Where do most stars (and the planetary systems that surround them) in the Milky Way form? What determines whether a young star cluster remains bound (such as an open or globular cluster), or disperses to join the field stars in the disc of the Galaxy? These questions not only impact understanding of the origins of stars and planetary systems like our own (and the potential for life to emerge that they represent), but also galaxy formation and evolution, and ultimately the story of star formation over cosmic time in the Universe. This volume will help readers understand our current views concerning the answers to these questions as well as frame new questions that will be answered by the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite that was launched in late 2013. The book contains the elaborated notes of lectures given at the 42nd Saas-Fee Advanced Course "Dynamics of Young Star Clusters & Associations" by Cathie Clarke (University of Cambridge) who presents the theory of star formation and dynamical evolution of stellar systems, Robert Mathieu (University of Wisconsin) who discusses the kinematics of star clusters and associations, and I. Neill Reid (S pace Telescope Science Institute) who provides an overview of the stellar populations in the Milky Way and speculates on from whence came the Sun. As part of the Saas-Fee Advanced Course Series, the book offers an in-depth introduction to the field serving as a starting point for Ph.D. research and as a reference work for professional astrophysicists.

Today many scientists recognize plasma as the key element in understanding new observations in interplanetary and interstellar space, in stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, and throughout the observable universe. Plasma astrophysics and cosmology, as a unified discipline, cover topics such as the large-scale structure and filamentation of the universe; the microwave background; the formation of galaxies and magnetic fields; active galactic nuclei and quasars; the origin and abundance of light elements; star formation and the evolution of solar systems; redshift periodicities and anomalous redshifts; general relativity; electric fields; the acceleration of charged particles to high energies; and cosmic rays. This text provides an update on the observations made in radio, optical and high-energy astrophysics, especially since 1985, and addresses the paradigm changing discoveries made by the planetary probes and satellites, radio telescopes, and the Hubble space telescope. Over 20 contributors, all distinguished plasma scientists, present a picture of the nature of our plasma universe with articles ranging from the popular level to advanced topics in plasma cosmology.

This volume is a compilation of the research presented at the International Asteroid Day workshop which was celebrated at Barcelona on June 30th, 2015. The proceedings discuss the beginning of a new era in the study and exploration of the solar system's minor bodies. International Asteroid Day commemorates the Tunguska event of June 30th, 1908. The workshop's goal was to promote the importance of dealing proactively with impact hazards from space. Multidisciplinary experts contributed to this discussion by describing the nature of comets and asteroids along with their offspring, meteoroids. New missions to return material samples of asteroids back to Earth such as Osiris-REx and Hayabusa 2, as well as projects like AIM and DART which will test impact deflection techniques for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids encounters were also covered. The proceedings include both an outreach level to popularize impact hazards and a scientific character which covers the latest knowledge on these topics, as well as offering proposals of promising new techniques that will help gain new insights of the properties of these challenging bodies by studying meteoroids and meteorites. Asteroids, comets, meteoroids and meteorites are introduced with descriptions of their nature, origin, and solar system pathways.

This book contains the elaborated and updated versions of the 24 lectures given at the 43rd Saas-Fee Advanced Course. Written by four eminent scientists in the field, the book reviews the physical processes related to star formation, starting from cosmological down to galactic scales. It presents a detailed description of the interstellar medium and its link with the star formation. And it describes the main numerical computational techniques designed to solve the equations governing self-gravitating fluids used for modelling of galactic and extra-galactic systems. This book provides a unique framework which is needed to develop and improve the simulation techniques designed for understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. Presented in an accessible manner it contains the present day state of knowledge of the field. It serves as an entry point and key reference to students and researchers in astronomy, cosmology, and physics.

The focus of his prize-winning thesis is on observations and modeling of binary millisecond pulsars. But in addition, John Antoniadis covers a wide range of observational measurements of binary compact stars systems and tests of General Relativity, like indirect measurements of gravitational wave emission and posing the most stringent constraints on Scalar-Tensor gravity theories. Among others, he presents a system that hosts the most massive neutron star known to date, which has important ramifications for strong-field gravity and nuclear physics. This impressive work was awarded the Otto-Hahn Medal of the Max-Planck Society and the Best PhD in Gravity, Particle and Atomic physics award by the German Physics Society (DPG).

