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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 181 records · Page 10
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

CW copper injector for SRF industrial cryomodules

Compact SRF industrial linacs can provide unique parameters of the beam (>1 MW and >1-10 MeV) hardly achievable by normal conducting linacs within limited space. SRF technology was prohibitively expensive until the development of conduction cooling which opened the way for compact stand alone SRF systems suitable for industrial and research applications. Limited cooling capacity puts strict requirements on the beam parameters with zero losses of the beam on the SRF cavity walls. This implies strict requirements on the beam energy to be accepted by the cryomodule and most importantly the beam bunching with zero particles in between. We designed a CW normal conducting RF injector which consists of a gridded RF gun integrated with a first cell of a copper booster cavity to satisfy these requirements. Here we present a complete design of a booster cavity including beam dynamics, RF, thermomechanical and engineering design.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

An engineering prototype of a late stage ionization cooling cell for a muon collider

Achieving the low emittances necessary for a muon collider requires ionization cooling. Much of that cooling occurs in compact cooling cells where superconducting coils and conventional RF cavities are closely interleaved [1]. The real challenges for these cooling cells reside in their engineering challenges: high field solenoids, RF cavities, and absorbers, often designed near technological limits, placed in close proximity to each other. We thus propose to build a prototype ionization cooling cell to demonstrate the capability of constructing an ionization cooling channel reaching the lowest emittances and to provide engineering input for the design of such beamlines. The magnets and cavities will be powered at their design values, and an absorber will be included along with a mechanism for heating the absorber similarly to how a beam would.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Analysis and Grading of the Test Performance of PS Modules for the CMS Phase-II Outer Tracker Upgrade

The Outer Tracker detector of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment provides information about the trajectory of charged particles produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). During the High Luminosity LHC upgrade, scheduled for the late 2020s, the Outer Tracker will be replaced with new modules capable of transmitting data to the L1 Trigger. These modules are being assembled at several facilities around the world, including Fermilab, necessitating coordinated standards of module quality. Here I discuss the development of POTATO (Phase-II Outer Tracker Analyzer of Test Outputs), a C++ software which provides a standardized procedure for analyzing and grading test results of the Outer Tracker modules. The particular focus of this paper is on the analysis and grading of the PS (pixel-strip) modules in POTATO.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Embedded EPICS server for PowerPMAC motion controllers

An embedded server layer of Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) for PowerPMAC motion controllers has been developed and deployed at two undulator beamlines of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Cancer Institute (GM/CA) Structural Biology Facility at the Advanced Photon Source (APS). This compact, open source solution makes the power and versatility of PowerPMAC motion controls directly accessible to distributed EPICS clients. At GM/CA the system controls about 200 servo and stepper motors — both encoded and unencoded — and multiple digital and analog I/O accessories. The server stack comprises two sublayers: a lower-level driver and database that communicates directly with PowerPMAC, and a facility-specific soft sublayer built on top. The paper describes installing EPICS on PowerPMAC, the implementation of both layers and client examples, including on-the-fly scanning.

EPICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Broadband optical modulation and control at millikelvin temperatures

A universal experimental challenge in studying radiation effects on cryogenic devices is precisely and accurately characterizing the position-dependent device response near the energy detection threshold. Here, we have developed a compact cryogenic optical beam steering system that can be used to generate O (μs) pulses of small numbers of photons over the energy range of 1.3–3.4 eV at room temperature, and deliver those photons via fiber optic to any specified location on the surface of a detector operating at cryogenic temperatures. This new system will allow for robust calibration of any photon-sensitive detector, including superconducting devices. The system can be used efficiently to explore the physics of target materials, quantify the position sensitivity of different sensor designs, measure phonon transport, and study the effects of quasiparticle poisoning on detector operation. We describe the design of this pulsed calibration method and present first results obtained with a second-generation system operated at room temperature and sub-Kelvin temperatures.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Radiative corrections relating leptoquark-fermion couplings probed at low and high energy

