Since the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect in 1988, spintronics has been presented as a new technology paradigm, awarded by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007. Initially used in read heads of hard disk drives, and while disputing a piece of the market to the flash memories, GMR devices have broadened their range of usage by growing towards magnetic field sensing applications in a huge range of scenarios. Potential applications at the time of the discovery have become real in the last two decades. Definitively, GMR was born to stand. In this sense, selected successful approaches of GMR based sensors in different applications: space, automotive, microelectronics, biotechnology ... are collected in the present book. While keeping a practical orientation, the fundamentals as well as the current trends and challenges of this technology are also analyzed. In this sense, state of the art contributions from academy and industry can be found through the contents. This book can be used by starting researchers, postgraduate students and multidisciplinary scientists in order to have a reference text in this topical fascinating field.

Ultrashort laser pulses with durations in the femtosecond range up to a few picoseconds provide a unique method for precise materials processing or medical applications. Paired with the recent developments in ultrashort pulse lasers, this technology is finding its way into various application fields. The book gives a comprehensive overview of the principles and applications of ultrashort pulse lasers, especially applied to medicine and production technology. Recent advances in laser technology are discussed in detail. This covers the development of reliable and cheap low power laser sources as well as high average power ultrashort pulse lasers for large scale manufacturing. The fundamentals of laser-matter-interaction as well as processing strategies and the required system technology are discussed for these laser sources with respect to precise materials processing. Finally, different applications within medicine, measurement technology or materials processing are highlighted.

This book presents the fabrication of optoelectronic nanodevices. The structures considered are nanowires, nanorods, hybrid semiconductor nanostructures, wide bandgap nanostructures for visible light emitters and graphene. The device applications of these structures are broadly explained. The book deals also with the characterization of semiconductor nanostructures. It appeals to researchers and graduate students.

In recent decades, cosmetic science has found new high-potency, bioactive ingredients that produce visibly superior skin benefits to the consumer. Light-based devices, including lasers and intense-pulsed light systems, have been used for years in the treatment of cutaneous vascular and pigmented lesions, yet have only recently appeared in cosmetic applications, beauty salons and spas. Meanwhile, ever more research and development is being performed with the intent of bringing them to the home-use market.
This book is the first to introduce a range of currently used, or under development, laser- and light-based technologies that will provide greater cosmetic benefits to the consumer. It explains the basic physics of light-based technologies, the bio-physical principles behind their mechanism of action, and their applications in many cosmetic procedures. The fundamentals of skin and hair physiology (relevant to the understanding of actions of various cosmetics) are also explained, as are: cosmeceuticals; topical drugs for cosmetic benefits; non-invasive and invasive options available for beauty treatments, and how all this fits in with the emerging light-based technologies.
Individual chapters are devoted to the various skin and hair conditions where light-based systems are currently used. Treatments discussed include the rejuvenation and toning of damaged skin; skin resurfacing and microdermabrasion; hair removal and growth reduction; wrinkle reduction; acne treatment and cellulite. Finally, the book examines the synergy of cosmeceuticals and topical bioactive agents with light-based technologies, safety issues, a regulatory perspective for OTC marketing, and concludes with a discussion of the business aspects related to home-use of light-based devices.
* The first book to introduce this emerging technology to the personal care industry.
* Explains their applications in many cosmetic procedures.
* Devotes individual chapters to common skin and hair conditions.

"Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics" merges two long-running serials--"Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics" and "Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy." This series features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science and digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and the computing methods used in all these domains.
* Updated with contributions from leading international scholars and industry experts
* Discusses hot topic areas and presents current and future research trends
* Invaluable reference and guide for physicists, engineers and mathematicians