Space curves around you, time slows down, particles are waves, a cat is both alive and dead. What's going on? It all starts to make sense when we untangle the universe with this clear and enlightening book. Day-dreamers and deep-thinkers, these are the concepts that will send your mind wandering to new places with a deeper understanding of the natural world. Physics has always been a tricky subject for the general public. Millions are fascinated by the laws of the physical world, but there has been a lack of books written specifically for general readers. The Universe Untangled is for those who are curious; yet do not have an extensive mathematical background. It uses images, analogies and comprehensible language to cover popular topics of interest including the evolution of the universe, fundamental forces and particle interactions, the nature of space and time according to Special and General Relativity, the ideas of Quantum Mechanics and the quest for knowing the unknown. The Universe Untangled is a unique book because it is written by an author whose career has been built on making science accessible to all. She has contributed to the design and content production of educational games, professional development courses, and science workbooks. In essence, this is not a book written by a physicist for other physicists. It is written by an educator who cares only about sharing her passion for science with others.

This book provides results of analysis of typical solar events, statistical analysis, the diagnostics of energetic electrons and magnetic field, as well as the global behavior of solar flaring loops such as their contraction and expansion. It pays particular attention to analyzing solar flare loops with microwave, hard X-ray, optical and EUV emissions, as well as the theories of their radiation, and electron acceleration/transport. The results concerning influence of the pitch-angle anisotropy of non-thermal electrons on their microwave and hard X-ray emissions, new spectral behaviors in X-ray and microwave bands, and results related to the contraction of flaring loops, are widely discussed in the literature of solar physics. The book is useful for graduate students and researchers in solar and space physics.

In the field of particle and astrophysics, one of the major unresolved problems is to understand the nature and properties of dark matter, which constitutes almost 80% of the matter content of the universe. This book gives a pedagogical introduction to the field of dark matter in general, and in particular to the model building perspective. Starting from the evidence and need for dark matter, it goes into the deeper understanding of how to accommodate a dark matter candidate in a particle physics model. This book focuses on teaching the basic tools for model building of dark matter, starting from the easiest to gradually the difficult one. Although there are plenty of dark matter models available in the literature, this book concentrates on the important ones. This book aims to motivate the reader to propose a new dark matter model complying with all observational constraints.

The detection of radial and non-radial solar-like oscillations in thousands of G-K giants with CoRoT and Kepler is paving the road for detailed studies of stellar populations in the Galaxy. The available average seismic constraints allow largely model-independent determination of stellar radii and masses, and can be used to determine the position and age of thousands of stars in different regions of the Milky Way, and of giants belonging to open clusters. Such a close connection between stellar evolution, Galactic evolution, and asteroseismology opens a new very promising gate in our understanding of stars and galaxies. This book represents a natural progression from the collection of review papers presented in the book 'Red Giants as Probes of the Structure and Evolution of the Milky Way', which appeared in the Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings series in 2012. This sequel volume contains review papers on spectroscopy, seismology of red giants, open questions in Galactic astrophysics, and discusses first results achieved by combining photometric/spectroscopic and seismic constraints on populations of stars observed by CoRoT and Kepler. The book also reports on discussions between expert researchers in Galactic evolution, specialists in stellar structure and asteroseismology, and key representatives of extensive ground-based spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE and the ESO-GAIA Spectroscopic Survey, which would serve as a roadmap for future endeavours in this field of research.

This is the first monograph dedicated entirely to problems of stability and chaotic behaviour in planetary systems and its subsystems. The author explores the three rapidly developing interplaying fields of resonant and chaotic dynamics of Hamiltonian systems, the dynamics of Solar system bodies, and the dynamics of exoplanetary systems. The necessary concepts, methods and tools used to study dynamical chaos (such as symplectic maps, Lyapunov exponents and timescales, chaotic diffusion rates, stability diagrams and charts) are described and then used to show in detail how the observed dynamical architectures arise in the Solar system (and its subsystems) and in exoplanetary systems. The book concentrates, in particular, on chaotic diffusion and clearing effects. The potential readership of this book includes scientists and students working in astrophysics, planetary science, celestial mechanics, and nonlinear dynamics.

This book presents the physics of magnetic flux tubes, including their fundamental properties and collective phenomena in an ensemble of flux tubes. The physics of magnetic flux tubes is vital for understanding fundamental processes in the solar atmosphere that are shaped and governed by magnetic fields. The concept of magnetic flux tubes is also central to various magnetized media ranging from laboratory plasma and Earth's magnetosphere to planetary, stellar and galactic environments. The book covers both theory and observations. Theoretical models presented in analytical and phenomenological forms that are tailored to practical applications. These are welded together with empirical data extending from the early pioneering observations to the most recent state-of-the-art data. This new edition of the book is updated and contains a significant amount of new material throughout as well as four new chapters and 48 problems with solutions. Most problems make use of original papers containing fundamental results. This way, the original paper, often based on complex theory, turns into a convenient tool for practical use and quantitative analysis.