Scalar leptoquarks (LQ) with masses between 2 TeV and 50 TeV are prime candidates to explain deviations between measurements and Standard-Model predictions in decay observables of b-flavored hadrons (“flavor anomalies”). Explanations of low-energy data often involve $\mathcal{O}$ (1) LQ-quark-lepton Yukawa couplings, especially when collider bounds enforce a large LQ mass. This calls for the calculation of radiative corrections involving these couplings. Studying such corrections to LQ-mediated b → cτν and b → sℓ + ℓ − amplitudes, we find that they can be absorbed into finite renormalizations of the LQ Yukawa couplings. If one wants to use Yukawa couplings extracted from low-energy data for the prediction of on-shell LQ decay rates, one must convert the low-energy couplings to their high-energy counterparts, which subsume the corrections to the on-shell LQ-quark-lepton vertex. We present compact formulae for these correction factors and find that in scenarios with S 1 , R 2 , or S 3 LQ the high-energy coupling is always smaller than the low-energy one, which weakens the impact of collider data on the determination of the allowed parameter spaces. For the R 2 scenario addressing b → cτν, in which one of the two involved Yukawa coupling must be significantly larger than 1, we find this coupling reduced by 15% at high energy. If both S 1 and R 2 are present, the high-energy coupling can also be larger and the size of the correction is unbounded, because tree contribution and vertex corrections involve different couplings. We further present the conversion formula to the $\overline{MS}$ scheme for the Yukawa couplings of the S 3 scenario.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Development of POTATO for 2S Module Grading for the CMS Phase-2 Outer Tracker Upgrade

Due to the High Luminosity-Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) upgrade, several detectors of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) will need to be upgraded, specifically the new Outer Tracker detector that will be composed of 13,200 silicon modules. The Outer Tracker features two types of modules; the PS (pixel-strip) and the 2S (strip-strip) modules. With a large influx of production of modules, extensive testing is required to ensure they fulfill the performance requirements. This research introduces POTATO (Phase-II Outer Tracker Analyzer of Test Outputs), a specialized software developed in C++ to analyze, grade, and store results in a centralized database since module data will be collected from various international production facilities. The implementation of POTATO will facilitate the selection of the best performing modules for the Outer Tracker upgrade. This paper is focused on the implementation of the analysis of 2S Module results within POTATO.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

In Situ Neutron Reflectometry Reveals the Interfacial Microenvironment Driving Electrochemical Ammonia Synthesis

Electrified interfaces are critical to the performance of energy systems and often demonstrate substantial complexity under operating conditions. A nanoscale understanding of the interfacial microenvironment, i.e., the solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI), in lithium-mediated nitrogen reduction (Li–N 2 R) is key for realizing efficient ammonia (NH 3 ) production. Herein, we used time-resolved neutron reflectometry (NR) to observe SEI formation under Li–N 2 R conditions. We found that the LiBF 4 -based electrolyte provided a substantially more well-defined SEI layer than previous SEI NR interrogations that used LiClO 4 , highlighting the underlying chemistry that dictates electrolyte design and enabling new NR-based studies. Using in situ NR, we found that the LiBF 4 -derived SEI under Li–N 2 R conditions comprises a thick, diffuse outer layer and a thin, compact inner layer at low current cycling (<2 mA/cm 2 ), revealing a structure which ex situ studies have not been able to probe. Increased current cycling and sustained current cycling led to the merging of the layers into a single-layer SEI. Here, we used isotope contrast methods with d 6 -EtOH and d 8 -THF to drive time-resolved tracking of SEI growth at low current cycling, revealing that the proton donor modifies the inner layer, and the solvent modifies the outer layer. Li dendritic growth was observed in the absence of a proton donor. Neutron absorption also indicated the presence of boron in the SEI, underscoring the value of neutron-based interrogation. Our results inform Li-based systems and reaction microenvironments, and these methods can be applied broadly to interfacial energy technologies.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2025

Amplification of 10 μm picosecond pulses in a compact optically pumped multiatmosphere CO 2 laser

Picosecond pulses, generated by a commercial mid-IR optical parametric source (∼0.5 ps, 1-5 μJ), have been regeneratively amplified to an energy of ≤2 mJ in a palm-size high-pressure CO 2 amplifier optically pumped by a Q-switched 2.8 μm Cr:Er:YSGG laser. The characteristics of the amplified pulses have been studied as a function of seed wavelength centered around 10.3 or 10.6 μm, and the pressure in the gain medium. The measured amplified pulse length is ∼5 ps. Numerical modeling suggests that pulses as short as ∼0.5 ps with multi-GW peak power can be generated in a mixture of CO 2 isotopes. Robustness of the output of a compact CO 2 regenerative amplifier to the seed and pump fluctuations measured at 3 Hz and a perfect Gaussian beam profile indicates the potential of such laser technology for producing high-power ultrashort long-wave infrared pulses at high repetition rates.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Optical 14 C Tracing for Biological and Pharmaceutical Applications Using Two-Color Cavity Ringdown Spectroscopy

