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At least 1,171 records · Page 65

The chemical composition of the sun from helioseismic and solar neutrino data

We perform a quantitative analysis of the solar composition problem by using a statistical approach that allows us to combine the information provided by helioseismic and solar neutrino data in an effective way. We include in our analysis the helioseismic determinations of the surface helium abundance and of the depth of the convective envelope, the measurements of the {sup 7}Be and {sup 8}B neutrino fluxes, and the sound speed profile inferred from helioseismic frequencies. We provide all the ingredients to describe how these quantities depend on the solar surface composition, different from the initial and internal composition due to the effects of diffusion and nuclear reactions, and to evaluate the (correlated) uncertainties in solar model predictions. We include error sources that are not traditionally considered such as those from inversion of helioseismic data. We, then, apply the proposed approach to infer the chemical composition of the Sun. Our result is that the opacity profile of the Sun is well constrained by the solar observational properties. In the context of a two-parameter analysis in which elements are grouped as volatiles (i.e., C, N, O, and Ne) and refractories (i.e., Mg, Si, S, and Fe), the optimal surface composition is found by increasing the abundance of volatiles by (45 ± 4)% and that of refractories by (19 ± 3)% with respect to the values provided by Asplund et al. (2009, ARA and A, 47, 481). This corresponds to the abundances ε{sub O} = 8.85 ± 0.01 and ε{sub Fe} = 7.52 ± 0.01, which are consistent at the ∼1σ level with those provided by Grevesse and Sauval (1998, SSRv, 85, 161). As an additional result of our analysis, we show that the best fit to the observational data is obtained with values of input parameters of the standard solar models (radiative opacities, gravitational settling rate, and the astrophysical factors S {sub 34} and S {sub 17}) that differ at the ∼1σ level from those presently adopted.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Floquet stability analyses of stratified oscillating boundary layers on adiabatic slopes

The presence of a no-slip, impermeable, adiabatic, sloped boundary in an otherwise quiescent, stably stratified, Boussinesq flow generates baroclinic vorticity within a diffusive boundary layer. Such conditions are typical of the oscillating boundary layers on adiabatic abyssal slopes, sloped lake bathymetry and sloped coastal bathymetry in the absence of high-wavenumber internal waves, mean flows, far-field turbulence on larger scales, and resonant tidal–bathymetric interaction. We investigate the linear stability of the oscillating flow within non-dimensional parameter space typical of the $M_2$ tide and hydraulically smooth, middle-latitude abyssal slopes through Floquet linear stability analysis. The flow dynamics depends on three non-dimensional variables: the Reynolds number for Stokes’ second problem, the Prandtl number, and a frequency ratio that accounts for the resonance conditions ($C$, criticality) of the buoyant restoring force and the tidal forcing. The Floquet analysis results suggest that oscillating laminar boundary layers on adiabatic abyssal slopes are increasingly unstable as Reynolds number, criticality parameter and/or spanwise disturbance wavenumber are increased. We also show that the two-dimensional Floquet linear instability necessarily generates three-dimensional baroclinic vorticity, which suggests that the evolution of the gravitational instabilities may be nonlinear as $t→∞$.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Spontaneous toroidal flow generation due to negative effective momentum diffusivity

Spontaneous structure formation, and in particular, zonal flows, is observed in a broad range of natural and engineered systems, often arising dynamically as the saturated state of a linear instability. Flows in tokamaks are known to self-organise on small scales, but large scale toroidal flows also arise even when externally applied torques are zero. This has previously been interpreted as the result of small externally imposed breaking of a symmetry. However, we show that for large enough field line pitch, a robust spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs, leading to the generation of strong toroidal flow structures; parameters are typical of Spherical Tokamak discharges with reversed shear profiles. The short wavelength dynamics are qualitatively similar to the growth of poloidal flow structures, and toroidal flow gradients nonlinearly saturate at levels where the shearing rate is comparable to linear growth rate. On long wavelengths, we measure Prandtl numbers of around zero for these systems, in conjunction with the formation of structured toroidal flows, and we show that this is consistent with a model of momentum transport where fluxes act to reinforce small flow gradients: the effective momentum diffusivity is negative. Toroidal flow structures are largely unaffected by collisional damping, so this may allow toroidal bulk flows of order the ion thermal velocity to be maintained with zero momentum input. This phenomenon also provides a mechanism for the generation of localised meso-scale structures like transport barriers.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Analytical Assessment for Transient Stability Under Stochastic Continuous Disturbances

