The DOE and BLM identified 285,000 acres of desert land in the Chuckwalla valley in the western U.S., for solar energy development. In addition to several approved solar projects, a pumped storage project was recently proposed to pump nearly 8000 acre-ft-yr of groundwater to store and stabilize solar energy output. This study aims at providing estimates of the amount of naturally-occurring recharge, and to estimate the impact of the pumping on the water table. To better provide the locations and intensity of natural recharge, this study employs an integrated, physically-based hydrologic model, PAWS+CLM, to calculate recharge. Then, the simulated recharge is used in a parameter estimation package to calibrate spatially-distributed K field. This design is to incorporate all available observational data, including soil moisture monitoring stations, groundwater head, and estimates of groundwater conductivity, to constrain the modeling. To address the uncertainty of the soil parameters, an ensemble of simulations are conducted, and the resulting recharges are either rejected or accepted based on calibrated groundwater head and local variation of the K field. The results indicate that the natural total inflow to the study domain is between 7107 and 12,772 afy. During the initial-fill phase of pumped storage project, the total outflow exceeds the upper bound estimate of the inflow. If the initial-fill is annualized to 20 years, the average pumping is more than the lower bound of inflows. The results indicate after adding the pumped storage project, the system will nearing, if not exceeding, its maximum renewable pumping capacity. The accepted recharges lead to a drawdown range of 24 to 45 ft for an assumed specific yield of 0.05. However, the drawdown is sensitive to this parameter, whereas there is insufficient data to adequately constrain this parameter.

We study the dependence of the peak power of a 1.5 Å Terawatt (TW), tapered x-ray free-electron laser (FEL) on the transverse electron density distribution. Multidimensional optimization schemes for TW hard x-ray free-electron lasers are applied to the cases of transversely uniform and parabolic electron beam distributions and compared to a Gaussian distribution. The optimizations are performed for a 200 m undulator and a resonant wavelength of λr=1.5Å using the fully three-dimensional FEL particle code genesis. The study shows that the flatter transverse electron distributions enhance optical guiding in the tapered section of the undulator and increase the maximum radiation power from a maximum of 1.56 TW for a transversely Gaussian beam to 2.26 TW for the parabolic case and 2.63 TW for the uniform case. Spectral data also shows a 30%-70% reduction in energy deposited in the sidebands for the uniform and parabolic beams compared with a Gaussian. An analysis of the transverse coherence of the radiation shows the coherence area to be much larger than the beam spotsize for all three distributions, making coherent diffraction imaging experiments possible.

Globally, many solar power plants and other types of renewable energy are being located in water-scarce regions. Many projects rely on groundwater resources whose sustainability is uncertain. In the Chuckwalla Basin in California, quantification of recharge and trans-valley underflow is needed to estimate the impacts of solar project withdrawals on the water table. However, such estimates are highly challenging due to data scarcity, heterogeneous soils and long residence times. Conventional assessment employs isolated groundwater models configured with crude and uniform estimates of recharge. Here, we employ a data-constrained surface subsurface processes model, PAWS+CLM, to provide an ensemble of recharges and underflows with perturbed parameters. Then, the Parameter Estimation (PEST) package is used to calibrate MODFLOW aquifer conductivity and filter out implausible recharges. The novel dual-model approach, potentially applicable in other arid regions, can effectively assimilate groundwater head observations, reject unrealistic parameters, and narrow the range of estimated drawdowns. Simulated recharge concentrates along alluvial fans at the mountain fronts and ephemeral washes where run-off water infiltrates. If an evenly distributed recharge was assumed, it resulted in under-estimated drawdown and larger uncertainty bounds. The withdrawals are approaching total inflow, suggesting the system will be nearing, if not exceeding, its sustainable groundwater production capacity, and a boom of such projects will not be sustainable. Especially, the cost/benefit of pumped-storage projects is called into question as the initial-fill phase depletes entire area’s recharge. Our study highlights the stress on groundwater resources of solar development, and that the speed of groundwater recovery does not indicate sustainability.

We present a catalog of likely astrophysical neutrino track-like events from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. IceCube began reporting likely astrophysical neutrinos in 2016, and this system was updated in 2019. The catalog presented here includes events that were reported in real time since 2019, as well as events identified in archival data samples starting from 2011. We report 275 neutrino events from two selection channels as the first entries in the catalog, the IceCube Event Catalog of Alert Tracks, which will see ongoing extensions with additional alerts. The Gold and Bronze alert channels respectively provide neutrino candidates with a 50% and 30% probability of being astrophysical, on average assuming an astrophysical neutrino power-law energy spectral index of 2.19. For each neutrino alert, we provide the reconstructed energy, direction, false-alarm rate, probability of being astrophysical in origin, and likelihood contours describing the spatial uncertainty in the alert's reconstructed location. We also investigate a directional correlation of these neutrino events with gamma-ray and X-ray catalogs, including 4FGL, 3HWC, TeVCat, and Swift-BAT.