The series Structure and Bonding publishes critical reviews on topics of research concerned with chemical structure and bonding. The scope of the series spans the entire Periodic Table and addresses structure and bonding issues associated with all of the elements. It also focuses attention on new and developing areas of modern structural and theoretical chemistry such as nanostructures, molecular electronics, designed molecular solids, surfaces, metal clusters and supramolecular structures. Physical and spectroscopic techniques used to determine, examine and model structures fall within the purview of Structure and Bonding to the extent that the focus is on the scientific results obtained and not on specialist information concerning the techniques themselves. Issues associated with the development of bonding models and generalizations that illuminate the reactivity pathways and rates of chemical processes are also relevant.The individual volumes in the series are thematic. The goal of each volume is to give the reader, whether at a university or in industry, a comprehensive overview of an area where new insights are emerging that are of interest to a larger scientific audience. Thus each review within the volume critically surveys one aspect of that topic and places it within the context of the volume as a whole. The most significant developments of the last 5 to 10 years should be presented using selected examples to illustrate the principles discussed. A description of the physical basis of the experimental techniques that have been used to provide the primary data may also be appropriate, if it has not been covered in detail elsewhere. The coverage need not be exhaustive in data, but should rather be conceptual, concentrating on the new principles being developed that will allow the reader, who is not a specialist in the area covered, to understand the data presented. Discussion of possible future research directions in the area is welcomed. Review articles for the individual volumes are invited by the volume editors.
Readership: research scientists at universities or in industry, graduate students
Special offer
For all customers who have a standing order to the print version of Structure and Bonding, we offer free access to the electronic volumes of the Series published in the current year via SpringerLink.

This book outlines the underlying principles on which modern road lighting is based, and provides the reader with knowledge of how these principles should be applied in practice. This book offers a completely fresh approach to the subject, reflecting how the technology of road lighting has progressed to keep up with the changes in lamp technology, especially in solid state light sources, and the increasing awareness of energy use and environmental issues. The book is divided into three parts. Part One describes lighting of open roads, with chapters discussing visual performance and comfort (including the effects of mesopic vision and age), and international standards and recommendations for road lighting. Lighting equipment is introduced; specifically lamps and luminaires in terms of their practical properties and features, but also the road surface and its characteristics. A chapter on Lighting Design makes the link between theory and practice, providing the reader with the knowledge needed for effective lighting design, including aspects relating to sustainability. The final chapter of Part One deals with lighting calculation conventions and measurements. Part Two is devoted to light pollution. The negative consequences of light pollution are described and tactics to restrict light pollution explained. Lighting criteria are defined that can be used by the lighting designer to guarantee installations stay within acceptable limits. International standards and recommendations on the restriction of light pollution are discussed. Part Three is devoted to tunnel lighting, with chapters discussing visual performance in tunnel environments, lighting criteria, standards and recommendations, and concluding with a chapter on tunnel lighting equipment and design. This book is a valuable resource for road lighting designers and engineers, students of lighting design and engineering, town planners, traffic engineers, environmental specialists, and lamp and luminaire developers and manufacturers.

The invention of the electron microscope more than 70 years ago made it possible to visualize a new world, far smaller than anything that could be seen with the traditional microscope. The biologist could study viruses and the components of cells, the materials scientist could study the structure of metals and alloys and many other substances, and especially their defects. But even the electron microscope had limits, and truly atomic structure was still too small to be observed directly. The so-called 'limit of resolution' of the microscope was well understood but attempts to use the necessary correctors were unsuccessful until the late 1990s. Such correctors now equip many microscopes in Europe, the USA and Japan and the results are extremely impressive. Moreover, microscopists feel that they are only at the beginning of a new era of subatomic microscopical imaging. In the present volume, we have brought together the principal contributors, instrument designers and microscopists to discuss this topic in depth.
* First book on the subject of correctors
* Well known contributors from academia and microscope manufacturers
* Provides an ideal starting point for preparing funding proposals

This comparative tutorial describes the reasons behind device failures and provides practical information on what can be done to minimize failure-prone designs and enhance device reliability. The text demonstrates how, with such advantages as smaller size, low-cost and simple operation, LEDs are well suited for a wide range of applications - especially in the field of optical fibre communication. This book should prove of interest to engineers and scientists in research, design, manufacturing and development of semiconductor lasers, LEDs and optical transmission systems.