This is a follow-on book to the introductory textbook "Physics of the Solar Corona" previously published in 2004 by the same author, which provided a systematic introduction and covered mostly scientific results from the pre-2000 era. Using a similar structure as the previous book the second volume provides a seamless continuation of numerous novel research results in solar physics that emerged in the new millennium (after 2000) from the new solar missions of RHESSI, STEREO, Hinode, CORONAS, and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) during the era of 2000-2018. The new solar space missions are characterized by unprecedented high-resolution imaging, time resolution, spectral capabilities, stereoscopy and tomography, which reveal the intricate dynamics of magneto-hydrodynamic processes in the solar corona down to scales of 100 km. The enormous amount of data streaming down from SDO in Terabytes per day requires advanced automated data processing methods. The book focuses exclusively on new research results after 2000, which are reviewed in a comprehensive manner, documented by over 3600 literature references, covering theory, observations, and numerical modeling of basic physical processes that are observed in high-temperature plasmas of the Sun and other astrophysical objects, such as plasma instabilities, coronal heating, magnetic reconnection processes, coronal mass ejections, plasma waves and oscillations, or particle acceleration.

A major fraction of star formation in the universe occurs in starbursts. These regions of particularly rapid star formation are often located towards the centers of host galaxies. Studies of this kind of star formation at high redshift have produced astonishing results over recent years that were only possible with the latest generation of large ground-based and space telescopes. The papers collected in this volume present these results in the context of the much firmer foundation of star formation in the local universe, and they emphasize all the important topics, from star formation in different environments to the cosmic star formation history.

This thesis presents theoretical and numerical studies on phenomenological description of the quark gluon plasma (QGP), a many-body system of elementary particles.

The author formulates a causal theory of hydrodynamics for systems with net charges from the law of increasing entropy and a momentum expansion method. The derived equation results can be applied not only to collider physics, but also to the early universe and ultra-cold atoms.

The author also develops novel off-equilibrium hydrodynamic models for the longitudinal expansion of the QGP on the basis of these equations. Numerical estimations show that convection and entropy production during the hydrodynamic evolution are key to explaining excessive charged particle production, recently observed at the Large Hadron Collider. Furthermore, the analyses at finite baryon density indicate that the energy available for QGP production is larger than the amount conventionally assumed. "

This book consists of invited reviews written by world-renowned experts on the subject of the outskirts of galaxies, an upcoming field which has been understudied so far. These regions are faint and hard to observe, yet hide a tremendous amount of information on the origin and early evolution of galaxies. They thus allow astronomers to address some of the most topical problems, such as gaseous and satellite accretion, radial migration, and merging. The book is published in conjunction with the celebration of the end of the four-year DAGAL project, an EU-funded initial training network, and with a major international conference on the topic held in March 2016 in Toledo. It thus reflects not only the views of the experts, but also the scientific discussions and progress achieved during the project and the meeting. The reviews in the book describe the most modern observations of the outer regions of our own Galaxy, and of galaxies in the local and high-redshift Universe. They tackle disks, haloes, streams, and accretion as observed through deep imaging and spectroscopy, and guide the reader through the various formation and evolution scenarios for galaxies. The reviews focus on the major open questions in the field, and explore how they can be tackled in the future. This book provides a unique entry point into the field for graduate students and non-specialists, and serves as a reference work for researchers in this exciting new field.

This book introduces readers to scattering from a practical/numerical point of view. The focus is on basic aspects like single scattering, multiple scattering, and whether inhomogeneous boundary conditions or inhomogeneous scatterers have to be taken into account. The powerful T-matrix approach is explained in detail and used throughout the book, and iterative solution methods are discussed. In addition, the book addresses appropriate criteria for estimating the accuracy of numerical results, as well as their importance for practical applications. Python code is provided with each chapter, and can be freely used and modified by readers. Moreover, numerous scattering results for different configurations are provided for benchmarking purposes. The book will be particularly valuable for those readers who plan to develop their own scattering code, and wish to test the correct numerical implementation of the underlying mathematics.

