrt{S_{NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV with ALICE at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Both flow angle and flow magnitude fluctuations are observed in the presented centrality ranges and are strongest in the most central collisions and for a transverse momentum p T > 2 GeV / c. Comparison with theoretical models, including iEBE-VISHNU, MUSIC, and AMPT, show that the measurements exhibit unique sensitivities to the initial state of heavy-ion collisions.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2024

Quantum field theory, worldline theory, and spin magnitude change in orbital evolution

A previous paper [Z. Bern et al., Binary dynamics through the fifth power of spin at 𝑂⁡(𝐺 2 ), Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 201402 (2023)] identified a puzzle stemming from the amplitudes-based approach to spinning bodies in general relativity: additional Wilson coefficients appear compared to current worldline approaches to conservative dynamics of generic astrophysical objects, including neutron stars. In this paper we clarify the nature of analogous Wilson coefficients in the simpler theory of electrodynamics. We analyze the original field-theory construction, identifying definite-spin states some of which have negative norms, and relating the additional Wilson coefficients in the classical theory to transitions between different quantum spin states. We produce a new version of the theory which also has additional Wilson coefficients, but no negative-norm states. We match, through 𝒪⁡(𝛼 2 ) and 𝒪⁡(𝑆 2 ), the Compton amplitudes of these field theories with those of a modified worldline theory with extra degrees of freedom introduced by releasing the spin supplementary condition. We build an effective two-body Hamiltonian that matches the impulse and spin kick of the modified field theory and of the worldline theory, displaying additional Wilson coefficients compared to standard worldline approaches. The results are then compactly expressed in terms of an eikonal formula. Our key conclusion is that, contrary to standard approaches, while the magnitude of the spin tensor is still conserved, the magnitude of the spin vector can change under conserved Hamiltonian dynamics and this change is governed by the additional Wilson coefficients. For specific values of Wilson coefficients the results are equivalent to those from a definite spin obeying the spin supplementary condition, but for generic values they are physically inequivalent. These results warrant detailed studies of the corresponding issues in general relativity.

classical black holes↗

DOE OSTI2020

Diffraction gratings with two-orders-of-magnitude-enhanced dispersion rates for sub-meV resolution soft X-ray spectroscopy

Diffraction gratings with large angular dispersion rates are central to obtaining high spectral resolution in grating spectrometers operating over a broad spectral range from infrared to soft X-ray domains. The greatest challenge is of course to achieve large dispersion rates in the short-wavelength X-ray domain. Here it is shown that crystals in non-coplanar asymmetric X-ray Bragg diffraction can function as high-reflectance broadband soft X-ray diffraction gratings with dispersion rates that are at least two orders of magnitude larger than those that are possible with state-of-the-art man-made gratings. Additionally, this opens new opportunities to design and implement soft X-ray resonant inelastic scattering (RIXS) spectrometers with spectral resolutions that are up to two orders of magnitude higher than what is currently possible, to further advance a very dynamic field of RIXS spectroscopy, and to make it competitive with inelastic neutron scattering. Examples of large-dispersion-rate crystal diffraction gratings operating near the 930 eV L 3 absorption edge in Cu and of the 2.838 keV L 3 -edge in Ru are presented.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2021

On the Use of Smart Meter Data to Estimate the Voltage Magnitude on the Primary Side of Distribution Service Transformers

This paper develops a novel method to estimate the voltage magnitude on the primary side of distribution service transformers. The proposed method relies exclusively on smart meters, and therefore it is fully data-driven. This is an important feature because electric utilities have detailed models of only the primary network - that is, the network between the distribution substation and the primary side of service transformers that are installed closer to end-customer sites. The network that connects the secondary side of service transformers to end-customer sites, referred to as the secondary network, is simply represented by a lumped load. For each secondary network, the proposed method uses data acquired from only 2 smart meters: the closest and the farthest-in the sense of electrical distance - from the service transformer. As a reference to this feature, the proposed method is named SM2Vp. To our knowledge, this is the first time a method is shown to provide actionable information for realtime operation and control of power distribution grids using only two smart meters per secondary network. This is important because utilities have experienced barriers in managing and using large data sets for real-time operation and control. SM2Vp is primarily intended to provide pseudo-measurements for distribution system state estimation, but it can also be used directly for voltage control schemes. The performance of SM2Vp is demonstrated by numerical simulations carried out on three secondary network synthetic models and by using field data provided by a utility partner serving customers in southwestern California. A maximum relative error of approximately 3.9% or less is observed for the primary voltage magnitude estimates in all numerical experiments.

distribution service transformer↗