The chemical etching of fission fragment tracks in natural fluorite

An experimental study of the mechanism for chemical etching of fission fragment tracks in the natural mineral fluorite is described. A systematic search showed that a 3:1 mixture by volume of sulphuric to hydrochloric acids was a most appropriate etchant. Experiments directed at determining the etching efficiency as a function of solvent temperature are also discussed. The preferential track etch ratioVt/Vg, the track length and the track density all depend upon the time and temperature of annealing.

It is variations of the fission track density in fluorite, with etching time and annealing temperature, which make possible an overall geophysical interpretation of annealing data for the mineral in terms of the paleoisotherm of its intrinsic fission track clock.

An interactive image analysis system INTIMAN, assembled for the swift and automatic readout of fission fragment track measurements, in both crystalline and non-crystalline materials, is described. Normal procedures for measuring and analyzing tracks are outlined.     

Particularization of α contamination using CR-39 track detectors

Solid-state nuclear track detectors (SSNTDs) have found wide use in various domains of science and technology, e.g. in environmental experiments. Measurement of α activity on sources in an environment, such as air, is not easy because of the short penetration range of the α particles. Furthermore, the measurement of α activity by most gas ionization detectors suffers from the high background induced by the accompanying gamma radiation. SSNTDs have been used successfully as detecting devices as passive system to detect the α contamination of different surfaces. This work presents the response of CR-39 (for two types) to α particles from two sources, ²³⁸Pu with energy 5 MeV and ²⁴¹Am with energy 5.4 MeV. The methods of etching and counting are investigated, along with the achievable linearity, efficiency and reproducibility. The sensitivity to low activity and energy resolution are studied.     

A note on the solution of a class of functional equations

On the basis of fixed point theorems for linear topological spaces the authors prove existence theorems for the solutions of functional equations that arise in Dynamic Programming.     

Numerical solution of an inverse initial boundary-value problem for the full time-dependent Maxwell's equations in the presence of imperfections of small volume

We consider the numerical solution, in a three-dimensional bounded domain, of the inverse problem for identifying the location of small electromagnetic imperfections in a medium with homogeneous background. Our numerical algorithm is based on the coupling of a discontinuous Galerkin method for the time-dependent Maxwell's equations, on the exact controllability method and on a Fourier inversion. Several numerical results are given with one and two imperfections and the robustness and accuracy of the numerical method used for the dynamic detection problem are shown.     

Research announcement on gaierkirfs method for a class of integra equations of the first kind

Let X and Y be locally convex spaces with K a closed convex cone in X Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for the image AK to be closed in Ywhen A:X→Y is a continuous linear map. This result is used to generalize a theorem of Abrams to infinite dimensional spaces and also to give sufficient conditions for the Hurwicz version of the Farkas lemma for locally convex spaces to hold.     

Well-posedness of a degenernate parabolic equation issuing from two-dimensional perfect fluid dynamics

A degenerate parabolic equation of convection-diffusion type has been proposed by Robert and Sommeria in [12] to describe the relaxation towards statistical equilibrium states in 2D incompressible perfect fluid dynamics. The paper is concerned with the Cauchy problem for this equation. The local existence of a variational soluation is obtained in using the decrease of the (negative) mixing entropy and Schauder theorem. A smoothing effect is used when proving the uniqueness of the variational solutions by youdovitch's method. Finally, global existence of solutions and their asymptotic convergence towards Gibbs states are shown for a large class of initial data.