This thesis highlights data from MINOS, a long-baseline accelerator neutrino experiment, and details one of the most sensitive searches for the sterile neutrino ever made. Further, it presents a new analysis paradigm to enable this measurement and a comprehensive study of the myriad systematic uncertainties involved in a search for a few-percent effect, while also rigorously investigating the statistical interpretation of the findings in the context of a sterile neutrino model. Among the scientific community, this analysis was quickly recognized as a foundational measurement in light of which all previous evidence for the sterile neutrino must now be (re)interpreted. The existence of sterile neutrinos has long been one of the key questions in the field. Not only are they a central component in many theories of new physics, but a number of past experiments have yielded results consistent with their existence. Nonetheless, they remain controversial: the interpretation of the data showing evidence for these sterile neutrinos is hotly debated.

Pulsar timing is a promising method for detecting gravitational waves in the nano-Hertz band. In his prize winning Ph.D. thesis Rutger van Haasteren deals with how one takes thousands of seemingly random timing residuals which are measured by pulsar observers, and extracts information about the presence and character of the gravitational waves in the nano-Hertz band that are washing over our Galaxy. The author presents a sophisticated mathematical algorithm that deals with this issue. His algorithm is probably the most well-developed of those that are currently in use in the Pulsar Timing Array community. In chapter 3, the gravitational-wave memory effect is described. This is one of the first descriptions of this interesting effect in relation with pulsar timing, which may become observable in future Pulsar Timing Array projects. The last part of the work is dedicated to an effort to combine the European pulsar timing data sets in order to search for gravitational waves. This study has placed the most stringent limit to date on the intensity of gravitational waves that are produced by pairs of supermassive black holes dancing around each other in distant galaxies, as well as those that may be produced by vibrating cosmic strings. Rutger van Haasteren has won the 2011 GWIC Thesis Prize of the Gravitational Wave International Community for his innovative work in various directions of the search for gravitational waves by pulsar timing. The work is presented in this Ph.D. thesis.

This book addresses the peculiarities of nonlinear wave propagation in waveguides and explains how the stratification depends on the waveguide and confinement. An example of this is an optical fibre that does not allow light to pass through a density jump. The book also discusses propagation in the nonlinear regime, which is characterized by a specific waveform and amplitude, to demonstrate so-called solitonic behaviour. In this case, a wave may be strongly localized, and propagates with a weak change in shape. In the waveguide case there are additional contributions of dispersion originating from boundary or asymptotic conditions. Offering concrete guidance on solving application problems, this essentially (more than twice) expanded second edition includes various aspects of guided propagation of nonlinear waves as well as new topics like solitonic behaviour of one-mode and multi-mode excitation and propagation and plasma waveguides, propagation peculiarities of electromagnetic waves in metamaterials, new types of dispersion, dissipation, electromagnetic waveguides, planetary waves and plasma waves interaction.The key feature of the solitonic behaviour is based on Coupled KdV and Coupled NS systems. The systems are derived in this book and solved numerically with the proof of stability and convergence. The domain wall dynamics of ferromagnetic microwaveguides and Bloch waves in nano-waveguides are also included with some problems of magnetic momentum and charge transport.

In this thesis, ultimate sensitive measurement for weak force imposed on a suspended mirror is performed with the help of a laser and an optical cavity for the development of gravitational-wave detectors. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, such measurements are subject to a fundamental noise called quantum noise, which arises from the quantum nature of a probe (light) and a measured object (mirror). One of the sources of quantum noise is the quantum back-action, which arises from the vacuum fluctuation of the light. It sways the mirror via the momentum transferred to the mirror upon its reflection for the measurement. The author discusses a fundamental trade-off between sensitivity and stability in the macroscopic system, and suggests using a triangular cavity that can avoid this trade-off. The development of an optical triangular cavity is described and its characterization of the optomechanical effect in the triangular cavity is demonstrated. As a result, for the first time in the world the quantum back-action imposed on the 5-mg suspended mirror is significantly evaluated. This work contributes to overcoming the standard quantum limit in the future.

This book presents a study of the saturation of unstable f-modes (fundamental modes) due to low-order nonlinear mode coupling. Since their theoretical prediction in 1934, neutron stars have remained among the most challenging objects in the Universe. Gravitational waves emitted by unstable neutron star oscillations can be used to obtain information about their inner structure, that is, the equation of state of dense nuclear matter. After its initial growth phase, the instability is expected to saturate due to nonlinear effects. The saturation amplitude of the unstable mode determines the detectability of the generated gravitational-wave signal, but also affects the evolution of the neutron star. The study shows that the unstable (parent) mode resonantly couples to pairs of stable (daughter) modes, which drain the parent's energy and make it saturate via a mechanism called parametric resonance instability. Further, it calculates the saturation amplitude of the most unstable f-mode multipoles throughout their so-called instability windows.