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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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At least 991 records · Page 55
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Ultrabroadband THz conductivity of gated graphene in- and out-of-equilibrium

We employ ultrabroadband terahertz (THz) spectroscopy to expose the high-frequency transport properties of Dirac fermions in monolayer graphene. By controlling the carrier concentration via tunable electrical gating, both equilibrium and transient optical conductivities are obtained for a range of Fermi levels. The frequency-dependent equilibrium response is determined through a combination of time-domain THz and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy for energies up to the near-infrared, which also provides a measure of the gate-voltage dependent Fermi level. Transient changes in the real and imaginary parts of the graphene conductivity are electro-optically resolved for frequencies up to 15 THz after near-infrared femtosecond excitation, both at the charge-neutral point and for higher electrostatic-doping levels. Modeling of the THz response provides insight into changes of the carrier spectral weights and scattering rates, and reveals an additional broad-frequency ($$\approx$$ 8 THz) component to the photo-induced response, which we attribute to the zero-momentum mode of quantum-critical transport observed here in large-area CVD graphene.

Coslovich, G↗
DOE OSTI2022

Hybrid simulation of Alfvén wave parametric decay instability in a laboratory relevant plasma

Large-amplitude Alfvén waves are subject to parametric decays, which can have important consequences in space, astrophysical, and fusion plasmas. Although the Alfvén wave parametric decay instability (PDI) was predicted decades ago, observational evidence is limited, stimulating considerable interest in laboratory demonstration of the instability and associated numerical modeling. Here, we report an important step toward direct hybrid simulation of the Alfvén wave PDI in a laboratory plasma, using antenna-like wave injection of a circularly polarized wave and realistic wave-plasma parameters. Considering collisionless damping, we identify the threshold Alfvén wave amplitudes and frequencies required for triggering the instability. These threshold behaviors are corroborated by simple theoretical analysis, considering the balance between PDI growth and ion Landau damping and PDI development in a bounded plasma. Other effects not included in the present model such as finite transverse wave scale and ion–neutral collisions are briefly discussed. These hybrid simulations promise to be a useful tool for investigating laboratory Alfvén wave dynamics and may provide guidance for future laboratory demonstration of the PDI process.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Use of intrinsic hysteresis for the active control of internal transport barriers in magnetically confined fusion plasmas

In magnetically confined fusion devices, control of internal transport barriers (ITBs) is important both to enhance and suppress the turbulent transport to improve confinement control. Barrier control should allow for the improvement of confinement to aid in achieving the needed fusion criteria while also permitting the degradation of confinement to control profiles and clean the device by moving out the impurities accumulated near the core. In this work, we present a novel control scenario that takes advantage of the hysteresis intrinsic to transport barriers to easily cycle through enhanced and degraded confinement regimes. The control scenario is illustrated using a five-field simplified transport model for an ITB using typical parameters of a neutral beam injection-heated DIII-D tokamak discharge. Pellets and ion cyclotron resonance frequency power are used as control knobs for this active control scenario. These knobs adequately modify at will the local gradients and, therefore, the growth rates and shearing rates, allowing for easy and efficient control of the barrier by taking advantage of the barrier hysteresis. The result is a control cycle that could be operated with a relatively small amount of power in high performance regimes which, nowadays, typically require large power to control. It may also have advantages to avoid, or at least ameliorate, the appearance of magnetohydrodynamic instabilities in the barrier region.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Anomalous electrodynamics and quantum geometry in the Dirac-Harper model for a graphene bilayer

In this work, graphene bilayers with layer antisymmetric strains are studied using the Dirac-Harper model for a pair of single layer Dirac Hamiltonians coupled by a one-dimensional moiré-periodic interlayer tunneling amplitude. This model hosts low energy, nearly dispersionless bands near charge neutrality that support anomalous polarizations of its charge multipole distributions. These are analyzed introducing a generalized Berry curvature that encodes the field-induced dynamics of multipole fields allowed in a chiral medium with time reversal symmetry. The formulation identifies a reciprocity relation between responses to layer-symmetric and layer-antisymmetric in-plane electric fields and reveals momentum-space quantum oscillations produced by a spatial pattern of band inversions on the moiré scale.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Calculating the two-photon exchange contribution to K L → μ + μ − decay