"Real time" imaging techniques have assisted materials science studies especially for non-ambient environments. These techniques have never been collectively featured in a single venue. The book is an assembly of materials studies utilizing cutting edge real time imaging techniques, emphasizing the significance and impact of those techniques.

This book shows an update in the field of micro/nano fabrications techniques of two and three dimensional structures as well as ultimate three dimensional characterization methods from the atom range to the micro scale. Several examples are presented showing their direct application in different technological fields such as microfluidics, photonics, biotechnology and aerospace engineering, between others. The effects of the microstructure and topography on the macroscopic properties of the studied materials are discussed, together with a detailed review of 3D imaging techniques. Content Level Research

For most elements of the periodic table, reliable computations of atomic data and properties are still a challenge for (atomic) theory today. Despite of the great effort, that has been undertaken by many groups worldwide during the past four decades, yet serious difficulties arise not only from the complexity of most atoms and ions but also from the large variety of data that is needed in different fields of physics and science. In practice, one often faces several intricacies in performing such computations with the largest, perhaps, (1) due to the shell structure of most atoms and ions. This shell structure, i. e. the occupation of the atomic subshells, does not only change typically when an atom undergoes some transition but also hampers the analysis of one and the same property between neighboured elements. In fact, the particular shell structure of an atom or ion strongly affects the number of degenerate levels (or those nearby in energy) and may thus lead to very different computational requirements in dependence of the occupation of the shells. Further difficulties arise in addition also from (2) the relativistic treatment on the basis of the Dirac-Coulomb (-Breit) Hamiltonian (which is needed for most medium and heavy elements, and sometimes even for the light ones) as well as from (3) the fact that many atomic properties are accompanied by the capture or emission of free electrons.

Probability, Random Processes, and Ergodic Properties is for mathematically inclined information/communication theorists and people working in signal processing. It will also interest those working with random or stochastic processes, including mathematicians, statisticians, and economists.

Highlights:

Complete tour of book and guidelines for use given in Introduction, so readers can see at a glance the topics of interest.

Structures mathematics for an engineering audience, with emphasis on engineering applications.

New in the Second Edition:

Much of the material has been rearranged and revised for pedagogical reasons.

The original first chapter has been split in order to allow a more thorough treatment of basic probability before tackling random processes and dynamical systems.

The final chapter has been broken into two pieces to provide separate emphasis on process metrics and the ergodic decomposition of affine functionals.

Many classic inequalities are now incorporated into the text, along with proofs; and many citations have been added.

This work addresses the topic of optical networks cross-layer design with a focus on physical-layer-impairment-aware design. Contributors captures both the physical-layer-aware network design as well as the latest advances in service-layer-aware network design. Treatment of topics such as, optical transmissions which are prone to signal impairments, dense packing of wavelengths, dispersion, crosstalk, etc., as well as how to design the network to mitigate such impairments, are all covered.

Strengthen your understanding of fast-moving WDMA optical network technology, and learn how to better select and design reliable all-optical telecom networks with this practical book. It will help expand your knowledge of LLN, Manhattan, Shuffle, De Bruijn, Gemmet, Matrix, Swift, and Starnet and will show you how to employ an effective method of network organization based on traffic demands.

"Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics" merges two long-running serials-Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics and Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy. This series features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science and digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and the computing methods used in all these domains.
An important feature of these Advances is that the subjects are written in such a way that they can be understood by readers from other specialities.

This book describes for readers technology used for effective sensing of our physical world and intelligent processing techniques for sensed information, which are essential to the success of Internet of Things (IoTs). The authors provide a multidisciplinary view of sensor technology from materials, process, circuits, and big data domains and showcase smart sensor systems in real applications including smart home, transportation, medical, environmental, agricultural, etc. Unlike earlier books on sensors, this book will provide a "global" view on smart sensors covering abstraction levels from device, circuit, systems, and algorithms. Profiles active research on smart sensors based on CMOS microelectronics; Describes applications of sensors and sensor systems in cyber physical systems, the social information infrastructure in our modern world; Includes coverage of a variety of related information technologies supporting the application of sensors; Discusses the integration of computation, networking, actuation, databases, and various sensors, in order to embed smart sensor systems into actual social systems.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in face detection and analysis. It outlines new research directions, including in particular psychology-based facial dynamics recognition, aimed at various applications such as behavior analysis, deception detection, and diagnosis of various psychological disorders. Topics of interest include face and facial landmark detection, face recognition, facial expression and emotion analysis, facial dynamics analysis, face classification, identification, and clustering, and gaze direction and head pose estimation, as well as applications of face analysis.

