The Non-Proliferation Treaty and other non-proliferation agreements are in place worldwide to ensure that nuclear material and facilities are used only for peaceful purposes. Antineutrino detectors, sensitive to reactor power and fuel changes, can complement the tools already at the disposal of international agencies to safeguard nuclear facilities and to verify the States’ compliance with the agreements. Recent advancement in these detectors has made it possible to leverage them to reduce the likelihood of an undetected diversion of irradiated nuclear material. Here we show the sensitivity of antineutrino monitors to fuel divergence from two reactor types: a traditional light-water reactor and an advanced sodium-cooled reactor design, a likely candidate for future deployment. The analysis demonstrates that a variety of potential diversion scenarios can be detected by such a system. We outline recent developments in monitoring capabilities and discuss their potential security implications to the international community.
Today's processors provide a rich source of statistical information on application execution through hardware counters. In this paper, we explore the utilization of these statistics as request signatures in server applications for identifying requests and inferring highlevel request properties (e.g., CPU and I/O resource needs). Our key finding is that effective request signatures may be constructed using a small amount of hardware statistics while the request is still in an early stage of its execution. Such on-the-fly request identification and property inference allow guided operating system adaptation at request granularity (e.g., resource-aware request scheduling and on-the-fly request classification). We address the challenges of selecting hardware counter metrics for signature construction and providing necessary operating system support for per-request statistics management. Our implementation in the Linux 2.6.10 kernel suggests that our approach requires low overhead suitable for runtime deployment. Our on-the-fly request resource consumption inference (averaging 7%, 3%, 20%, and 41% prediction errors for four server workloads, TPC-C, TPC-H, J2EE-based RUBiS, and a trace-driven index search, respectively) is much more accurate than the online running-average based prediction (73-82% errors). Its use for resource-aware request scheduling results in a 15-70% response time reduction for three CPU-bound applications. Its use for on-the-fly request classification and anomaly detection exhibits high accuracy for the TPC-H workload with synthetically generated anomalous requests following a typical SQL-injection attack pattern.
We report new results from field emission microscopy studies of multiwall carbon nanotubes and from energy spectrum measurements of beams from diamond field emitters. In both systems, we find that resonant tunneling through adsorbed species on the emitter surface is an important and sometimes dominant effect. For diamond emitters our observations include order-of-magnitude emission enhancement without spectral broadening, complex spectral structure, and sensitivity of that structure to the applied electric field. For carbon nanotubes we have observed electron beams from individual adsorbates which are estimated to approach the maximum beam brightness allowed by Pauli exclusion.
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