We present a theoretical framework within which both the real and imaginary parts of the complex, two-photon exchange amplitude contributing to K L → μ + μ − decay can be calculated using lattice quantum chromodynamics. The real part of this two-photon amplitude is of approximately the same size as that coming from a second-order weak strangeness-changing neutral-current process. Thus a test of the standard model prediction for this second-order weak process depends on an accurate result of this two-photon amplitude. A limiting factor of our proposed method comes from low-energy three-particle π π γ states. The contribution from these states will be significantly distorted by the finite volume of our calculation—a distortion for which there is no available correction. However, a simple estimate of the contribution of these three-particle states suggests their contribution to be at most a few percent allowing their neglect in a lattice calculation with a 10% target accuracy. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2023

msr-genie

MSR-Genie is a vendor-neutral tool for fast and efficient queries about model-specific registers (MSRs). The tool allows end users to query bi-directionally across MSR lists as well as processor families and models, and provides them with guidance on appropriate bitmasks. The msr-genie tool is open-source and easily extensible, and currently supports 30 Intel processor models and two-thousand unique MSRs.

Fan, Kyle↗
DOE OSTI2022

Full 3D Kinetic Modeling and Quantification of Positive Streamer Evolution in an Azimuthally Swept Pin-to-Plane Wedge Geometry

Cathode-directed streamer evolution in near atmospheric air is modeled in 3D pin-to-plane geometries using a 3D kinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code that simulates particle-particle collisions via the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. Due to the computational challenges associated with a complete 360° volumetric domain, a practical alternative was achieved using a wedge domain and a range of azimuthal angles was explored (5°, 15°, 30°, and 45°) to study possible effects on the streamer growth and propagation due to the finite wedge angle. A DC voltage of 6 kV is administered to a hemispherical anode of radius 100 μm, with a planar cathode held at ground potential, generating an over-volted state with an electric field of 4 MV/m across a 1500 μm gap. The domain is seeded with an initial ion and electron density of 10 18 m -3 at 1 eV temperature confined to a spherical region of radius 100 μm centered at the tip of the anode. The air chemistry model [1] includes standard Townsend breakdown mechanisms (electron-neutral elastic, excitation, ionization, attachment, and detachment collision chemistry and secondary electron emission) as well as streamer mechanisms (photoionization and ion-neutral collisions) via tracking excited state neutrals which can then either quench via collisions or spontaneously emit a photon based on specific Einstein-A coefficients [2, 3]. In this work, positive streamer dynamics are formally quantified for each wedge angle in terms of electron velocity and density as temporal functions of coordinates r, Φ, and z. Applying a random plasma seed for each simulation, particles of interest are tracked with near femtosecond temporal resolution out to 1.4 ns and spatially binned. This process is repeated six times and results are averaged. Prior 2D studies have shown that the reduced electric field, E/n, can significantly impact streamer evolution [4]. We extend the analysis to 3D wedge geometries, to limit computational costs, and examine the wedge angle’s effect on streamer branching, propagation, and velocity. Results indicate that the smallest wedge angle that produced an acceptably converged solution is 30°. The potential effects that a mesh, when under-resolved with respect to the Debye length, can impart on streamer dynamics and numerical heating were not investigated, and we explicitly state here that the smallest cell size was approximately 10 times the minimum λ D in the streamer channel at late times. This constraint on cell size was the result of computational limitations on total mesh count.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Impact of Selenium and Vitamin E Deficiency on Zika Virus Pathogenesis and Immune Response in Mice

