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At least 1,063 records · Page 59

Readout optimization of multi-amplifier sensing charge-coupled devices for single-quantum measurement

The non-destructive readout capability of the Skipper Charge Coupled Device (CCD) has been demonstrated to reduce the noise limitation of conventional silicon devices to levels that allow single-photon or single-electron counting. The noise reduction is achieved by taking multiple measurements of the charge in each pixel. These multiple measurements come at the cost of extra readout time, which has been a limitation for the broader adoption of this technology in particle physics, quantum imaging, and astronomy applications. This work presents recent results of a novel sensor architecture that uses multiple non-destructive floating-gate amplifiers in series to achieve sub-electron readout noise in a thick, fully-depleted silicon detector to overcome the readout time overhead of the Skipper-CCD. This sensor is called the Multiple-Amplifier Sensing Charge-Coupled Device (MAS-CCD) can perform multiple independent charge measurements with each amplifier, and the measurements from multiple amplifiers can be combined to further reduce the readout noise. We will show results obtained for sensors with 8 and 16 amplifiers per readout stage in new readout operations modes to optimize its readout speed. The noise reduction capability of the new techniques will be demonstrated in terms of its ability to reduce the noise by combining the information from the different amplifiers, and to resolve signals in the order of a single photon per pixel. The first readout operation explored here avoids the extra readout time needed in the MAS-CCD to read a line of the sensor associated with the extra extent of the serial register. The second technique explore the capability of the MAS-CCD device to perform a region of interest readout increasing the number of multiple samples per amplifier in a targeted region of the active area of the device.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Static metrology of the meter-scale deformable heliostat

This paper describes a heliostat metrology system which is developed based on deflectometry, utilizing a static perforated panel instead of conventional dynamic monitor displays to provide incident rays. The developed method is named static screen deflectometry (SSD). This robust and scalable method is especially valuable for outdoor tests of large reflectors used in concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) systems. The developed method has been successfully demonstrated on a 2.4 𝑚 × 3.3 𝑚 float glass deformable reflector bent to focus sunlight at 113 𝑚 distance throughout a day. From images obtained from a camera at 50𝑚 distance, the reflector surface was measured to an accuracy of less than 1 𝑚𝑟𝑎𝑑 rms slope error in the full test scope.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Comparison of flash-memory elements using materials based on graphene

Charge capture on flash-memory test structures with floating gates made of graphene (few-layer graphene) and its compounds (graphene oxide and partially fluorinated graphene) is investigated. A comparison of the memory window for different structures has shown the potential of using reduced graphene oxide, graphene with only a few layers, and fluorographene. For the first time, partially fluorinated graphene has been employed as a floating gate in flash-memory structures. Graphene-based materials are promising for 2D printing technologies and flexible electronics.

77 NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY↗

Generation of Giant Amplitude Pulses in a Klystron Chaos Auto-Oscillator

The presented experimental results demonstrate that microwave pulses of giant amplitude are generated in a klystron generator operating in the self-excited mode of chaotic oscillations. The auto-oscillator is assembled using a noisetron scheme that contains two five-cavity floating-drift klystrons serially connected in a ring, one of which operates in the mode of linear signal amplification (the linear klystron) and the other works in the mode of nonlinear signal amplification (the nonlinear klystron). It is established that, at a certain value of the beam current of a nonlinear klystron, intermittency of chaos–chaos type is realized in the auto-oscillation system in the form of chaotic sequences of microwave pulses of giant amplitude formed over the chaotic amplitude background. This type of intermittency is caused by the amplitude bistability of the nonlinear floating-drift klystron.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

A Holistic Algorithmic Approach to Improving Accuracy, Robustness, and Computational Efficiency for Atmospheric Dynamics

Atmospheric weather and climate models must perform simulations very quickly to be useful. Therefore, modelers have traditionally focused on reducing computations as much as possible. However, in our new era of increasingly compute-capable hardware, data movement is now the prohibiting expense. This study examines the computational benefits of a new algorithmic approach to modeling atmospheric dynamics on scales relevant to weather and climate simulation. Rather than minimizing computations, this new approach considers the larger problem more holistically, including spatial accuracy, temporal accuracy, robustness (i.e., oscillations), on-node efficiency, and internode data transfers together at once. Numerical experiments demonstrate how computations can be strategically increased to simultaneously address each of these constraints while reducing data movement to adapt to modern accelerated hardware. The new algorithm can achieve at times up to 80% peak floating point throughput in single precision on the Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU, where the traditional approach is shown to only achieve single-digit floating point efficiency. Further, the new algorithm is twice as fast as a standard Runge--Kutta time integrator, and high-order accuracy with Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory (WENO) limiting came at less than 30% additional runtime cost on a GPU, thus increasing the accuracy per degree of freedom.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Control Co-Design of Wind Turbines

