Urban Water Conservation and Efficiency Potential in California

Improving urban water-use efficiency is a key solution to California's short-term and longterm water challenges: from drought to unsustainable groundwater use to growing tensions over limited supplies. Reducing unnecessary water withdrawals leaves more water in reservoirs and aquifers for future use and has tangible benefits to fish and other wildlife in our rivers and estuaries. In addition, improving water-use efficiency and reducing waste can save energy, lower water and wastewater treatment costs, and eliminate the need for costly new infrastructure

Input Comparison of Radiogenic Neutron Estimates for Ultra-low Background Experiments

Ultra-low-background experiments address some of the most important open questions in particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics: the nature of dark matter, whether the neutrino is its own antiparticle, and does the proton decay. These rare event searches require well-understood and minimized backgrounds. Simulations are used to understand backgrounds caused by naturally occurring radioactivity in the rock and in every piece of shielding and detector material used in these experiments. Most important are processes like spontaneous fission and ({\alpha},n) reactions in material close to the detectors that can produce neutrons. A comparison study between two dedicated software packages is detailed. The cross section libraries, neutron yields, and spectra from the Mei-Zhang-Hime and the SOURCES-4A codes are presented. The resultant yields and spectra are used as inputs to direct dark matter detector toy models in GEANT4, to study the impact of their differences on background estimates and fits. Although differences in neutron yield calculations up to 50% were seen, there was no systematic difference between the Mei-Hime-Zhang and SOURCES-4A results. Neutron propagation simulations smooth differences in spectral shape and yield, and both tools were found to meet the broad requirements of the low-background community

Free Radicals in Superfluid Liquid Helium Nanodroplets: A Pyrolysis Source for the Production of Propargyl Radical

An effusive pyrolysis source is described for generating a continuous beam of radicals under conditions appropriate for the helium droplet pick-up method. Rotationally resolved spectra are reported for the $\nu_1$ vibrational mode of the propargyl radical in helium droplets at 3322.15 cm$^{-1}$. Stark spectra are also recorded that allow for the first experimental determination of the permanent electric dipole moment of propargyl, namely -0.150 D and -0.148 D for ground and excited state, respectively, in good agreement with previously reported ab initio results of -0.14 D [1]. The infrared spectrum of the $\nu_1$ mode of propargyl-bromide is also reported. The future application of these methods for the production of novel radical clusters is discussed

Uncovering the Hidden Order in URu2Si2 by Impurity Doping

We report the use of impurities to probe the hidden order parameter of the strongly correlated metal URu_2Si_2 below the transition temperature T_0 ~ 17.5 K. The nature of this order parameter has eluded researchers for more than two decades, but is accompanied by the development of a partial gap in the single particle density of states that can be detected through measurements of the electronic specific heat and nuclear spin-lattice relaxation rate. We find that impurities in the hidden order phase give rise to local patches of antiferromagnetism. An analysis of the coupling between the antiferromagnetism and the hidden order reveals that the former is not a competing order parameter but rather a parasitic effect of the latter.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Managing drought: Learning from Australia

California is facing yet another year of unprecedented, record-breaking drought. At this time of need, US agencies have turned to Australia to identify the strategies that urban water utilities and water agencies adopted to survive its worst drought in recorded history, the Millennium Drought, which lasted from 1997 until it officially ended in 2012

Modern trends in the retail ice cream store

Cover title.Includes bibliographical references

On chip interconnects for multiprocessor turbo decoding architectures

International audienc

An algorithm for LET-analysis

An algorithm for the derivation of LET-distributions from pulse- height spectra obtained with proportional counters is described. The method is based on Fourier transformation: it is applicable to spherical as well as non-spherical proportional counters. The relation between the energy mean, LD, of LET and the energy mean, yD, of the lineal energy density is given