The study of variability in engineering design—An appreciation and a retrospective

We explore the concept of parameter design applied to the production of glass beads in the manufacture of metal-encapsulated transistors. The main motivation is to complete the analysis hinted at in the original publication by Jim Morrison in 1957, which was an early example of discussing the idea of transmitted variation in engineering design, and an influential paper in the development of analytic parameter design as a data-centric engineering activity. Parameter design is a secondary design activity focused on selecting the nominals of the design variables to achieve the required target performance and to simultaneously reduce the variance around the target. Although the 1957 paper is not recent, its approach to engineering design is modern.

Parameter-free solution of the Bohr Hamiltonian for actinides in the octupole mode

An analytic, parameter-free (up to overall scale factors) solution of the Bohr Hamil- tonian involving axially symmetric quadrupole and octupole deformations, as well as an infinite well potential, is obtained, after separating variables in a way reminiscent of the Variable Moment of Inertia (VMI) concept. Normalized spectra and B(EL) ratios are found to agree with experimental data for 226Ra and 226Th, the nuclei known to lie closest to the border between octupole deformation and octupole vibrations in the light actinide region

Parameter-independent predictions for nuclear shapes and B(E2) transition rates in the proxy-SU(3) model

Using a new approximate analytic parameter-free proxy-SU(3) scheme, we make predictions of shape observables for actinides and superheavy elements, namely β and γ deformation variables, and compare these with predictions by relativistic and non-relativistic mean-field theories. Furthermore, we make predictions for B(E2) transition rates of deformed nuclei and compare these with existing data and predictions of other theoretical approaches.