Wind energy is recognized worldwide as cost-effective and environmentally friendly, and it is among the fastest-growing sources of electrical energy. To further decrease the cost of wind energy, wind turbines are being designed at ever-larger scales. To expand the deployment of wind energy, wind turbines are also being designed on floating platforms for placement in deep-water locations offshore. Both larger-scale and floating wind turbines pose challenges because of their greater structural loads and deflections. Complex, large-scale systems such as modern wind turbines increasingly require a control co-design approach, whereby the system design and control design are performed in a more integrated fashion. This article reviews recent developments in control co-design of wind turbines. We provide an overview of wind turbine design objectives and constraints, issues in the design of key wind turbine components, modeling of the wind turbine and environment, and controller coupling issues. Wind turbine control functions and the integration of control design in co-design are detailed with a focus on co-design compatible control approaches.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

FPZIP

fpzip is a C/C++ library for lossless and lossy compression of 1D, 2D, and 3D single- and double-precision floating-point arrays. Although designed for lossless compression, the user may optionally request lossy compression by specifying how many bits of precision per floating-point value to retain. Fpzip supports streaming compression and decompression with either a memory buffer or a file as source or destination. In addition to a simple C interface, fpzip comes with an executable for (de)compressing binary files.

Lindstrom, PeterG↗

Plant density and enhanced plant vigor estimation for high-resolution images v1

The package contains algorithms for the estimation of sprout/plant density and the corresponding enhanced plant vigor from remotely sensed (RS) images. These algorithms aim to improve the plant characterization and monitoring in the early season when the soil component is significant compared to the plant spatial coverage. In such a scenario, the identification of sprouts (or plants) and the estimation of plant vegetation indexes can be performed only using UAV-acquired images. Additionally, because of the extremely high resolution, gridding becomes necessary to improve visualization and provide more informative maps. However, to capture the real range of values of the VIs, it is important to avoid the inclusion of those pixels belonging to the soil component. The sprout/plant density estimation algorithm takes in input a classification map and uses the vegetation class to estimates the plant density within a user-defined grid using a floating window. Similarly, the enhanced plant vigor algorithm takes in input the vegetation index and the classification map. The enhanced vegetation index is computed for each pixel as the average value among those pixels that belong to the vegetation class within a floating window. The software is developed for the MATLAB environment.

Falco, Nicola↗

BinFPE

BinFPE is a tool that detects floating-point exceptions (NaN, infinity, and subnormal quantities) in NVIDIA GPU applications using binary instrumentation. It requires no re-compilation of the application and can analyze libraries. The tool extends NVBit (https://github.com/NVlabs/NVBit), which is provided by NVIDIA Labs to analyze binaries. When the tool detects a floating-point exception it reports to the user the location of the exception (file and line number).

Laguna Peralta, Ignacio↗

Ciel

Compiler optimizations can alter the numerical results of scientific computing applications. When numerical results differ significantly between compilers, optimization levels, and floating-point hardware, these numerical inconsistencies can impact programming productivity. Ciel is a framework that helps programmers identify locations in the source code that are affected by compiler optimizations in CPU and GPU code. Ciel uses a floating-point precision enhancement strategy, guided by a recursive bisection search algorithm with increasing search granularity, to identify the program expressions that induce numerical inconsistencies due to compiler optimizations.

Miao, Wenjun↗

GPU-FPX

GPU-FPX is a tool based on NVBit that detects and analyzes floating-point exceptions on NVIDIA GPUs through binary instrumentation. Its purpose is to detect and report the occurrences of floating-point exceptions during numerical computations, offering efficient location detections and exception flow. GPUFPX achieves exceptional performance, being 16x faster than comparable prior tools, such as BinFPE.

