Dalton's theory of the atom is generally considered to be what made the atom a scientifically fruitful concept in chemistry. To be sure, by Dalton's time the atom had already had a two-millenium history as a philosophical idea, and corpuscular thought had long been viable in natural philosophy (that is, in what we would today call physics).
Atoms in Chemistry will examine episodes in the evolution of the concept of the atom, particularly in chemistry, from Dalton's day to our own. It begins with an overview of scientific atomic theories from the 17th through 20th centuries that analyzes corpuscular theories of matter proposed or entertained by natural philosophers in the 17th century. Chapters will focus on philosophical and religious conceptions of matter, 19th-century organic structural theories, the debate surrounding the truth of the atomic-molecular theory, and physical evidence accumulated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that suggested that atoms were actually real, even if they were not exactly as Dalton envisioned them. The final chapter of this book takes the reader beyond the atom itself to some of the places associated with the history of scientific atomism. As a whole, this volume will serve as a passport to important episodes from the more than 200-year history of atoms in chemistry.

Practically every display technology in use today relies on the flat, energy-efficient construction made possible by liquid crystals. These displays provide visually-crisp, vibrantly-colored images that a short time ago were thought only possible in science fiction. Liquid crystals are known mainly for their use in display technologies, but they also provide many diverse and useful applications: adaptive optics, electro-optical devices, films, lasers, photovoltaics, privacy windows, skin cleansers and soaps, and thermometers. The striking images of liquid crystals changing color under polarized lighting conditions are even on display in many museums and art galleries - true examples of 'science meeting art'. Although liquid crystals provide us with visually stunning displays, fascinating applications, and are a rich and fruitful source of interdisciplinary research, their full potential may yet remain untapped.

It was not until 1971 that the authority for defining scientific units, the General Conference of Weights and Measures got around to defining the unit that is the basis of chemistry (the mole, or the quantity of something). Yet for all this tardiness in putting the chemical sciences on a sound quantitative basis, chemistry is an old and venerable subject and one naturally asks the question, why? Well, the truth is that up until the mid-1920s, many physicists did not believe in the reality of molecules. Indeed, it was not until after the physics community had accepted Ernest Rutherford's 1913 solar-system-like model of the atom, and the quantum mechanical model of the coupling of electron spins in atoms that physicists started to take seriously the necessity of explaining the chemical changes that chemists had been observing, investigating and recording since the days of the alchemists.

The effect which now bears his name, was discovered in 1958 by Rudolf Moessbauer at the Technical University of Munich. At first, this appeared to be a phenomenon related to nuclear energy levels that provided some information about excited state lifetimes and quantum properties. However, it soon became apparent that Moessbauer spectroscopy had applications in such diverse fields as general relativity, solid state physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, medical physics, archeology and art. It is the extreme sensitivity of the effect to the atomic environment around the probe atom as well as the ability to apply the technique to some interesting and important elements, most notably iron, that is responsible for the Moessbauer effect's extensive use. The present volume reviews the historical development of the Moessbauer effect, the experimental details, the basic physics of hyperfine interactions and some of the numerous applications of Moessbauer effect spectroscopy.

Electrostatic forces are essential for the hierarchical structure of matter: electrons are bound to the atomic nucleus by electrostatic forces; atoms carry (partial) charges and ions with opposite charges attract and form (chemical) bonds. Small residual electrostatic forces between molecules allow them to form macroscopic structures such as crystals. Electrostatic interactions explain pseudo-forces used in popular computer programs used to model properties of atoms, molecules, and proteins. By beginning with the basics and then diving deeper into the topic, this book aims to familiarize the reader with electrostatic forces at the atomic and molecular level.

While neutron halos were discovered 30 years ago, this is the first book written on the subject of this exotic form of nuclei that typically contain many more neutrons than stable isotopes of those elements. It provides an introductory description of the halo and outlines the discovery and evidence for its existence. It also discusses different theoretical models of the halo's structure as well as models and techniques in reaction theory that have allowed us to study the halo. This is written at a level accessible to graduate students starting a PhD in nuclear physics. Halo nuclei are an exotic form of atomic nuclei that contain typically many more neutrons than stable isotopes of those elements. To give you a famous example, an atom of the element lithium has three electrons orbiting a nucleus with three protons and, usually, either 3 or 4 neutrons. The difference in the number of neutrons gives us two different isotopes of lithium, Li6 and Li7. But if you keep adding neutrons to the nucleus you will eventually reach Li11, with still 3 protons (that means it's lithium) but with 8 neutrons. This nucleus is so neutron-rich that the last two are very weakly bound to the rest of the nucleus (a Li9 core). What happens is a quantum mechanical effect: the two outer neutrons float around beyond the rest of the nuclear core at a distance that is beyond the range of the force that is holding them to the core. This is utterly counterintuitive. It means the nucleus looks like a core plus extended diffuse cloud of neutron probability: the halo. The author of the book, Jim Al-Khalili, is a theoretician who published some of the key papers on the structure of the halo in the mid and late 90s and was the first to determine its true size. This monograph is based on review articles he has written on the mathematical models used to determine the halo structure and the reactions used to model that structure.