Here, with the growing integration of renewable power generation, plug-in electric vehicles, and other sources of uncertainty, increasing stochastic continuous disturbances are brought to power systems. The impact of stochastic continuous disturbances on power system transient stability attracts significant attention. To address this problem, this paper proposes an analytical assessment method for transient stability of multi-machine power systems under stochastic continuous disturbances. In the proposed method, a probability measure of transient stability is presented and analytically solved by stochastic averaging. Compared with the conventional method (Monte Carlo simulation), the proposed method is many orders of magnitude faster, which makes it very attractive in practice when many plans for transient stability must be compared or when transient stability must be analyzed quickly. Also, it is found that the evolution of system energy over time is almost a simple diffusion process by the proposed method, which explains the impact mechanism of stochastic continuous disturbances on transient stability in theory.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor Reference Plant Model

This report details the progress of Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in creating a reference plant multiphysics model for the Advanced Burner Test Reactor (ABTR). This model was developed under Task 13 of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission project “Development and Modeling Support for Advanced Non-Light Water Reactors,” and is an extension of the reference plant model developed in Task 4b, which was improved upon in the following ways. (1) The discrete ordinates method was used in lieu of the super-homogenization (SPH)-corrected diffusion approximation in order to better capture the anisotropic scattering contribution and the neutron leakage change due to thermal expansion. (2) The novel neutronic spatial discretization approach, termed the ring-heterogeneous (RH) approximation, was conceptualized and introduced to capture the differential expansion of the materials in the core. This new technique proved capable of preserving fission rates and maintaining the eigenvalue within 2.5% and 266 pcm with 9 neutron energy groups, respectively. Separating the different materials in the core enables the differential expansion of materials to be explicitly accounted for, eliminating the need for problem-specific cross-section functionalization techniques. (3) The SAM model for the core and system thermal-hydraulics analysis was updated to include 61 channels instead of just four representative ones. This enables users to obtain improved spatial resolution for sodium temperature and density scalar fields. (4) All the mesh files were created via the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) Reactor module, eliminating all reliance on external tools for mesh creation. (5) Finally, the fuel axial expansion now leverages the HT9 and UPuZr material properties that have been validated against experimental data. The reference plant model was used to perform a full-core unprotected loss of flow (ULOF) transient calculation, including neutronics, thermal and mechanical feedback mechanisms. Future work will be devoted to further enhancements of the model. Potential improvements to the model include the addition of the control rod driveline expansion feedback and the upgrading of the support plate model so as to explicitly include 3D effects. Additionally, a Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation funded parallel effort has completely automated the creation of the ring-heterogeneous (RH) mesh from the fully heterogeneous (FH) geometry, thus maximizing user friendliness for the sodium fast reactor sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) workflow and will be incorporated in future work.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Challenge Problem 1: Preliminary Results of the Direct Numerical Simulation of Transient Flows

