Long-lived trees preserve a record of environmental conditions during their lifetime in the pattern of yearly xylem widths and in changing wood density within and among the increments. Crossdated earlywood, latewood, and total ring widths, and minimum earlywood and maximum latewood densities, from three sites in the mountains of Maine, are analyzed visually and statistically to evaluate their relationships to one another and to external, environmental factors which affect the ring width and density through internal, physiological processes. Maximum density values show highest levels of similarity within and among the three site chronologies, thus implying a good degree of sensitivity to climate; minimum density values, however, showed lowest sensitivity to climate. Two biologically reasonable hypotheses concerning climate--tree growth interactions are proposed: (1) that maximum density is related to spring temperatures prior to its formation; and (2) that maximum density is related to summer water relations as the latewood forms. With the help of response function analysis, simple correlation, and multiple linear regression, these two hypotheses are tested: (1) maxmum density as a single predictor explains up to 37% of spring temperature variance; with earlywood widths at one site, 47% of spring temperature variance is explained; (2) maximum density as a single predictor explains up to 45% of summer temperature variance, 11% of summer precipitation variance, and 23% of the variance of Thornthwaite water deficit values; with total ring widths at one site, 22% of the variance of summer stream runoff is explained. Regression equations were applied to the 201- to 310-year tree-ring records to form reconstructions of these past climatic events. Independent verification testing of the reconstructions strongly validates the relationship between maximum density and spring temperature; the relationship to summer water relations is not as strongly verified, but results encourage further testin of this relationship. Results from this study may be applied both to (1) an increased understanding of relationship of climate to the formation of wood density; and (2) further development of dendroclimatology in mesic regions such as northeastern North America.

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A multiwavelength investigation is conducted for nineteen blazar-type active galactic nuclei. Studies of variability timescales and flux duty cycles are performed at x- and gamma-rays for each source, with the relationship between flux and spectral index also being probed at gamma wavelengths. The correlation between these two energy ranges is also investigated, by utilising the Discrete Correlation Function with both one and ten day binning. The sources were chosen for their availability over a range of different x- and gamma-ray data sources: observations utilised include 0.2 - 150 keV x-ray data from the Swift mission and 200 MeV- 300 GeV gamma-ray data from the Fermi mission. Daily-binned Fermi data is used to calculate the smallest rise and decay e-folding times in gamma for each source. The results range from 0.4 to 21 days, corresponding to limits on the size of the gamma emission region ranging from Rd^-1 = 4.39 x 10^12 to Rd^-1 = 5.14 x 10^14 m. Flux duty cycles for fourteen sources are created from Fermi data, with six displaying structure at high fluxes that indicate flaring states have occured. Five of these six sources also display clear flares in their light curves, confirming these results. The relationship between the flux and the spectral index shows eight of nineteen sources exhibit harder-when-brighter behaviour. Four of these eight have been previously confirmed to display such behaviour. Results from the Discrete Correlation Function show a correlation at a time lag of ~ 600 days for H 1426+428, of uncertain origin. Gaussian functions are fitted to possible near-zero peaks in 3C 66A, 3C 454.3 and Mrk 421, which could be indicative of a synchrotron self-Compton component to the emission of these objects.

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Electron transport in vacuum deposited a-Se films has been investigated by Interrupted-Field Time-of-Flight (IFTOF) transient photoconductivity experiments to examine the effect of sample temperature (T) and applied electric field (F) on X-ray induced changes in the electron lifetime. Upon exposure to x-rays, the electron lifetime decreases. The decrease in normalized lifetime is almost linearly proportional to the absorbed dose, and is more significant at higher temperatures. Upon the cessation of x-ray irradiation, the lifetime recovers towards its equilibrium value through a structural relaxation process, and is characterized by a structural relaxation time. The structural relaxation time decreases with temperature in an Arrhenius fashion, and exhibits an activation energy that is roughly 1.4 eV. The structural relaxation time at room temperature (21 C) is 2 – 4 hrs whereas at 35 C, 6 – 10 mins. These measurements are important in characterizing the charge collection efficiency of a-Se based x-ray detectors, and its dependence on x-ray exposure and temperature. The results indicate that the rate of change of electron lifetime per unit exposure is less than 2%/Gy.

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