Dark matter particles in the Galactic Center and halo can annihilate or decay into a pair of neutrinos producing a monochromatic flux of neutrinos. The spectral feature of this signal is unique and it is not expected from any astrophysical production mechanism. Its observation would constitute a dark matter smoking gun signal. We performed the first dedicated search with a neutrino telescope for such signal, by looking at both the angular and energy information of the neutrino events. To this end, a total of five years of IceCube's DeepCore data has been used to test dark matter masses ranging from 10 GeV to 40 TeV. No significant neutrino excess was found and upper limits on the annihilation cross section, as well as lower limits on the dark matter lifetime, were set. The limits reached are of the order of 10-24 cm3/s for an annihilation and up to 1027 s for decaying dark matter. Using the same data sample we also derive limits for dark matter annihilation or decay into a pair of Standard Model charged particles.

Core-collapse supernovae are a promising potential high-energy neutrino source class. We test for correlation between seven years of IceCube neutrino data and a catalog containing more than 1000 core-collapse supernovae of types IIn and IIP and a sample of stripped-envelope supernovae. We search both for neutrino emission from individual supernovae as well as for combined emission from the whole supernova sample, through a stacking analysis. No significant spatial or temporal correlation of neutrinos with the cataloged supernovae was found. All scenarios were tested against the background expectation and together yield an overall p-value of 93%; therefore, they show consistency with the background only. The derived upper limits on the total energy emitted in neutrinos are 1.7 × 1048 erg for stripped-envelope supernovae, 2.8 × 1048 erg for type IIP, and 1.3 × 1049 erg for type IIn SNe, the latter disfavoring models with optimistic assumptions for neutrino production in interacting supernovae. We conclude that stripped-envelope supernovae and supernovae of type IIn do not contribute more than 14.6% and 33.9%, respectively, to the diffuse neutrino flux in the energy range of about [ 103-105] GeV, assuming that the neutrino energy spectrum follows a power-law with an index of −2.5. Under the same assumption, we can only constrain the contribution of type IIP SNe to no more than 59.9%. Thus, core-collapse supernovae of types IIn and stripped-envelope supernovae can both be ruled out as the dominant source of the diffuse neutrino flux under the given assumptions.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory sends realtime neutrino alerts with a high probability of being astrophysical in origin. We present a new method to correlate these events and possible candidate sources using 2089 blazars from the Fermi-LAT 4LAC-DR2 catalog and with 3413 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) from the Radio Fundamental Catalog. No statistically significant neutrino emission was found in any of the catalog searches. The result suggests that a small fraction, <1%, of the studied AGNs emit neutrinos that pass the alert criteria, and is compatible with prior evidence for neutrino emission presented by IceCube and other authors from sources such as TXS 0506 + 056 and PKS 1502 + 106. We also present cross-checks to other analyses that claim a significant correlation using similar data samples.

Atmospheric muon neutrinos are produced by meson decays in cosmic-ray-induced air showers. The flux depends on meteorological quantities such as the air temperature, which affects the density of air. Competition between decay and re-interaction of those mesons in the first particle production generations gives rise to a higher neutrino flux when the air density in the stratosphere is lower, corresponding to a higher temperature. A measurement of a temperature dependence of the atmospheric νμ flux provides a novel method for constraining hadronic interaction models of air showers. It is particularly sensitive to the production of kaons. Studying this temperature dependence for the first time requires a large sample of high-energy neutrinos as well as a detailed understanding of atmospheric properties. We report the significant (>10σ) observation of a correlation between the rate of more than 260,000 neutrinos, detected by IceCube between 2012 and 2018, and atmospheric temperatures of the stratosphere, measured by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA’s AQUA satellite. For the observed 10 % seasonal change of effective atmospheric temperature we measure a 3.5(3) % change in the muon neutrino flux. This observed correlation deviates by about 2-3 standard deviations from the expected correlation of 4.3 % as obtained from theoretical predictions under the assumption of various hadronic interaction models.

The LIGO/Virgo collaboration published the catalogs GWTC-1, GWTC-2.1, and GWTC-3 containing candidate gravitational-wave (GW) events detected during its runs O1, O2, and O3. These GW events can be possible sites of neutrino emission. In this paper, we present a search for neutrino counterparts of 90 GW candidates using IceCube DeepCore, the low-energy infill array of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The search is conducted using an unbinned maximum likelihood method, within a time window of 1000 s, and uses the spatial and timing information from the GW events. The neutrinos used for the search have energies ranging from a few GeV to several tens of TeV. We do not find any significant emission of neutrinos, and place upper limits on the flux and the isotropic-equivalent energy emitted in low-energy neutrinos. We also conduct a binomial test to search for source populations potentially contributing to neutrino emission. We report a nondetection of a significant neutrino-source population with this test.