Micronutrient status is recognized to influence host susceptibility to viral infections, yet its impact on Zika virus (ZIKV) pathogenesis remains incompletely understood. We investigated the effects of dietary selenium and combined selenium plus vitamin E deficiency on ZIKV infection outcomes in a type I interferon α/β receptor knockout (Ifnar1 −/− ) murine model. Mice maintained on deficient diets exhibited significantly lower neutralizing antibody titers and reduced levels of key antiviral cytokines (IFN-γ, TNF-α, IFN-α, IFN-β, IL-12p70, CCL5) compared to controls. Correspondingly, higher viral RNA loads were detected in the brains of double-deficient mice, which also experienced greater weight loss and increased mortality. Deep sequencing revealed no major differences in overall viral genome diversity across diet groups; however, specific mutations, including V330L and D67E in the E gene, and V360I in the NS3 gene, were enriched or detected in nutritionally deficient animals. These findings suggest that antioxidant micronutrient deficiency impairs both humoral and cellular immune responses to ZIKV, potentially facilitating enhanced neuroinvasion. While the functional consequences of the identified mutations warrant further investigation, our results underscore the importance of adequate micronutrient intake for optimal antiviral defense. Further studies are needed to clarify the epidemiological significance of these observations.

Biological and medical sciences↗
DOE OSTI2025

JHTDB-wind: a web-accessible large-eddy simulation database of a wind farm with virtual sensor querying

This paper introduces JHTDB-wind (https://turbulence.idies.jhu.edu/datasets/windfarms, last access: 11 November 2025), a publicly accessible database containing large-eddy simulation (LES) data from wind farms. Building on the framework of the Johns Hopkins Turbulence Database (JHTDB), which hosts direct numerical simulation (DNS) and some LES datasets of canonical turbulent flows, JHTDB-wind stores the 4D space–time history of the flow and provides users the ability to access and query the data via a web-based virtual sensor interface. The initial dataset comprises LES results from a large wind farm with 10×6 turbines, modeled using a filtered actuator line method, under conventionally neutral atmospheric conditions. These data comprise 1 h (hour) of flow field data (velocity, pressure, potential temperature deviation, subgrid-scale (SGS) eddy viscosity, and turbine forces, approximately 15 TB (terabytes) and wind turbine data – including both turbine-level operational quantities and blade-level aerodynamic quantities (approximately 1.3 TB) – stored in Zarr and Parquet formats, respectively. Data retrieval is facilitated by the giverny Python package, allowing remote users to query the database in Python or MATLAB (C and Fortran support are available for flow field data). This paper details the simulation setup and demonstrates data access through examples that analyze wind farm flow structures and turbine performance. The framework is extensible to future datasets, including the JHTDB-wind diurnal cycle simulation analyzed in Xiao et al. (2025).

17 WIND ENERGY↗
NASA NTRS1967

A study of seeded rotating arcs.

Neutral carrier gas and slightly ionized plasma binary mixture model for nonhomogeneous seeding effects on rotating arc performance

ROTATING FLUID↗
NASA NTRS1972

The solar wind H and He/+/ content.

Computation of the expected fluxes of He(+) ions and neutral H atoms in the solar wind. A simple model is used to compute the intensity of resonantly backscattered solar He II (304 A) and Lyman alpha radiation.

Gregory, C. T.↗
NASA NTRS1976

The mesosphere

The mesosphere is an atmospheric region characterized by a negative gradient of solar energy absorption and temperature. Although the distribution of most minor constituents is dominated by photochemistry, vertical transport does have a pronounced effect on many of them. The basic dynamic principles are discussed along with their application to the important mesospheric motions: acoustic-gravity waves, tides, planetary-scale waves, and eddy motions. Oxides of nitrogen and hydrogen are also examined which strongly influence the balance of odd oxygen (O and O3). Brief discussions of the chemistry of carbon compounds and of excited species are also included. The chemistry of ionic species in the mesosphere is very important because it strongly influences the propagation and absorption of radio waves. Because of ion clustering and negative-ion formation, such chemistry is extremely complex. The current state of knowledge is discussed in some detail. The principles involved in constructing models for predicting the distribution of minor constituents, both neutral and ionic, are presented.