This report presents the first direct numerical simulations (DNS) of transient mixed convection in an idealized downcomer-like channel (Challenge Problem 1, Phase II). Using the GPU-accelerated NekRS solver, we modeled a sudden decay in driving pressure, mimicking loss-of-flow events, and tracked the resulting evolution of Reynolds number, boundary-layer structure, turbulence statistics, and heat-transfer metrics. Key findings include the systematic thickening and eventual asymmetry of velocity and thermal boundary layers under buoyant deceleration; minimal “memory” lag in Reynolds shear stress and TKE profiles when sampled at matching Re, yet clear shifts of peak locations toward the cooled wall; overshoots in transient eddy-viscosity and eddy-diffusivity (and corresponding sub-unity turbulent Prandtl numbers) on the cooled side; and a pronounced transient Nusselt-number enhancement driven by wall-temperature inertia and residual eddy mixing. These effects combined to offer a temporary cooling margin above steady-state predictions during reactor LOF transients. Future work will extend this work to a more complex “Case II” geometry (90° turn + lower plenum) and generate multi-Re/Pr datasets for data-driven turbulence closures.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

A Compound Poisson Generator Approach to Point-source Inference in Astrophysics

Abstract The identification and description of point sources is one of the oldest problems in astronomy, yet even today the correct statistical treatment for point sources remains one of the field’s hardest problems. For dim or crowded sources, likelihood-based inference methods are required to estimate the uncertainty on the characteristics of the source population. In this work, a new parametric likelihood is constructed for this problem using compound Poisson generator (CPG) functionals that incorporate instrumental effects from first principles. We demonstrate that the CPG approach exhibits a number of advantages over non-Poissonian template fitting (NPTF)—an existing method—in a series of test scenarios in the context of X-ray astronomy. These demonstrations show that the effect of the point-spread function, effective area, and choice of point-source spatial distribution cannot, generally, be factorized as they are in NPTF, while the new CPG construction is validated in these scenarios. Separately, an examination of the diffuse-flux emission limit is used to show that most simple choices of priors on the standard parameterization of the population model can result in unexpected biases: when a model comprising both a point-source population and diffuse component is applied to this limit, nearly all observed flux will be assigned to either the population or to the diffuse component. A new parameterization is presented for these priors that properly estimates the uncertainties in this limit. In this choice of priors, CPG correctly identifies that the fraction of flux assigned to the population model cannot be constrained by the data.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Gradient flow based phase-field modeling using separable neural networks

Allen–Cahn equation is a reaction–diffusion equation and is widely used for modeling phase separation. Machine learning methods for solving the Allen–Cahn equation in its strong form suffer from inaccuracies in collocation techniques, errors in computing higher-order spatial derivatives, and the large system size required by the space–time approach. To overcome these challenges, we propose solving the gradient flow of the Ginzburg–Landau free energy functional, which is equivalent to the Allen–Cahn equation, thereby avoiding the second-order spatial derivatives associated with the Allen–Cahn equation. A minimizing movement scheme is employed to solve the gradient flow problem, eliminating the complexities of a space–time approach. We utilize a separable neural network that efficiently represents the phase field through low-rank tensor decomposition. As we use the minimizing movement scheme to numerically solve the gradient flow problem, we thus, refer to the proposed method as the Separable Deep Minimizing Movement (SDMM) method. The evaluation of the functional in the minimizing movement scheme using the Gauss quadrature technique bypasses the inaccuracies associated with collocation techniques traditionally used to solve partial differential equations. A hyperbolic tangent transformation is introduced on the phase field prior to the evaluation of the functional to ensure that it remains strictly bounded within the values of the two phases. For this transformation, theoretical guarantee for energy stability of the minimizing movement scheme is established. Our results suggest that this transformation helps to improve the accuracy and efficiency significantly. The proposed method resolves the challenges faced by state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, outperforming them in both accuracy and efficiency. It is also the first machine learning method to achieve an order of magnitude speed improvement over the finite element method. In addition to its formulation and computational implementation, several case studies illustrate the applicability of the proposed method.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Conservative discontinuous Galerkin schemes for nonlinear Dougherty–Fokker–Planck collision operators