Laguna Peralta, Ignacio↗

CIGEN

CIGEN is a tool that finds input ranges that cause high compiler-induced numerical inconsistencies in numerical programs written in a compiled language. Numerical program behavior may diverge when they are compiled and ran differently. Many factors, such as different hardware architectures (for example, the x87 FPU with its 80-bit registers), different compilers, or different optimization flags may cause the results of floating-point computations to become inconsistent. This kind of inconsistencies are known as compiler-induced numerical inconsistencies. Given a program with floating-point inputs and an output,

Laguna Peralta, Ignacio↗

Sea Surface Salinity Reemergence in an Updated North Atlantic In Situ Salinity Dataset

Monthly sea surface salinity (SSS) fields are constructed from observations, using objective mapping on a 1° x 1° grid in the Atlantic between 30°S and 50°N in the 1970-2016 period in an update of the dataset of Reverdin et al. Data coverage is heterogeneous, with increased density in 2002 when Argo floats become available, high density along Voluntary Observing Ship lines, and low density south of 10°S. Using lag correlation, the seasonal reemergence of SSS anomalies is investigated between 20° and 50°N in 5° x 5° boxes during the 1993-2016 period, both locally and remotely following the displacements of the deep mixed-layer waters estimated from virtual float trajectories derived from the daily AVISO surface geostrophic currents. Although SSS data are noisy, local SSS reemergence is detected in about half of the boxes, notably in the northeast and southeast, while little reemergence is seen in the central and part of the eastern subtropical gyre. In the same period, sea surface temperature (SST) reemergence is found only slightly more frequently, reflecting the short data duration. However, taking geostrophic advection into account degrades the detection of remote SSS and even SST reemergence. When anomalies are averaged over broader areas, robust evidence of a second and third SSS reemergence peak is found in the northeastern and southeastern parts of the domain, indicating long cold-season persistence of large-scale SSS anomalies, while only a first SST reemergence is seen. Finally, an oceanic reanalysis is used to confirm that the correlation analysis indeed reflects the reemergence of subsurface salinity anomalies.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Effects of Atmosphere and Ocean Horizontal Model Resolution on Tropical Cyclone and Upper-Ocean Response Forecasts in Four Major Hurricanes

A coupled atmosphere–ocean model is necessary for tropical cyclone (TC) prediction to accurately characterize ocean feedback on atmospheric processes within the TC environment. Here, the ECMWF coupled global model is run at horizontal resolutions from 9 to 1.4 km in the atmosphere, as well as 25 and 8 km in the ocean, to identify how resolution impacts forecast accuracy of four observed major TCs in the Atlantic: Irma, Florence, Teddy, and Ida. Most of the resolutions used here are unprecedented for global models. GOES-16 and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite images and best track data are used for atmospheric validation. Salinity and temperature observations from Air-Launched Autonomous Micro-Observer (ALAMO) floats are used to validate modeled upper-ocean response, including mixed layer deepening, sea surface cooling, and near-inertial waves in the wakes of TCs. Increasing atmospheric resolution leads to more realistic TC structure and stronger winds, significantly improving TC intensity forecasts and modestly improving track errors. Ocean resolution impacts the upper-ocean response but does not influence atmospheric forecasts for the fast-moving TCs considered here. Stronger mixing, sea surface cooling, and near-inertial oscillations are found for both higher atmosphere and ocean resolutions, provided the initial upper-ocean state is the same for the two ocean resolutions. Whether this agrees better with the ALAMO observations also depends on the realism of the initial upper-ocean state in the model, emphasizing the importance of ocean initialization for the accurate upper-ocean response. Overall, the model at all resolutions correctly predicts stronger mixing, surface cooling, and near-inertial oscillation amplitudes to the right of a TC center, as observed by ALAMO floats.

Atmosphere-ocean interaction↗

Verification of a rapid mooring and foundation design tool

Marine renewable energy devices require mooring and foundation systems that suitable in terms of device operation and are also robust and cost effective. In the initial stages of mooring and foundation development a large number of possible configuration permutations exist. Filtering of unsuitable designs is possible using information specific to the deployment site (i.e. bathymetry, environmental conditions) and device (i.e. mooring and/or foundation system role and cable connection requirements). The identification of a final solution requires detailed analysis, which includes load cases based on extreme environmental statistics following certification guidance processes. Static and/or quasi-static modelling of the mooring and/or foundation system serves as an intermediate design filtering stage enabling dynamic time-domain analysis to be focused on a small number of potential configurations. Mooring and foundation design is therefore reliant on logical decision making throughout this stage-gate process. The open-source DTOcean (Optimal Design Tools for Ocean Energy Arrays) Tool includes a mooring and foundation module, which automates the configuration selection process for fixed and floating wave and tidal energy devices. As far as the authors are aware, this is one of the first tools to be developed for the purpose of identifying potential solutions during the initial stages of marine renewable energy design. While the mooring and foundation module does not replace a full design assessment, it provides in addition to suitable configuration solutions, assessments in terms of reliability, economics and environmental impact. This article provides insight into the solution identification approach used by the module and features the verification of both the mooring system calculations and the foundation design using commercial software. Several case studies are investigated: a floating wave energy converter and several anchoring systems. It is demonstrated that the mooring and foundation module is able to provide device and/or site developers with rapid mooring and foundation design solutions to appropriate design criteria.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Computationally-driven discovery of second harmonic generation in EuBa 3 (B 3 O 6 ) 3 through inversion symmetry breaking