Laser-based 14 C quantitation has been proposed as a more affordable, higher-throughput, table-top alternative to accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of a mid-IR 14 C detector based on two-color cavity ringdown spectroscopy (2C-CRDS) for low-level 14 C isotope tracing in biological studies. The 2C-CRDS technique quantifies the sample 14 C content by measuring the 14 CO 2 absorption signals from the combusted samples with mid-IR lasers. With 2C-CRDS, we previously demonstrated the most sensitive and accurate optical measurements of 14 CO 2 . The current detection sensitivity and quantitation accuracy of the instrument, at a few parts per quadrillion (where a quadrillion = 10 15 ) 14 C/C mole fraction, is competitive against AMS. Here, by applying the 2C-CRDS 14 C sensor to two applications relevant to 14 C-labeled biochemical analysis and pharmaceutical studies, we demonstrate sub-fCi level (where 1 fCi = 10 –15 Ci) quantitation of sample 14 C activity, with a minimum sample-size requirement of 3 mg of carbon. The current measurement throughput, ~25 min/sample, is largely limited by the sampling efficiency of the online combustion and CO 2 processing interface to the 2C-CRDS instrument. The possibility of a significantly improved measurement throughput of a few minutes per sample is suggested by the results of a flow-through 14 CO 2 sampling scheme. In conclusion, this improved measurement efficiency, combined with the relatively low cost and compact size of a 2C-CRDS sensor, could potentially revolutionize high-sensitivity 14 C tracing in biological, pharmaceutical, and clinical studies.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Design of a shipping fixture for a compact cryomodule hermetic assembly

In support of the development of a conduction-cooled 915MHz superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cryomodule, this study highlights the design of a shipping fixture for transporting the hermetic assembly 4500 km from Jefferson Lab to General Atomics in San Diego, California. The hermetic assembly consists of a 2-cell 915 MHz SRF cavity, a coaxial fundamental power coupler and warm-to-cold transition beam tubes. The two-part shipping assembly consists of an inner frame, providing direct mounting of the components, and an outer frame mounted to the ground transport vehicle. The inner frame is then connected to the outer frame by way of wire-rope isolators. Accelerometer data from ground transportation of previous projects at Jefferson Lab provides the baseline for the expected frequency and magnitude of vibrational and shock events during transit. Modal analyses were carried out in ANSYS on the inner frame assembly and critical components to identify an appropriate wire-rope isolator configuration such that peak loads are mitigated and the incurred frequencies do not correspond with the fundamental modes of the structures.

Accelerator Physics↗
DOE OSTI2025

Draft Prototype Microreactor Transportation Safety Program

Microreactors are compact reactors capable of producing less than 50 megawatts of electrical energy. Typically, these reactors are factory-fabricated and designed to be easily transportable by truck, rail, vessel, or air. Microreactor designs often assume that the unit can be transported containing either unirradiated or irradiated fuel. The interest in microreactors is driven by several factors, including the need to generate power on at remote locations, at military installations, at facilities such as data centers, and in areas recovering from natural disasters. The U.S. Department of Defense is actively pursuing the microreactor concept to meet the increasing energy demands of military operations that require portable and dense power sources. Commercial vendors are also exploring microreactor concepts. The report Microreactor Transportation Emergency Planning Challenges (Maheras et al. 2024) outlined the emergency planning challenges associated with the transportation of microreactors by road, rail, and by barge/ship. The successful commercial deployment and redeployment of microreactors will also require the development of microreactor transportation safety programs. The elements in these safety programs are not specific to microreactors; however, the transport of microreactors may pose unique challenges in these areas. This report builds on the report Microreactor Transportation Emergency Planning Challenges (Maheras et al. 2024) and develops the elements of a prototype microreactor transportation safety program that describes the elements that should be contained vendor-developed microreactor transportation safety programs, identifying the unique elements associated with microreactor transport. This will provide vendors and their transportation contractors a basis for their transportation planning and will accelerate the commercial deployment and redeployment of microreactors by identifying those issues unique to microreactor transport. The emphasis of this report is on highway transport of microreactors. This is based on a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission transportation package approval strategy of crawl-walk-run, where transport by highway is evaluated first (Coles et al. 2021, 2024, Maheras et al. 2021), then other surface modes (rail and barge/ship), and finally air transport. Evaluation of maritime transport of microreactors was recently initiated (Rigato et al. 2024, Maheras et al. 2025). The report first discusses microreactors in general and microreactor transportation safety program planning assumptions. The report then provides a description of the transportation safety planning process and provides an extensive discussion of the elements of transportation safety programs. Specific elements examined included transportation roles and responsibilities, transportation planning, transportation mode and route selection, carrier selection, transportation packaging, advance notification of shipments, public information and communications, emergency response plans and procedures, inspections, security, safe parking, shipment tracking, weather and road conditions, medical preparedness, training and exercises, and program evaluation. The report then identifies the unique elements of a transportation safety program associated with microreactor transport. These unique elements were in the areas of: the unusual nature of microreactor designs, compensatory measures, increased radiation dose rates in the vicinity of microreactors, transportation package approval versus 10 CFR 50.59, and the use of a risk-informed transportation package approval process.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Two-Step Procedure to Detect Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds with Next-Generation Terrestrial Gravitational-Wave Detectors

