Frontiers In Data Analytics And Monitoring Tools For Extreme Materials

One of the major challenges in materials science today is developing materials that can survive and function in extreme environments, such as the high-radiation environments found in a fission or fusion reactor or the ultra-high temperature experienced by a hypervelocity vessel or a spacecraft traveling through Earths atmosphere on its return to the planets surface. What is needed to discover such materials was the topic of a 2-day workshop held at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on October 5-6, 2022. That workshop, titled Materials in Extreme Environments: New Monitoring Tools and Data-Driven Approaches, brought together an international collection of experts on the testing and measurement of materials in extreme environments and on discovering and developing new materials. This Proceedings of a Workshop recaps the presentations and discussions that took place during the 2 days of the workshop.

The laser has revolutionized many areas of science and society, providing bright and versatile light sources that transform the ways we investigate science and enables trillions of dollars of commerce. Now a second laser revolution is underway with pulsed petawatt-class lasers (1 petawatt: 1 million billion watts) that deliver nearly 100 times the total world's power concentrated into a pulse that lasts less than one-trillionth of a second. Such light sources create unique, extreme laboratory conditions that can accelerate and collide intense beams of elementary particles, drive nuclear reactions, heat matter to conditions found in stars, or even create matter out of the empty vacuum. These powerful lasers came largely from U.S. engineering, and the science and technology opportunities they enable were discussed in several previous National Academies' reports. Based on these advances, the principal research funding agencies in Europe and Asia began in the last decade to invest heavily in new facilities that will employ these high-intensity lasers for fundamental and applied science. No similar programs exist in the United States. Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers assesses the opportunities and recommends a path forward for possible U.S. investments in this area of science.

Helium has long been the subject of public policy deliberation and management, largely because of its many strategic uses and its unusual source-it is a derived product of natural gas and its market has several anomalous characteristics. Shortly after sources of helium were discovered at the beginning of the last century, the U.S. government recognized helium's potential importance to the nation's interests and placed its production and availability under strict governmental control. In the 1960s, helium's strategic value in cold war efforts was reflected in policies that resulted in the accumulation of a large reserve of helium owned by the federal government. The latest manifestation of public policy is expressed in the Helium Privatization Act of 1996 (1996 12 Act), which directs that substantially all of the helium accumulated as a result of those earlier policies be sold off by 2015 at prices sufficient to repay the federal government for its outlays associated with the helium program. The present volume assesses whether the interests of the United States have been well served by the 1996 Act and, in particular, whether selling off the helium reserve has had any adverse effect on U.S. scientific, technical, biomedical, and national security users of helium.

Data mining of massive data sets is transforming the way we think about crisis response, marketing, entertainment, cybersecurity and national intelligence. Collections of documents, images, videos, and networks are being thought of not merely as bit strings to be stored, indexed, and retrieved, but as potential sources of discovery and knowledge, requiring sophisticated analysis techniques that go far beyond classical indexing and keyword counting, aiming to find relational and semantic interpretations of the phenomena underlying the data. Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis examines the frontier of analyzing massive amounts of data, whether in a static database or streaming through a system. Data at that scale-terabytes and petabytes-is increasingly common in science (e.g., particle physics, remote sensing, genomics), Internet commerce, business analytics, national security, communications, and elsewhere. The tools that work to infer knowledge from data at smaller scales do not necessarily work, or work well, at such massive scale. New tools, skills, and approaches are necessary, and this report identifies many of them, plus promising research directions to explore. Frontiers in Massive Data Analysis discusses pitfalls in trying to infer knowledge from massive data, and it characterizes seven major classes of computation that are common in the analysis of massive data. Overall, this report illustrates the cross-disciplinary knowledge-from computer science, statistics, machine learning, and application disciplines-that must be brought to bear to make useful inferences from massive data.

Current von Neumann style computing is energy inefficient and bandwidth limited as information is physically shuttled via electrons between processor, short term non-volatile memory, and long-term storage. Biologically inspired neuromorphic computing, with its inherent autonomous learning capabilities and much lower power requirements based on analog processing, is seen as an avenue for overcoming these limitations. The development of nanoelectronic memory resistors, or memristors, is essential to neuromorphic architectures as they allow logic-based elements for information processing to be combined directly with nonvolatile memory for efficient emulation of neurons and synapses found in the brain. Memristors are typically composed of a switchable material with nonlinear hysteretic behavior sandwiched between two conducting encoding elements. The design, dynamic control, scaling and fundamental understanding of these materials is essential for establishing memristive devices. To explore the state-of-the-art in the materials fundamentally underlying memristor technologies: their science, their mechanisms and their functional imperatives to realize neuromorphic computing machines, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Board on Physics and Astronomy convened a workshop on February 28, 2020. This publication summarizes the presentation and discussion of the workshop.

Fusion offers the prospect of virtually unlimited energy. The United States and many nations around the world have made enormous progress toward achieving fusion energy. With ITER scheduled to go online within a decade and demonstrate controlled fusion ten years later, now is the right time for the United States to develop plans to benefit from its investment in burning plasma research and take steps to develop fusion electricity for the nation's future energy needs. At the request of the Department of Energy, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a committee to develop a strategic plan for U.S. fusion research. The final report's two main recommendations are: (1) The United States should remain an ITER partner as the most cost-effective way to gain experience with a burning plasma at the scale of a power plant. (2) The United States should start a national program of accompanying research and technology leading to the construction of a compact pilot plant that produces electricity from fusion at the lowest possible capital cost.

Radio observations of the cosmos are gathered by geoscientists using complex earth-orbiting satellites and ground-based equipment, and by radio astronomers using large ground-based radio telescopes. Signals from natural radio emissions are extremely weak, and the equipment used to measure them is becoming ever-more sophisticated and sensitive. The radio spectrum is also being used by radiating, or "active," services, ranging from aircraft radars to rapidly expanding consumer services such as cellular telephones and wireless internet. These valuable active services transmit radio waves and thereby potentially interfere with the receive-only, or "passive," scientific services. Transmitters for the active services create an artificial "electronic fog" which can cause confusion, and, in severe cases, totally blinds the passive receivers. Both the active and the passive services are increasing their use of the spectrum, and so the potential for interference, already strong, is also increasing. This book addresses the tension between the active services' demand for greater spectrum use and the passive users' need for quiet spectrum. The included recommendations provide a pathway for putting in place the regulatory mechanisms and associated supporting research activities necessary to meet the demands of both users.

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