Spectral evidence for Dirac spinons in a kagome lattice antiferromagnet

Zeng, Z.*; Zhou, C.*; Zhou, H.*; Han, L.*; Chi, R.*; Li, K.*; Kofu, Maiko; Nakajima, Kenji; Wei, Y.*; Zhang, W.*; et al.

Nature Physics, 20(7), p.1097 - 1102, 2024/07

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02495-z

Intrinsic factors responsible for brittle versus ductile nature of refractory high-entropy alloys

Tsuru, Tomohito; Han, S.*; Matsuura, Shutaro*; Chen, Z.*; Kishida, Kyosuke*; Lobzenko, I.; Rao, S.*; Woodward, C.*; George, E.*; Inui, Haruyuki*

Nature Communications (Internet), 15, p.1706_1 - 1706_10, 2024/02

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45639-8

Refractory high-entropy alloys (RHEAs) have attracted attention because of their potential for use in ultrahigh-temperature applications. Unfortunately, their body-centered-cubic (BCC) crystal structures make them more brittle than the ductile and fracture-resistant face-centered-cubic (FCC) HEAs. RHEAs also display significantly lower creep strengths than a leading Ni-base superalloy and its FCC matrix. To overcome these drawbacks and develop RHEAs into viable structural materials, improved fundamental understanding is needed of factors that control strength and ductility. Here we investigate two model RHEAs, TiZrHfNbTa and VNbMoTaW, and show that the former is plastically compressible down to 77 K, whereas the latter is not below 298 K. We find that hexagonal close-packed (HCP) elements in TiZrHfNbTa lower its dislocation core energy, increase its lattice distortion, and lower its shear modulus relative to VNbMoTaW whose elements are all BCC, leading to the formers higher ductility and modulus-normalized yield strength. Consistent with our yield strength models, primarily screw dislocations are present in TiZrHfNbTa after deformation, but equal numbers of edge and screw segments in VNbTaMoW. Dislocation cores are compact in VNbTaMoW and extended in TiZrHfNbTa, and different macroscopic slip planes are activated in the two RHEAs, which we attribute to the concentration of HCP elements. Our findings demonstrate how electronic structure changes related to the ratio of HCP to BCC elements can be used to control strength, ductility, and slip behavior to develop the next generation of high-temperature materials for more efficient power plants and transportation.

PANDORA Project for the study of photonuclear reactions below

Tamii, Atsushi*; Pellegri, L.*; Sderstrm, P.-A.*; Allard, D.*; Goriely, S.*; Inakura, Tsunenori*; Khan, E.*; Kido, Eiji*; Kimura, Masaaki*; Litvinova, E.*; et al.

European Physical Journal A, 59(9), p.208_1 - 208_21, 2023/09

https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-01081-w

no abstracts in English

Urban Working Groups in the IAEA's model testing programmes; Overview from the MODARIA I and MODARIA II programmes

Thiessen, K. M.*; Boznar, M. Z.*; Charnock, T. W.*; Chouhan, S. L.*; Federspiel, L.; Grai, B.*; Grsic, Z.*; Helebrant, J.*; Hettrich, S.*; Hulka, J.*; et al.

Journal of Radiological Protection, 42(2), p.020502_1 - 020502_8, 2022/06

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6498/ac5173

The Fe(n,)Fe cross section from the surrogate ratio method and its effect on the Fe nucleosynthesis

Yan, S. Q.*; Li, X. Y.*; Nishio, Katsuhisa; Lugaro, M.*; Li, Z. H.*; Makii, Hiroyuki; Pignatari, M.*; Wang, Y. B.*; Orlandi, R.; Hirose, Kentaro; et al.

Astrophysical Journal, 919(2), p.84_1 - 84_7, 2021/10

https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac12ce

Development of a reference database for beta-delayed neutron emission

Dimitriou, P.*; Dillmann, I.*; Singh, B.*; Piksaikin, V.*; Rykaczewski, K. P.*; Tain, J. L.*; Algora, A.*; Banerjee, K.*; Borzov, I. N.*; Cano-Ott, D.*; et al.

Nuclear Data Sheets, 173, p.144 - 238, 2021/03

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nds.2021.04.006

-delayed neutron emission has been of interest since the discovery of nuclear fission. In nuclear power reactors, delayed-neutron data play a crucial role in reactor kinetics calculations and safe operation. -delayed neutron data also have a significant impact in the field of nuclear structure and astrophysics especially as nuclei farther away from stability are explored at the new generation of radioactive beam facilities. Several compilations of -decay half-lives and delayed-neutron emission probabilities are available, however, complete documentation of measurements and evaluation procedures is often missing for these properties. Efforts to address this gap in nuclear data and create an updated compilation and evaluation of -delayed neutron properties were undertaken under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which formed a Coordinated Research Project (CRP) on "Development of a Reference Database of Beta-delayed Neutron Emission Data". In this paper we summarize the work that was performed and present the results of the CRP.