Cosmological gravitational-wave backgrounds are an exciting science target for next-generation ground-based detectors, as they encode invaluable information about the primordial Universe. However, any such background is expected to be obscured by the astrophysical foreground from compact-binary coalescences. We propose a novel framework to detect a cosmological gravitational-wave background in the presence of binary black holes and binary neutron star signals with next-generation ground-based detectors, including Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescope. Our procedure involves first removing all the individually resolved binary black hole signals by notching them out in the time-frequency domain. Then, we perform joint Bayesian inference on the individually resolved binary neutron star signals, the unresolved binary neutron star foreground, and the cosmological background. For a flat cosmological background, we find that we can claim detection at 5⁢𝜎 level when Ω ref ≥ 2.7 × 10 −12 /$\sqrt{𝑇_{obs}/yr}$, where 𝑇 obs is the observation time (in years), which is within a factor of ≲ 2 from the sensitivity reached in the absence of these astrophysical foregrounds.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2026

Deep X-Ray Observation of NGC 3221: Everything Everywhere All at Once

We present a comprehensive analysis of 475 ks (438 ks unpublished and 37 ks archival) XMM-Newton/EPIC-pn observations of a nearby, highly inclined, star-forming, luminous infrared galaxy NGC 3221 through spatial, temporal, and spectral information. We confirm the presence of a low-luminosity (presumably Compton-thick) active galactic nucleus (AGN). The 0.4–12 keV luminosity and the hardness ratio of the six ultraluminous X-ray sources previously identified in Chandra data exhibit diverse variability on day scales. The collective emission from unresolved sources exhibits a different day-scale variability. We have also discovered two new predominantly soft (<1 keV) sources. One of these has an enigmatic spectral shape featuring a soft component, which we interpret as a superbubble in NGC 3221, and a variable hard component from a compact object, unresolved from the superbubble. We do not confidently detect any X-ray emission from SN 1961L. The hot gas in the interstellar medium (ISM, out to ±6 kpc from the disk plane) and that in the extraplanar region (6–12 kpc) both require two thermal phases at ∼0.15 keV and ∼0.55 keV. The ∼0.55 keV component is fainter in the ISM than the ∼0.15 keV component, but the emission from the latter falls off more steeply with disk height than the emission from the former. This makes the extraplanar region hotter and less dense than the ISM. The proximity of NGC 3221 and the occurrence of the underluminous AGN offer a unique observing opportunity to study the hot diffuse medium along with nuclear and diskwide point sources.

Das, Sanskriti [Stanford Univ., CA (United States)↗
DOE OSTI2025

Compact in situ probe for magnetotransport measurements of 2D materials under variable tensile strain

The recent development of freestanding oxide membranes has opened new opportunities for strain engineering of transition metal oxides beyond values accessible in bulk samples. While a number of studies have been performed with fixed strain, the ability to dynamically control the strain state during measurement would be greatly enabling. To this end, we present an in situ uniaxial strain probe optimized for transport measurements of tensile-strained 2D or quasi-2D materials down to 2 K. Utilizing a flexible polyimide substrate as the stress transfer medium, our platform simplifies the sample preparation process and allows precise alignment of strain fields relative to the crystalline axes. An in situ optical microscope monitors the macroscopic strain state operando and makes it possible to complete an entire magnetotransport study at cryogenic temperatures under continuous strain variations. We demonstrate the capabilities of the probe on a freestanding LaNiO 3 membrane, where we induce tensile strain up to 8% and observe a corresponding strong transport anisotropy. In view of the rapid developments in low-dimensional materials synthesis and the plethora of novel quantum phenomena they exhibit, this strain probe provides general instrumentation for examining and controlling these properties via strain.

