Commencing with a self-contained overview of atomic collision theory, this monograph presents recent developments of R-matrix theory and its applications to a wide-range of atomic molecular and optical processes. These developments include the electron and photon collisions with atoms, ions and molecules which are required in the analysis of laboratory and astrophysical plasmas, multiphoton processes required in the analysis of superintense laser interactions with atoms and molecules and positron collisions with atoms and molecules required in antimatter studies of scientific and technologial importance. Basic mathematical results and general and widely used R-matrix computer programs are summarized in the appendices.

Shortlisted for the 2020 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books Creating an element is no easy feat. It's the equivalent of firing six trillion bullets a second at a needle in a haystack, hoping the bullet and needle somehow fuse together, then catching it in less than a thousandth of a second - after which it's gone forever. Welcome to the world of the superheavy elements: a realm where scientists use giant machines and spend years trying to make a single atom of mysterious artefacts that have never existed on Earth. From the first elements past uranium and their role in the atomic bomb to the latest discoveries stretching our chemical world, Superheavy will reveal the hidden stories lurking at the edges of the periodic table. Why did the US Air Force fly planes into mushroom clouds? Who won the transfermium wars? How did an earthquake help give Japan its first element? And what happened when Superman almost spilled nuclear secrets? In a globe-trotting adventure that stretches from the United States to Russia, Sweden to Australia, Superheavy is your guide to the amazing science filling in the missing pieces of the periodic table. By the end you'll not only marvel at how nuclear science has changed our lives - you'll wonder where it's going to take us in the future.

All living matter is comprised of cells, small compartments isolated from the environment by a cell membrane and filled with concentrated solutions of various organic and inorganic compounds. Some organisms are single-cell, where all life functions are performed by that cell. Others have groups of cells, or entire organs, specializing in one particular function. The survival of the entire organism depends on all of its cells and organs fulfilling their roles.While the cells are studied by different sciences, they are seen differently by biologists, chemists, or physicists. Biologists concentrate their attention on cell structure and function. What does the cell consist of? Where are its organelles? What function does each organelle fulfil? From a chemists' point of view, a cell is a complex chemical reaction chamber where various molecules are synthesized or degraded. The main question is how these, sometimes very complicated chains of reactions are controlled. Finally, from a physics standpoint, one of the main questions is the physical movement of all these molecules between organelles within the cell, as well as their exchange with the extracellular medium. The aim of this book is to look into the basic physical phenomena occurring in cells. These physical transport processes facilitate chemical reactions in the cell and that in turn leads to the biological functions necessary for the cell to satisfy its role in the mother organism. Ultimately, the goals of every cell are to stay alive and to fulfil its function as a part of a larger organ or organism. This book is an inventory of physical transport processes occurring in cells while the second volume will be a closer look at how complex biological and physiological cell phenomena result from these very basic physical processes.

This dissertation focuses on the calculation of transport coefficients in the matter created in a relativistic heavy-ion collision after chemical freeze-out. This matter can be well approximated using a pion gas out of equilibrium. We describe the theoretical framework needed to obtain the shear and bulk viscosities, the thermal and electrical conductivities and the flavor diffusion coefficients of a meson gas at low temperatures. To describe the interactions of the degrees of freedom, we use effective field theories with chiral and heavy quark symmetries. We subsequently introduce the unitarization methods in order to obtain a scattering amplitude that satisfies the unitarity condition exactly, then go on to calculate the transport properties of the low-temperature phase of quantum chromodynamics - the hadronic medium - which can be used in hydrodynamic simulations of a relativistic heavy-ion collision and its subsequent evolution. We show that the shear viscosity over entropy density exhibits a minimum in a phase transition by studying this coefficient in atomic Argon (around the liquid-gas phase transition) and in the linear sigma model in the limit of a large number of scalar fields (which presents a chiral phase transition). Finally, we provide an experimental method for estimating the bulk viscosity in relativistic heavy-ion collisions by performing correlations of the fluctuating components of the stress-energy tensor.

Key features: Complete introductory overview of cosmic ray physics Covers the origins, acceleration, transport mechanisms and detection of these particles Mathematical and technical detail is kept separate from the main text

This collection of papers will address the question "What is the Magnetospheric Cusp?" and what is its role in the coupling of the solar wind to the magnetosphere as well as its role in the processes of particle transport and energization within the magnetosphere. The cusps have traditionally been described as narrow funnel-shaped regions that provide a focus of the Chapman-Ferraro currents that flow on the magnetopause, a boundary between the cavity dominated by the geomagnetic field (i.e., the magnetosphere) and the external region of the interplanetary medium. Measurements from a number of recent satellite programs have shown that the cusp is not confined to a narrow region near local noon but appears to encompass a large portion of the dayside high-latitude magnetosphere. It appears that the cusp is a major source region for the production of energetic charged particles for the magnetosphere. This book will be of great interest to scientists in Space Physics as well as to those working in research organizations in governments and industries, university departments of physics, astronomy, space physics, and geophysics. Part of this book has already been published in a journal.