Here, we present a novel discontinuous Galerkin algorithm for the solution of a class of Fokker–Planck collision operators. These operators arise in many fields of physics, and our particular application is for kinetic plasma simulations. In particular, we focus on an operator often known as the ‘Lenard–Bernstein’ or ‘Dougherty’ operator. Several novel algorithmic innovations, based on the concept of weak equality, are reported. These weak equalities are used to define weak operators that compute primitive moments, and are also used to determine a reconstruction procedure that allows an efficient and accurate discretization of the diffusion term. We show that when two integrations by parts are used to construct the discrete weak form, and finite velocity-space extents are accounted for, a scheme that conserves density, momentum and energy exactly is obtained. One novel feature is that the requirements of momentum and energy conservation lead to unique formulas to compute primitive moments. Careful definition of discretized moments also ensure that energy is conserved in the piecewise linear case, even though the kinetic-energy term, $v^2$ is not included in the basis set used in the discretization. A series of benchmark problems is presented and shows that the scheme conserves momentum and energy to machine precision. Empirical evidence also indicates that entropy is a non-decreasing function. The collision terms are combined with the Vlasov equation to study collisional Landau damping and plasma heating via magnetic pumping.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Comparison of the Radiation Resistance of Prospective Bipolar and Heterobipolar Transistors

Approaches to solving the problem of the development of efficient bipolar and heterobipolar transistors operating at radio- and ultrahigh frequencies (0.1–10 GHz), which could be used as active elements of modern Si-based and GaAs-based radiation-resistant analog-digital integrated circuits, are discussed. Comparison of the radiation resistance of prospective “lateral” Si-based bipolar and “vertical” AlGaAs/GaAs heterobipolar transistors with a characteristic base thickness of 70–350 nm is performed. The features of the electron transport in active transistor regions are analyzed in detail and the influence of a surge in the velocity and the diffusion of quasi-ballistic electrons on an increase in the radiation resistance of transistors is evaluated.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

Data-driven probability concentration and sampling on manifold

A new methodology is proposed for generating realizations of a random vector with values in a finite-dimensional Euclidean space that are statistically consistent with a dataset of observations of this vector. The probability distribution of this random vector, while a priori not known, is presumed to be concentrated on an unknown subset of the Euclidean space. A random matrix is introduced whose columns are independent copies of the random vector and for which the number of columns is the number of data points in the dataset. The approach is based on the use of (i) the multidimensional kernel-density estimation method for estimating the probability distribution of the random matrix, (ii) a MCMC method for generating realizations for the random matrix, (iii) the diffusion-maps approach for discovering and characterizing the geometry and the structure of the dataset, and (iv) a reduced-order representation of the random matrix, which is constructed using the diffusion-maps vectors associated with the first eigenvalues of the transition matrix relative to the given dataset. The convergence aspects of the proposed methodology are analyzed and a numerical validation is explored through three applications of increasing complexity. The proposed method is found to be robust to noise levels and data complexity as well as to the intrinsic dimension of data and the size of experimental datasets. Both the methodology and the underlying mathematical framework presented in this paper contribute new capabilities and perspectives at the interface of uncertainty quantification, statistical data analysis, stochastic modeling and associated statistical inverse problems.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Nanowires for Electrochemical Energy Storage

Nanomaterials provide many desirable properties for electrochemicalenergy storage devices due to their nanoscale size effect, which could be significantlydifferent from bulk or micron-sized materials. Particularly, confined dimensions playimportant roles in determining the properties of nanomaterials, such as the kinetics ofion diffusion, the magnitude of strain/stress, and the utilization of active materials.Nanowires, as one of the representative one-dimensional nanomaterials, have greatcapability for realizing a variety of applications in thefields of energy storage since theycould maintain electron transport along the long axis and have a confinement effectacross the diameter. In this review, we give a systematic overview of the state-of-the-artresearch progress on nanowires for electrochemical energy storage, from rational designand synthesis,in situstructural characterizations, to several important applications inenergy storage including lithium-ion batteries, lithium-sulfur batteries, sodium-ionbatteries, and supercapacitors. The problems and limitations in electrochemical energystorage and the advantages in utilizing nanowires to address the issues and improve thedevice performance are pointed out. At the end, we also discuss the challenges and demonstrate the prospective for the futuredevelopment of advanced nanowire-based energy storage devices.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