2D materials↗
DOE OSTI2025

The z ∼ 1.03 Merging Cluster SPT-CL J0356–5337: New Strong Lensing Analysis with HST and MUSE

We present a strong lensing analysis and reconstruct the mass distribution of SPT-CL J0356−5337, a galaxy cluster at redshift z = 1.034. Our model supersedes previous models by making use of new multiband Hubble Space Telescope data and Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) spectroscopy. We identify two additional lensed galaxies to inform a more well-constrained model using 12 sets of multiple images in five separate lensed sources. The three previously known sources were spectroscopically confirmed by G. Mahler et al. at redshifts of z = 2.363, z = 2.364, and z = 3.048. We measured the spectroscopic redshifts of two of the newly discovered arcs using MUSE data, at z = 3.0205 and z = 5.3288. We increase the number of cluster member galaxies by a factor of 3 compared to previous work. We also report the detection of extended Lyα emission from several background galaxies. We measure the total projected mass density of the two major subcluster components, one dominated by the brightest cluster galaxy and the other by a compact group of luminous red galaxies. We find ${M}_{{\rm{B}}{\rm{C}}{\rm{G}}}(\lt 80\,\rm{kpc})=3.9{3}_{-0.14}^{+0.21}\times 1{0}^{13}$ M⊙ and ${M}_{{\rm{LRG}}}(\lt 80\,\rm{kpc})=2.9{2}_{-0.23}^{+0.16}\times 1{0}^{13}$ M⊙, yielding a mass ratio of $1.3{5}_{-0.08}^{+0.16}$ . The strong lensing constraints offer a robust estimate of the projected mass density regardless of modeling assumptions; allowing more substructure in this line of sight does not change the results or conclusions. Our results corroborate the conclusion that SPT-CL J0356−5337 is dominated by two mass components and is likely undergoing a major merger on the plane of the sky.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Design of a shipping fixture for a compact cryomodule hermetic assembly

Two conduction-cooled 915 MHz superconducting radio frequency hermetic assemblies must be safely transported from the Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA to General Atomics in San Diego, CA for perfor-mance testing in a custom horizontal test cryostat. One hermetic assembly consists of a 2-cell 915 MHz cavity, a coaxial fundamental power coupler, and the warm-to-cold transition beam tubes. The second hermetic assembly consists of a 2-cell 915 MHz cavity only. The assemblies will be transported on a flatbed air-ride trailer over the approximate 4000 km distance. Design requirements included adequate attenuation of 4g vertical axis, 5g beamline axis, and 1.5g lateral axis shock events. The isolation system was designed using helical wire-rope isolators with modal and transient finite element analysis performed in Ansys. Results show shock attenuation of a 10 ms half-sine pulse input to < 1g in the vertical axis, < 1.5g in the beam-line axis, and < 0.5g in the lateral axis for both assem-blies at the specified design loads and all structural stresses are kept below the material yield limits. Addi-tionally, the natural frequencies of both isolation sys-tems adequately attenuate the fundamental modes of the critical structures.

Accelerator Physics↗
DOE OSTI2026

A compact, low-power epithermal neutron counter for lunar water detection

The detection and characterization of lunar water are critical for enabling sustainable human and robotic exploration of the Moon. Orbital neutron spectrometers, such as instruments on Lunar Prospector and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have revealed hydrogen-rich regions near the poles but are limited by coarse spatial resolution and low counting efficiency. We present a compact, lightweight, and low-power epithermal neutron detector based on boron-coated silicon imagers, designed to probe subsurface hydrogen at decimeter scales from mobile platforms such as lunar rovers. This instrument leverages the high neutron capture cross-section of 10 B to convert epithermal neutrons into detectable α and 7 Li ions in a fully-depleted silicon imager, providing a unique event topology to identify neutrons while suppressing backgrounds. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that a 3 μm boron layer achieves optimal neutron detection efficiency, further enhanced with polyethylene moderation to improve sensitivity to the 0.4 eV–500 keV epithermal energy range. For a 10 cm 2 active area, the detector achieves sensitivity to H 2 O weight fractions as low as 0.01 wt% in a 15 minute measurement. This scalable, portable, low-mass design is well-suited for integration into upcoming Artemis and commercial lunar rovers, providing a transformative capability for in-situ resource prospecting and ground-truth validation of orbital measurements.

Detector modelling and simulations I (interaction ↗