This book explains the advantages of fiber optics over conventional coaxial cables when routing microwave signals.

This book is addressed to newcomers to error control coding (ECC), making the subject easy to understand and to apply in a variety of cases. The book begins by presenting in a detailed, step-by-step manner the plethora of parts an ECC system has and the way they interact to achieve the performance required. Contrary to the more abstract and formal approach followed in most books on this topic, this book is unique in that all of the concepts, methods, techniques and algorithms are introduced by way of examples. Thus, the book is almost a workbook, and therefore very suitable for self-study. Readers are encouraged to take an active role while reading, performing calculations as chapters' progress. Moreover, to reinforce the learning process, many of the topics introduced in the book (Galois fields, Extended Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon codes, interleaving, erasure correction, etc.) are presented in various parts of the book in different ways or contexts. Offers a practical guide to error control coding, accessible to readers with varying backgrounds; Provides newcomers with a sound foundation in error control coding, using a select few topics considered by the author fundamental from an engineering point of view; Presents material with minimal mathematics; Motivates carefully concepts, methods and algorithms making clear the idea behind the conditions for the code to work.

Digital geometry emerged as an independent discipline in the second half of the last century. It deals with geometric properties of digital objects and is developed with the unambiguous goal to provide rigorous theoretical foundations for devising new advanced approaches and algorithms for various problems of visual computing. Different aspects of digital geometry have been addressed in the literature. This book is the first one that explicitly focuses on the presentation of the most important digital geometry algorithms. Each chapter provides a brief survey on a major research area related to the general volume theme, description and analysis of related fundamental algorithms, as well as new original contributions by the authors. Every chapter contains a section in which interesting open problems are addressed.

Authored by the developer of dressed photon science and technology as well as nanophotonics, this book outlines concepts of the subject using a novel theoretical framework that differs from conventional wave optics. It provides a quantum theoretical description of optical near fields and related problems that puts matter excitation such as electronic and vibrational ones on an equal footing with photons. By this description, optical near fields are interpreted as quasi-particles and named dressed photons which carry the material excitation energy in a nanometric space. The author then explores novel nanophotonic devices, fabrications, and energy conversion based on the theoretical picture of dressed photons. Further, this book looks at how the assembly of nanophotonic devices produces information and communication systems. Dressed photon science and technology is on its way to revolutionizing various applications in devices, fabrications, and systems. Promoting further exploration in the field, this book presents physically intuitive concepts, theories, and technical details for students, engineers, and scientists engaged in research and development in dressed photon science and technology as well as nanophotonics.

This book describes the latest advances in pulse signal analysis and their applications in classification and diagnosis. First, it provides a comprehensive introduction to useful techniques for pulse signal acquisition based on different kinds of pulse sensors together with the optimized acquisition scheme. It then presents a number of preprocessing and feature extraction methods, as well as case studies of the classification methods used. Lastly it discusses some promising directions for the future study and clinical applications of pulse signal analysis. The book is a valuable resource for researchers, professionals and postgraduate students working in the field of pulse diagnosis, signal processing, pattern recognition and biometrics. It is also useful for those involved in interdisciplinary research.

The PUILS series presents Progress in Ultrafast Intense Laser Science. This third volume in the series covers a diverse range of disciplines, focusing on such topics as strong field ionization of atoms, ionization and fragmentation of molecules and clusters, generation of high-order harmonics and attosecond pulses, filamentation and laser plasma interaction, and the development of ultrashort and ultrahigh-intensity light sources.