jaxhps: An elliptic PDE solver built with machine learning in mind

Elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) can model many physical phenomena, such as electrostatics, acoustics, wave propagation, and diffusion. In scientific machine learning settings, a high-throughput PDE solver may be required to generate a training dataset, run in the inner loop of an iterative algorithm, or interface directly with a deep neural network. To provide value to machine learning users, such a PDE solver must be compatible with standard automatic differentiation frameworks, scale efficiently when run on graphics processing units (GPUs), and maintain high accuracy for a large range of input parameters. We have designed the jaxhps package with these use-cases in mind by implementing a highly efficient and accurate solver for elliptic problems with native hardware acceleration and automatic differentiation support.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Quasielastic electromagnetic scattering cross sections and world data comparisons in the GENIE Monte Carlo event generator

The usage of Monte Carlo neutrino event generators (MC$\textit{ν}$EGs) is a norm within the high-energy $\textit{ν}$ scattering community. The relevance of quasielastic (QE) energy regimes to $\textit{ν}$ oscillation experiments implies that accurate calculations of $\textit{ν}$A cross sections in this regime will be a key contributor to reducing the systematic uncertainties affecting the extraction of oscillation parameters. In spite of this, many MC$\textit{ν}$EGs utilize highly phenomenological, parametrized models of QE scattering cross sections. Moreover, a culture of validation of MC$\textit{ν}$EGs against prolific electron ($\textit{e}$) scattering data has been historically lacking. In this work, we implement new eA cross sections obtained from nuclear ab initio approaches in GENIE, the primary MC$\textit{ν}$EG utilized by the FNAL community. In particular, we utilize results from quantum MC methods which solve the many-body nuclear problem in the short-time approximation (STA), allowing consistent retention of two-nucleon dynamics which are crucial to explain available nuclear electromagnetic (electroweak) data over a wide range of energy and momentum transfers. This new implementation in GENIE is fully tested against the world QE electromagnetic data, finding agreement with available data below ~2 GeV of beam energy with the aid of a scaling function formalism. The STA is currently limited to study $\textit{A}$ ≤ 12 nuclei, however, its semi-inclusive multibody identity components are exportable to other many-body computational techniques such as auxiliary field diffusion MC which can reach $\textit{A}$ ≤ 40 systems while continuing to realize the factorization contained within the STA’s multinucleon dynamics. Together, these developments promise to make future experiments such as DUNE more accurate in their assessment of MC$\textit{ν}$EG systematics, $\textit{ν}$ properties, and potentially empower the discovery of physics beyond the Standard Model.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Best of both worlds: Enforcing detailed balance in machine learning models of transition rates

The slow microstructural evolution of materials often plays a key role in determining material properties. When the unit steps of the evolution process are slow, direct simulation approaches such as molecular dynamics become prohibitive and Kinetic Monte-Carlo (kMC) algorithms, where the state-to-state evolution of the system is represented in terms of a continuous-time Markov chain, are instead frequently relied upon to efficiently predict long-time evolution. The accuracy of kMC simulations however relies on the complete and accurate knowledge of reaction pathways and corresponding kinetics. This requirement becomes extremely stringent in complex systems such as concentrated alloys where the astronomical number of local atomic configurations makes the a priori tabulation of all possible transitions impractical. Machine learning models of transition kinetics have been used to mitigate this problem by enabling the efficient on-the-fly prediction of kinetic parameters. While conventional KMC methods based on transition state theory naturally yield reversible dynamics that exactly obey the detailed balance criterion, providing strong guarantees on the properties of the stationary distribution, many recently-proposed ML-based approaches to barrier predictions provide no such guarantees. In this study, we derive conditions under which physics-informed ML architectures exactly enforce the detailed balance condition by construction, even when relying on non-extensive descriptions of states in terms of local environments around mobile defects. In conclusion, using the diffusion of a vacancy in a concentrated alloy as an example, we show that such ML architectures also exhibit superior performance in terms of prediction accuracy, demonstrating that the imposition of physical constraints can facilitate the accurate learning of barriers at no increase in computational cost.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