Nonlinear optical (NLO) crystals with superior properties are significant for advancing laser technologies and applications. Introducing rare earth metals to borates is a promising and effective way to modify the electronic structure of a crystal to improve its optical properties in the visible and ultraviolet range. In this work, we computationally discover inversion symmetry breaking in EuBa 3 (B 3 O 6 ) 3 , which was previously identified as centric, and demonstrate noncentrosymmetry via synthesizing single crystals for the first time by the floating zone method. We determine the correct space group to be P 6¯. The material has a large direct bandgap of 5.56 eV and is transparent down to 250 nm. The complete anisotropic linear and nonlinear optical properties were also investigated with a d 11 of ∼0.52 pm/V for optical second harmonic generation. Further, it is Type I and Type II phase matchable. This work suggests that rare earth metal borates are an excellent crystal family for exploring future deep ultraviolet (DUV) NLO crystals. It also highlights how first principles computations combined with experiments can be used to identify noncentrosymmetric materials that have been wrongly assigned to be centrosymmetric.

He, Jingyang (ORCID:0000000238863659)↗

Data for Post-Access Report: Tidal Energy Resource Characterization and Model Validation via the Assessment of Cost-effective Spatially Distributed Current Measurements from microFloat Swarms

This project evaluated how high-resolution, spatially distributed field data can be used to refine and validate site-scale hydrodynamic simulations of tidal channels. Use of such spatially-distributed field observations or site-scale hydrodynamic simulations will be needed for producing accurate predictions of tidal energy production over larger arrays of tidal turbines. The data contained in this archive includes field observations of water velocity from a series of short surveys in Agate Pass taken on August 20th, 2020 using station-keeping ADCP (acoustic doppler current profiler) measurements, drifting downward-looking ADCPs, and microFloats, gathered by researchers at APL-UW under a previous project. It also includes high-resolution hydrodynamic model runs for the site during that time generated under TEAMER support. An explanatory file (.pdf format) describes the survey and field data structure. Processed data is stored in .mat format. Survey summary: start time, number of floats, water level. microFloat data: - Cleaned data for each float in survey, - Time series of position (lat., lon.), depth (relative to surface), and horizontal velocity (u, v) Drifting ADCP data: - Cleaned data for each drifting ADCP in survey - Time series of position (lat., lon.), sample depth (relative to surface), and observed water velocity (u,v,w) Stationary ADCP data: - Cleaned data for each station-keeping data set in survey - Time series of position (lat., lon.), sample depth (relative to surface), and observed water velocity (u,v,w) FVCOM (Finite Volume Coastal Ocean Model) model outputs: Water level and velocity, as well as derived variables (e.g., power density) from the final refined model simulations for the Agate Pass subdomain. Contained in NetCDF and ASCII files for the duration of August 18th and 20th 2020 field surveys. Additional scripts for processing the data and generating the figures in the report are included.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

AmeriFlux FLUXNET-1F US-WPT Winous Point North Marsh

This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-WPT Winous Point North Marsh. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-WPT Winous Point North Marsh produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - The marsh site has been owned by the Winous Point Shooting Club since 1856 and has been managed by wildlife biologists since 1946. The hydrology of the marsh is relatively isolated by the surrounding dikes and drainages and only receives drainage from nearby croplands through three connecting ditches. Since 2001, the marsh has been managed to maintain year-round inundation with the lowest water levels in September. Within the 0–250 m fetch of the tower, the marsh comprises 42.9% of floating-leaved vegetation, 52.7% of emergent vegetation, and 4.4% of dike and upland during the growing season. Dominant emergent plants include narrow-leaved cattail (Typha angustifolia), rose mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos), and bur reed (Sparganium americanum). Common floating-leaved species are water lily (Nymphaea odorata) and American lotus (Nelumbo lutea) with foliage usually covering the water surface from late May to early October.

Chen, Jiquan↗