ARI-MA: Recasting Nuclear Forensics Discovery as a Digital Library Search Problem

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

1140073 (Gey). Nuclear forensics is the science of identification of source and characteristics of smuggled nuclear materials possibly seized by authorities (APS/AAAS Joint Working Group: Nuclear Forensics: Role, State of the Art, Program Needs,2008). Nuclear material identification is of utmost importance to international threat reduction and this project targets making a significant step in this effort. The nuclear materials identification process will be cast as a search problem against a digital library of standard nuclear materials samples and their digital signatures. This should prove useful to supply a conceptual, algorithmic approach to nuclear material identification and origination. Among the elements of the problem and questions to be resolved are: Can the identification of nuclear samples which represent the nodes in a nuclear decay chain be approached as a weighted, labeled directed graph matching problem? Can the standard XML representations of chemical materials and compounds be extended to represent the nuclear isotope decay chain process? From existing representations, nuclear decay theory can be used to extrapolate downstream (times after analysis) or upstream (time prior to sample analysis, up to time zero). Can a simulation approach be used to develop a pseudo-digital library derived from the differential equations of nuclear decay to test algorithmic research without having to operate under the veil of secrecy? This project seeks to answer these questions, develop a digital library of nuclear signatures, and field educational outreach to encourage more search specialists to dedicate research attention to the problems. Cooperation has been obtained from projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory (nuclear materials samples library) and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (nuclear ontology). The results of the project are targeted to include open-source code for nuclear forensics search to be made available to DNDO agencies and national laboratory groups, and to streamline the process of nuclear materials identification. This project is believed to be the first computer science algorithmic approach to the nuclear forensics search problem as a special directed graph matching problem. The success of this project would encourage other computer scientists to work on nuclear forensics search. Success in nuclear forensics search is a critical component to fighting terrorist activity and preventing disastrous individual terrorist nuclear attacks.