Monte Carlo methods have been very prominent in computer simulation of various systems in physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science. This book focuses on the discussion and path-integral quantum Monte Carlo methods in many-body physics and provides a concise but complete introduction to the Metropolis algorithm and its applications in these two techniques. To explore the schemes in clarity, several quantum many-body systems are analysed and studied in detail. The book includes exercises to help digest the materials covered. It can be used as a tutorial to learn the discussion and path-integral Monte Carlo or a recipe for developing new research in the reader's own area. Two complete Java programs, one for the discussion Monte Carlo of 4^He clusters on a graphite surface and the other for the path-integral Monte Carlo of cold atoms in a potential trap, are ready for download and adoption.

The confocal microscope is appropriate for imaging cells or the measurement of industrial artefacts. However, junior researchers and instrument users sometimes misuse imaging concepts and metrological characteristics, such as position resolution in industrial metrology and scale resolution in bio-imaging. And, metrological characteristics or influence factors in 3D measurement such as height assessment error caused by 3D coupling effect are so far not yet identified. In this book, the authors outline their practices by the working experiences on standardization and system design. This book assumes little previous knowledge of optics, but rich experience in engineering of industrial measurements, in particular with profile metrology or areal surface topography will be very helpful to understand the theoretical concerns and value of the technological advances. It should be useful for graduate students or researchers as extended reading material, as well as microscope users alongside their handbook.

This book is for senior undergraduates, graduate students and researchers interested in understanding the physical and chemical interactions of organic semiconductors on emergent two-dimensional (2D) materials. Molecular electronics has come of age, and there is now a pressing need to understand molecule-2D material heterointerfaces at the nanoscale. The purpose of this book is to present a coherent coverage of these heterointerfaces for next generation molecular memories, switches, bio-sensors and magnetic quantum devices. In this interdisciplinary collection, advances in the application of scanning probe and high-resolution synchrotron techniques are illustrated.

Volume 3 of this three-part series presents more advanced topics and applications of relativistic quantum field theory. The application of quantum chromodynamics to high-energy particle scattering is discussed with concrete examples for how to compute QCD scattering cross sections. Experimental evidence for the existence of quarks and gluons is then presented both within the context of the naive quark model and beyond. Dr Strickland then reviews our current understanding of the weak interaction, the unified electroweak theory, and the Brout-Higgs-Englert mechanism for the generation of gauge boson masses. The last two chapters contain a self-contained introduction to finite temperature quantum field theory with concrete examples focusing on the high-temperature thermodynamics of scalar field theories, QED, and QCD.

Written in the perspective of an experimental chemist, this book puts together some fundamentals from chemistry, solid state physics and quantum chemistry, to help with understanding and predicting the electronic and optical properties of organic semiconductors, both polymers and small molecules. The text is intended to assist graduate students and researchers in the field of organic electronics to use theory to design more efficient materials for organic electronic devices such as organic solar cells, light emitting diodes and field effect transistors. After addressing some basic topics in solid state physics, a comprehensive introduction to molecular orbitals and band theory leads to a description of computational methods based on Hartree-Fock and density functional theory (DFT), for predicting geometry conformations, frontier levels and energy band structures. Topological defects and transport and optical properties are then addressed, and one of the most commonly used transparent conducting polymers, PEDOT:PSS, is described in some detail as a case study.