Poppoff, I. G.↗
NASA NTRS1978

Energy distributions of sputtered copper neutrals and ions

Direct quantitative analysis of surfaces by secondary ion mass spectrometry will depend on an understanding of the yield ratio of ions to neutrals. This ratio as a function of the energy of the sputtered particles has been obtained for a clean polycrystalline copper surface sputtered by 1000-3000 eV Ar(+). The energy distributions of both neutral and ionized copper were measured with a retarding potential analyzer using potential modulation differentiation and signal averaging. The maximum for both distributions is identical and occurs near 2.5 eV. The energy distributions of neutrals is more sharply peaked than that of the ions, presumably as a consequence of more efficient nutralization of slow escaping ions by the mobile electrons of copper. The ion-neutral ratio is compared with results from various ionization models.

Lundquist, T. R.↗
NASA NTRS1979

Plasma particle trajectories around spacecraft propelled by ion thrusters

The thruster plasma is assumed to be described by a collimated energetic beam and a cloud of ionized thermal propellant produced by charge-exchange. A simple adiabatic model is used to describe the expansion of these neutral plasmas away from the source. As the pressure falls, shielding currents dissipate, and the geomagnetic field takes control of the particles. In low earth orbit, it is concluded that the vehicle easily outruns its thruster plasma. At geosynchronous altitude, the local electric fields around high voltage surfaces collect return current from the thermal plasma that appears to be limited only by the available space charge. Results appropriate to proposed electric propulsion missions and the solar power satellite are presented and operational considerations are discussed.

Liemohn, H. B.↗
NASA NTRS1981

Kinetic response of ionospheric ions to onset of auroral electric fields

By examining the exact analytic solution of a kinetic model of collisional interaction of ionospheric ions with atmospheric neutrals in the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook approximation, we show that the onset of intense auroral electric fields in the topside ionosphere can produce the following kinetic effects: (1) heat the bulk ionospheric ions to approximately 2 eV, thus driving them up to higher altitudes where they can be subjected to collisionless plasma processes; (2) produce a non-Maxwellian superthermal tail in the distribution function; and (3) cause the ion distribution function to be anisotropic with respect to the magnetic field with the perpendicular average thermal energy exceeding the parallel thermal energy.

Chiu, Y. T.↗
NASA NTRS1981

Kinetic response of ionospheric ions to onset of auroral electric fields

Examination of the exact analytic solution of a kinetic model of collisional interaction of ionospheric fions with atmospheric neutrals in the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook approximation, shows that the onset of intense auroral electric fields in the topside ionosphere can produce the following kinetic effects: (1) heat the bulk ionospheric ions to approximately 2 eV, thus driving them up to higher altitudes where they can be subjected to collisionless plasma processes; (2) produce a nonMaxwellian superthermal tail in the distribution function; and (3) cause the ion distribution function to be anisotropic with respect to the magnetic field with the perpendicular average thermal energy exceeding the parallel thermal energy.

Chiu, Y. T.↗
NASA NTRS1982

A model of a comet coma with interstellar molecules in the nucleus

The coma of a comet is modeled assuming the icy nucleus contains interstellar molecules. This composition overcomes discrepancies between observation and earlier model predictions for CN, C2, C3, and NH2 abundances. It is found that the abundances of CN, C2, and C3-bearing compounds in the nucleus must be constrained to trace amounts in order to account for the observed column densities. NH3 also cannot be abundant by more than about 1%. The model gives good agreement with observed relative ranges of neutral species in the coma as well as with their observed relative intensity dependence on heliocentric distance. The size of the nucleus and the heliocentric ranges considered are relevant to comet Halley.

Biermann, L.↗
NASA NTRS1986

Construction and control of large space structures

Recent NASA research efforts on space construction are reviewed. Preliminary results of the EASE/ACCESS Shuttle experiments are discussed. A 45-foot beam was constructed on orbit in 30 minutes using a manual assembly technique at a work station. A large tetrahedron was constructed several times using a free floating technique. The capability of repair, utilities installation, and handling the structures using a mobile foot restraint on the RMS was also demonstrated. Implications of the experiments for space station are presented. Models of 5-meter space station structure together with neutral buoyancy simulations suggest manual assembly techniques are feasible. Selected research on control of flexible structures is discussed.

Card, M. F.↗