[en] High-resolution spectral observations of the optical candidate for the X-ray transient X0331 + 53 are presented. The data show broad hydrogen and helium emission and strong interstellar absorption corresponding to a visual extinction of about 7 mag. No photospheric absorption in the emission lines, and no radial-velocity variations greater than 0.5 km/s were found over a three-day period. It is concluded that the optical continuum does not arise at or near the primary star. As an example of the spectrographic data, a resolution profile of H-alpha emission in X0331 + 53 is provided

No abstract available

[en] Nearly every new large-scale laser system application at LLNL has requirements for beam control which exceed the current level of available technology. For applications such as inertial confinement fusion, laser isotope separation, laser machining, and laser the ability to transport significant power to a target while maintaining good beam quality is critical. There are many ways that laser wavefront quality can be degraded. Thermal effects due to the interaction of high-power laser or pump light with the internal optical components or with the ambient gas are common causes of wavefront degradation. For many years, adaptive optics based on thing deformable glass mirrors with piezoelectric or electrostrictive actuators have be used to remove the low-order wavefront errors from high-power laser systems. These adaptive optics systems have successfully improved laser beam quality, but have also generally revealed additional high-spatial-frequency errors, both because the low-order errors have been reduced and because deformable mirrors have often introduced some high-spatial-frequency components due to manufacturing errors. Many current and emerging laser applications fall into the high-resolution category where there is an increased need for the correction of high spatial frequency aberrations which requires correctors with thousands of degrees of freedom. The largest Deformable Mirrors currently available have less than one thousand degrees of freedom at a cost of approximately $1M. A deformable mirror capable of meeting these high spatial resolution requirements would be cost prohibitive. Therefore a new approach using a different wavefront control technology is needed. One new wavefront control approach is the use of liquid-crystal (LC) spatial light modulator (SLM) technology for the controlling the phase of linearly polarized light. Current LC SLM technology provides high-spatial-resolution wavefront control, with hundreds of thousands of degrees of freedom, more than two orders of magnitude greater than the best Deformable Mirrors currently made. Even with the increased spatial resolution, the cost of these devices is nearly two orders of magnitude less than the cost of the largest deformable mirror

No abstract available

[en] In recent years a tentative description of the short-range part of hadron interactions with constituent quark interchange has been developed providing an alternative approach to meson physics. Quark interchange plays a role, for example, in the nucleon-nucleon (NN) phase shifts and cross-section. In heavy ion collision simulations at intermediate energies one of the main features is the NN cross-section in the collisional term, where in most cases it is an input adjusted to the free space value. In this paper we introduce the quark degrees of freedom to the NN cross-section in the Vlasov-Uehling-Uhlenbeck (VUU) model and explore the possibility that these effects appear in the observables at lower energies

[en] Benign metastasizing leiomyoma (BML) is a rarely found entity with few documented cases in the literature, usually occurring in women of reproductive age with a history of myomectomy or hysterectomy. The leiomyomas can metastasize to several organs, the lungs being the most commonly affected. We report a case of a 40-year-old female patient who presented at our institution with low back pain. She underwent a lumbar MR that revealed the presence of an expansive and compressive mass in the body of L4. This mass was biopsied, corresponding to a metastasizing leiomyoma with no malignant characteristics. Subsequently, a CT examination showed several soft tissue density round masses in both lungs, but the most striking feature was a 12 cm mass located in the left iliac crest. There was asymmetrical uterus enlargement, caused by the presence of several leiomyomas. Since the lesions were estrogen and progesterone positive, hormone suppression consisting of oophorectomy followed by anastrozole was the chosen treatment. No signs of progression were observed at the 6-month follow-up. This case is one of the very few that occurred in a woman with no previous uterine intervention, adding further evidence that surgery is not an essential condition for this entity to develop

[en] Short note

[en] Brief item

[en] An adaptive optical system used to correct horizontal beam propagation paths has been demonstrated. This system utilizes an interferometric wave-front sensor and a large-actuator-number MEMS-based spatial light modulator to correct the aberrations incurred by the beam after propagation along the path. Horizontal path correction presents a severe challenge to adaptive optics systems due to the short atmospheric transverse coherence length and the high degree of scintillation incurred by laser propagation along these paths. Unlike wave-front sensors that detect phase gradients, however, the interferometric wave-front sensor measures the wrapped phase directly. Because the system operates with nearly monochromatic light and uses a segmented spatial light modulator, it does not require that the phase be unwrapped to provide a correction and it also does not require a global reconstruction of the wave-front to determine the phase as required by gradient detecting wave-front sensors. As a result, issues with branch points are eliminated. Because the atmospheric probe beam is mixed with a large amplitude reference beam, it can be made to operate in a photon noise limited regime making its performance relatively unaffected by scintillation. The MEMS-based spatial light modulator in the system contains 1024 pixels and is controlled to speeds in excess of 800 Hz, enabling its use for correction of horizontal path beam propagation. In this article results are shown of both atmospheric characterization with the system and open loop horizontal path correction of a 1.53 micron laser by the system. To date Strehl ratios of greater than 0.5 have been achieved

[en] The present study reports the experimental results regarding the effect of molar ratio of hydrolysis water used in the sol-gel synthesis upon the structure of zirconia. The ZrO₂ materials were _CH₃ )₄ ], n-propanol, acetic acid, and deionized water. Thermogravimetric analysis and infrared spectroscopy were performed to evaluate the structural evolution upon samples heating; the complete removal of organic compounds at 330 °C was verified. The results of X-ray diffraction showed that the calcination temperature of 400 °C was enough to the crystallization of the metastable tetragonal zirconia phase. Nitrogen adsorption-desorption measurements indicated that the textural properties of zirconia were affected by the water content used in the synthesis, and the highest surface area was achieved when the water molar ratio of 4 was used. (author)