The first version of quantum theory, developed in the mid 1920's, is what is called nonrelativistic quantum theory; it is based on a form of relativity which, in a previous volume, was called Newton relativity. But quickly after this first development, it was realized that, in order to account for high energy phenomena such as particle creation, it was necessary to develop a quantum theory based on Einstein relativity. This in turn led to the development of relativistic quantum field theory, which is an intrinsically many-body theory. But this is not the only possibility for a relativistic quantum theory. In this book we take the point of view of a particle theory, based on the irreducible representations of the Poincare group, the group that expresses the symmetry of Einstein relativity. There are several ways of formulating such a theory; we develop what is called relativistic point form quantum mechanics, which, unlike quantum field theory, deals with a fixed number of particles in a relativistically invariant way. A central issue in any relativistic quantum theory is how to introduce interactions without spoiling relativistic invariance. We show that interactions can be incorporated in a mass operator, in such a way that relativistic invariance is maintained. Surprisingly for a relativistic theory, such a construction allows for instantaneous interactions; in addition, dynamical particle exchange and particle production can be included in a multichannel formulation of the mass operator. For systems of more than two particles, however, straightforward application of such a construction leads to the undesirable property that clusters of widely separated particles continue to interact with one another, even if the interactions between the individual particles are of short range. A significant part of this volume deals with the solution of this problem. Since relativistic quantum mechanics is not as well-known as relativistic quantum field theory, a chapter is devoted to applications of point form quantum mechanics to nuclear physics; in particular we show how constituent quark models can be used to derive electromagnetic and other properties of hadrons.

This thesis explores two distinct applications of laser spectroscopy: the study of nuclear ground state properties, and element selective radioactive ion beam production. It also presents the methods and results of an investigation into isotope shifts in the mercury isotopic chain. These Resonance Ionization Laser Ion Source (RILIS) developments are detailed, together with an RILIS ionization scheme that allowed laser ionized ion beams of chromium, germanium, radium and tellurium to be generated at the Isotope Mass Separator On-Line (ISOLDE) facility. A combination of laser spectroscopy with decay spectroscopy and mass spectrometry unambiguously demonstrated a cessation of the extreme shape staggering first observed in the 1970s and revealed the characteristic kink at the crossing of the N=126 shell closure. A series of RILIS developments were required to facilitate this experiment, including mercury "ionization scheme" development and the coupling of the RILIS with an arc discharge ion source. Laser spectroscopy has since become a powerful tool for nuclear physics and the Resonance Ionization Laser Ion Source (RILIS), of the ISOLDE facility at CERN, is a prime example. Highlighting important advances in this field, the thesis offers a unique and revealing resource.

This textbook is a unique and ambitious primer of nuclear physics, which introduces recent theoretical and experimental progresses starting from basics in fundamental quantum mechanics. The highlight is to offer an overview of nuclear structure phenomena relevant to recent key findings such as unstable halo nuclei, superheavy elements, neutron stars, nucleosynthesis, the standard model, lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD), and chiral effective theory. An additional attraction is that general properties of nuclei are comprehensively explained from both the theoretical and experimental viewpoints. The book begins with the conceptual and mathematical basics of quantum mechanics, and goes into the main point of nuclear physics - nuclear structure, radioactive ion beam physics, and nuclear reactions. The last chapters devote interdisciplinary topics in association with astrophysics and particle physics. A number of illustrations and exercises with complete solutions are given. Each chapter is comprehensively written starting from fundamentals to gradually reach modern aspects of nuclear physics with the objective to provide an effective description of the cutting edge in the field.

This book presents state-of-the-art research on quantum hybridization, manipulation, and measurement in the context of hybrid quantum systems. It covers a broad range of experimental and theoretical topics relevant to quantum hybridization, manipulation, and measurement technologies, including a magnetic field sensor based on spin qubits in diamond NV centers, coherently coupled superconductor qubits, novel coherent couplings between electron and nuclear spin, photons and phonons, and coherent coupling of atoms and photons. Each topic is concisely described by an expert at the forefront of the field, helping readers quickly catch up on the latest advances in fundamental sciences and technologies of hybrid quantum systems, while also providing an essential overview.

The present theme concerns the forces of nature, and what investigations of these forces can tell us about the world we see about us. The story of these forces is long and complex, and contains many episodes that are not atypical of the bulk of scientific research, which could have achieved greater acclaim 'if only...'.The intention of this book is to introduce ideas of how the visible world, and those parts of it that we cannot observe, either because they are too small or too large for our scale of perception, can be understood by consideration of only a few fundamental forces. The subject in these pages will be the authority of the commonly termed, laws of physics, which arise from the forces of nature, and the corresponding constants of nature (for example, the speed of light, c, the charge of the electron, e, or the mass of the electron, me).