Development of a user-friendly interface IRONS for atmospheric dispersion database for nuclear emergency preparedness based on the Fukushima database

El-Asaad, H.*; Nagai, Haruyasu; Sagara, Hiroshi*; Han, C. Y.*

Annals of Nuclear Energy, 141, p.107292_1 - 107292_9, 2020/06

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2019.107292

Atmospheric dispersion simulations can provide crucial information to assess radioactive plumes in the environment for nuclear emergency preparedness. However, it is a difficult and time-consuming task to make simulations assuming many possible scenarios and to derive data from a vast number of results. Therefore, an interface was developed to assist users in conveying characteristics of plumes from simulation results. The interface uses a large database that contains WSPEEDI-II simulations for the first 20-days of radioactive release from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and it displays essential quantitative data to the user from the database. The user may conduct sensitivity analysis with the help of the interface by changing release condition to generate many different case scenarios.

Battery-free, skin-interfaced microfluidic/electronic systems for simultaneous electrochemical, colorimetric, and volumetric analysis of sweat

Bandodkar, A. J.*; Gutruf, P.*; Choi, J.*; Lee, K.-H.*; Sekine, Yurina; Reeder, J. T.*; Jeang, W. J.*; Aranyosi, A. J.*; Lee, S. P.*; Model, J. B.*; et al.

Science Advances (Internet), 5(1), p.eaav3294_1 - eaav3294_15, 2019/01

https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav3294

Interest in advanced wearable technologies increasingly extends beyond systems for biophysical measurements to those that enable continuous, non-invasive monitoring of biochemical markers in biofluids. Here, we introduce battery-free, wireless microelectronic platforms that perform sensing via schemes inspired by the operation of biofuel cells. Combining these systems in a magnetically releasable manner with chrono-sampling microfluidic networks that incorporate assays based on colorimetric sensing yields thin, flexible, lightweight, skin-interfaced technologies with broad functionality in sweat analysis. A demonstration device allows simultaneous monitoring of sweat rate/loss, along with quantitative measurements of pH and of lactate, glucose and chloride concentrations using biofuel cell and colorimetric approaches.

Multi-threading performance of Geant4, MCNP6, and PHITS Monte Carlo codes for tetrahedral-mesh geometry

Han, M. C.*; Yeom, Y. S.*; Lee, H. S.*; Shin, B.*; Kim, C. H.*; Furuta, Takuya

Physics in Medicine & Biology, 63(9), p.09NT02_1 - 09NT02_9, 2018/05

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6560/aabd20

The multi-threading computation performances of the Geant4, MCNP6, and PHITS codes were evaluated using three tetrahedral-mesh phantoms with different complexity. Photon and neutron transport simulations were conducted and the initialization time, calculation time, and memory usage were measured as a function of the number of threads N used in the simulation. The initialization time significantly increases with the complexity of the phantom, but not much with the number of the threads. For the calculation time, Geant4 showed good parallelization efficiency with multi-thread computation (30 times speed-up factor for N = 40) adopting the private tallies while saturation of the speed-up factor were observed in MCNP6 and PHITS (10 and a few times for N = 40) due to the time delay for the sharing tallies. On the other hand, Geant4 requires larger memory specification and the memory usage rapidly increases with the number of threads compared to MCNP6 or PHITS. It is notable that when compared to the other codes, the memory usage of PHITS is much smaller, regardless of both the complexity of the phantom and the number of the threads.

The Application of radiochronometry during the 4th collaborative materials exercise of the nuclear forensics international technical working group (ITWG)

Kristo, M. J.*; Williams, R.*; Gaffney, A. M.*; Kayzar-Boggs, T. M.*; Schorzman, K. C.*; Lagerkvist, P.*; Vesterlund, A.*; Ramebck, H.*; Nelwamondo, A. N.*; Kotze, D.*; et al.

Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, 315(2), p.425 - 434, 2018/02

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-017-5680-5

In a recent international exercise, 10 international nuclear forensics laboratories successfully performed radiochronometry on three low enriched uranium oxide samples, providing 12 analytical results using three different parent-daughter pairs serving as independent chronometers. The vast majority of the results were consistent with one another and consistent with the known processing history of the materials. In general, for these particular samples, mass spectrometry gave more accurate and more precise analytical results than decay counting measurements. In addition, the concordance of the U-Pa and U-Th chronometers confirmed the validity of the age dating assumptions, increasing confidence in the resulting conclusions.