As suggested by the reference to this page, it is essentially a vanity project for Ecopulse's principal, Nino R. Pereira. It highlights his and his co-authors' papers that stand out for one reason or another. Some turned out to be useful, as qualitatively indicated by being referred to; others represented an initial foray into a new scientific area or initiated a new cooperative effort. In chronological order, they deal with solitons or more generally nonlinear equations in the late 1970s, with intense, short pulses of x-rays as needed to do nuclear weapons radiation test in the laboratory up to the mid-1990s, and follow-on work in related areas that continued for some time. At this writing (2022), ongoing are only the high-resolution measurements with synchrotron radiation on bent crystals.

• Solitons.
  My 1976 thesis dealt with solitons, isolated structures that are stable even though they are described by nonlinear equations, specifically the nonlinear Schroedinger equation. The motivation was a creative suggestion about plasma turbulence by Prof. Ravi Sudan. The only way to deal with such equations was, and still is, numerically. Prof. Jack Denavit had developed various codes that addressed one or another aspect of the problem. Most useful turned to be a 1-D spectral code. In it, each small modification corresponds to a slightly different nonlinear equation, all relevant to some physical situation, and all led to interesting but minor papers. The exception is a paper on the Benjamin-Ono equation, which connected its solitons to the motion of corresponding poles in the complex plane. In was done together with two superb mathematicians, who then continued to do similar things elsewhere. Still, the most consequential paper presents an exact soliton solution to the Ginzburg-Landau equation, which extends the nonlinear Schroedinger equation to phenomena such as light pulses in fibers. This so-called Pereira-Stenflo soliton is the standard soliton in the nonlinear Schroedinger equation, but raised to a complex power. For details see the Pereira-Stenflo paper itself. It is still being referenced after more than 40 years. After much fun with solitons and nonlinear equations, I found myself in research that turned out to be really interesting and also better funded.
• Spectral softening by backscatter.
  At the time it was important to test all kinds of military equipment for its response to radiation from a nuclear explosion. This is is mimicked in the laboratory by various kinds of pulsed power machines known as nuclear weapons simulators. One type makes longish pulses of MeV-like photons relevant to the equipment on earth, another type makes much shorter pulses of keV-like x-rays relevant to satellites. The most interesting regime is intermediate, around many tens of keV x-rays, but this is difficult to achieve directly. Instead, in a concept later known as flubber I had computed that multiple Compton scattering would bring a photon's energy from an MeV or so down substantially, and that this might work on the Aurora Pulsed Radiation Simulator at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), which was the largest pulsed power machine ever built. Its history is on the web, just google for it. At the time the facility's Director, F. J. Agee, was interested in facility upgrades, and had enough funding. It didn't work exactly as predicted but well enough as documented in later papers, and led to a most enjoyable decades-long association with ARL.
• Megavolt pulsed power.
  Agee's Aurora Upgrade program was needed in part because the machine had not had the necessary tender loving care, perhaps because some earlier upgrading attempts had failed and it worked well enough for Government use. Still, the pulse to pulse variability was a perennial problem, which was finally solved by symmetry arguments. Initially, the idea was to improve the so-called V/N oil switch: it is a capacitive divider (1/N) that takes the 10 MV pulse down to 1 MV, which can be handled by a large but otherwise more conventional gas switch. The final result is perfectly reproducible pulses. After this success Aurora was dismantled. The V/N swith papers have been rarely referenced because no one uses a high-voltage blullein like Aurora any more. In doing one better than the pulsed power experts who designed the machine we benefited from better instrumentation, from time to do the measurements, and better computers (the computations are done by the second author Dr. Natalia A. Gondarenko). In fact, the machine was to be dismantled, so we could try out various ideas and no one feared that some non-standard intervention would destroy it.
• Z-pinches.
  On the other end of the x-ray spectrum, not MeV but keV, are z-pinches driven by low-impedance pulsers. First introduced to the field by Prof. Norman Rostoker at Maxwell Labs, I ended up organizing the second Dense Z-Pinch Conference, and the first one that could be visited by Russian scientists. At the time I had written a review of the topic, which cold be distributed at the conference. It was much referenced at the time, and it is still a useful introduction but now quite dated. A similar paper is on plasma points , an update of a report by Konstantin Koshelev on localized radiation emission within Z-pinches.
• Pulsed x-rays at NRL.
  As nuclear weapons simulation gradually lost its importance, and therefore Z-pinches and Aurora as well, research on x-rays with a smaller pulsed power machine at the Naval Research laboratory (NRL) increased. I fell in with the section of Bruce Weber. We showed how to get some energy-selectivity in hard x-ray spectral measurement with magnets , how to make a high power density bremsstrahlung diode behave by removing hydrogen from the tantalum anode by heating it to 2500 K or so (after cleaning it inside and out a second or so beforehand), and made good use of the special environment in the Plasma-Filled Rod Pinch (PFRP) to measure a tiny (10 eV) change in a high-energy (63,287 eV) characteristic line (in Ir) caused by rather modest ionization. The latter work led to many more papers with the Polasik group in Torun, Poland.
• Nuclear Isomers
  The reason to measure an energy shift in a characteristic x-ray line was motivated by a project at ARL that tried to make some practical use of the energy stored in nuclear isomers, perhaps a gamma ray laser. In this project the latest accomplishment (as of 2022) is a paper in Nature (by Chiara, Carroll, and others) that demonstrates a never before seen electromagnetic interaction between an atom's nucleus and its electrons. I think the project is scientifically interesting but completely impractical: the energy in the nucleus is too well shielded by the electrons, and in any case it's much too expensive to put the energy into the nuclei first. As the bomb people know, to get at nuclear energy you need particles that don't see the electrons, like neutrons.
• Lithium for x-ray
  The explosion that accompanies a radiation pulse is especially large for softer x-rays, and it is difficult to make a window that stops the debris from the explosion but still lets the x-rays through. For the purpose I evaluated nitrogen-cooled lithium strengthened by powdered lithium hydride, and lithium metal supported on a transparent grid: lithium is the most transparent to keV-like x-rays of all solids, at least at room temperature. Solid deuterium is better, but it must be kept at 10 K, cryogenic. When the synchrotron community started to explore refractive lenses, our lithium version attracted some attention. Since then many publications have been done with people at the APS synchrotron. Look for them in the section on bent crystals.
• Other papers.
  Some are really good, some are insignificant, but here they are.