CaloChallenge 2022: a community challenge for fast calorimeter simulation

Here, we present the results of the ‘Fast Calorimeter Simulation Challenge 2022’—the CaloChallenge. We study state-of-the-art generative models on four calorimeter shower datasets of increasing dimensionality, ranging from a few hundred voxels to a few tens of thousand voxels. The 31 individual submissions span a wide range of current popular generative architectures, including variational autoencoders (VAEs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), normalizing flows, diffusion models, and models based on conditional flow matching. We compare all submissions in terms of quality of generated calorimeter showers, as well as shower generation time and model size. To assess the quality we use a broad range of different metrics including differences in one-dimensional histograms of observables, KPD/FPD scores, AUCs of binary classifiers, and the log-posterior of a multiclass classifier. The results of the CaloChallenge provide the most complete and comprehensive survey of cutting-edge approaches to calorimeter fast simulation to date. In addition, our work provides a uniquely detailed perspective on the important problem of how to evaluate generative models. As such, the results presented here should be applicable for other domains that use generative AI and require fast and faithful generation of samples in a large phase space.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Supporting Simulation Families in Nuclear Reactor Workflows SBIR Phase I. Final Scientific/Technical Report

The US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) Toolkit has accelerated both the solutions to existing problems and deployment of new designs for current and advanced reactors. Within the toolkit, there exist various families of simulation tools that target specific aspects of a multi-physics simulation for a nuclear reactor. Tools within a specific family vary in both complexity and fidelity as well as the types of resources they require. To complement the NEAMS effort, the Computational Model Builder (CMB) has been designed to provide a graphical user interface to design and execute nuclear reactor workflows. Previously, we had designed a workflow in CMB to design and prepare for execution a neutronics simulation using DIF3D, a diffusion and transport solver developed at Argonne National Laboratory. For this Phase I effort, we extended CMB’s reactor modeling tools to design and execute a workflow using Proteus-SN, a higher-fidelity transport solver developed at Argonne with more preparatory requirements from the workflow. Furthermore, this workflow was designed to maximize the common features of the two workflows, describing the analogous tasks between the workflows as belonging to a “simulation family”. This perspective facilitates the abstraction of the neutronics simulations to a single bifurcated workflow, allowing the engineer to design a reactor and then choose the appropriate simulation according to his or her needs for fidelity and computational cost.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Bounce-averaged theory in arbitrary multi-well plasmas: solution domains and the graph structure of their connections

Bounce-averaged theories provide a framework for simulating relatively slow processes, such as collisional transport and quasilinear diffusion, by averaging these processes over the fast periodic motions of a particle on a closed orbit. This procedure dramatically increases the characteristic time scale and reduces the dimensionality of the modelled system. The natural coordinates for such calculations are the constants of motion (COM) of the fast particle motion, which by definition do not change during an orbit. However, for sufficiently complicated fields – particularly in the presence of local maxima of the electric potential and magnetic field – the COM are not sufficient to specify the particle trajectory. In such cases, multiple domains in COM space must be used to solve the problem, with boundary conditions enforced between the domains to ensure continuity and particle conservation. Previously, these domains have been imposed by hand, or by recognising local maxima in the fields, limiting the flexibility of bounce-averaged simulations. Here, we present a general set of conditions for identifying consistent domains and the boundary condition connections between the domains, allowing the application of bounce-averaged theories in arbitrarily complicated and dynamically evolving electromagnetic field geometries. We also show how the connections between the domains can be represented by a directed graph, which can help to succinctly represent the trajectory bifurcation structure.

fusion plasma↗