Coverings are efficient ways to exhaust Euclidean N-space with congruent geometric objects. Discrete quasiperiodic systems are exemplified by the atomic structure of quasicrystals. The subject of coverings of discrete quasiperiodic sets emerged in 1995. The theory of these coverings provides a new and fascinating perspective of order down to the atomic level. The authors develop concepts related to quasiperiodic coverings and describe results. Specific systems in 2 and 3 dimensions are described with many illustrations. The atomic positions in quasicrystals are analyzed.

It became clear in the early days of fusion research that the effects of the containment vessel (erosion of "impurities") degrade the overall fusion plasma performance. Progress in controlled nuclear fusion research over the last decade has led to magnetically confined plasmas that, in turn, are sufficiently powerful to damage the vessel structures over its lifetime. This book reviews current understanding and concepts to deal with this remaining critical design issue for fusion reactors. It reviews both progress and open questions, largely in terms of available and sought-after plasma-surface interaction data and atomic/molecular data related to these "plasma edge" issues.

Fundamental physics with trapped particles (ions, atoms or molecules) rep resents one of the most challenging and promising fields of investigation, with impressive results during this last decade. The use of both particle trapping and laser cooling techniques, together with traditional techniques of atomic physics, represents a powerlul tool of investigation for a wide range of fields. Experiments spanning very high resolution spectroscopy to Bose-Einstein condensation, tests of the Standard Model ofelectroweak interactions to precise mass measurements, detailed analysis of ~ decay to QED tests have been presented by leading scientists who reported the most recent results and discussed the perspectives in the different fields. During the ten working days of the School, 39 lecturers, 6 seminars and two poster sessions have been organized by offering to the attendants a.complete pic ture of the present research status about the new frontiers of atomic physics. L. Caneschi gave a general overview of the Standard Model of electroweak interac tions. He pointed out the achievements and the limits of validity of the model.

Stephanie Frank Singer received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Courant Institute in 1991. In 2002 she resigned her tenured professorship at Haverford College. Since then she has been writing and consulting independently. Her first book was Symmetry In Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction.The predictive power of mathematics in quantum phenomena is one of the great intellectual successes of the 20th century. This textbook, aimed at undergraduate or graduate level students (depending on the college or university), concentrates on how to make predictions about the numbers of each kind of basic state of a quantum system from only two ingredients: the symmetry and the linear model of quantum mechanics. This method, involving the mathematical area of representation theory or group theory, combines three core mathematical subjects, namely, linear algebra, analysis and abstract algebra. Wide applications of this method occur in crystallography, atomic structure, classification of manifolds with symmetry, and other areas.The topics unfold systematically, introducing the reader first to an important example of a quantum system with symmetry, the single electron in a hydrogen atom. about the numbers of each kind of electronic orbital based solely on the physical spherical symmetry of the hydrogen atom. The final chapters address the related ideas of quantum spin, measurement and entanglement.This user-friendly exposition, driven by numerous examples and exercises, requires a solid background in calculus and familiarity with either linear algebra or advanced quantum mechanics. The Hydrogen Atom: An Introduction to Group and Representation Theory will benefit students in mathematics, physics and chemistry, as well as a literate general readership. A separate solutions manual is available to instructors.

Collision-or interaction-induced spectroscopy refers to radiative transitions, which are forbidden in free atoms or molecules, but which occur in clusters of interacting atoms or molecules. The most common phenomena are induced absorption, in the infrared region, and induced light scattering, which involves inelastic scattering of visible laser light. The particle interactions giving rise to the necessary induced dipole moments and polarizabilities are modelled at long range by multipole expansions; at short range, electron overlap and exchange mechanisms come into play. Information on atomic and molecular interactions and dynamics in dense media on a picosecond timescale may be drawn from the spectra. Collision-induced absorption in the infrared was discovered at the University of Toronto in 1949 by Crawford, Welsh and Locke who studied liquid O and N. Through the 1950s and 1960s, 2 2 experimental elucidation of the phenomenon, particularly in gases, continued and theoretical underpinnings were established. In the late 1960s, the related phenomenon of collision-induced light scattering was first observed in compressed inert gases. In 1978, an 'Enrico Fermi' Summer School was held at Varenna, Italy, under the directorship of J. Van Kranendonk. The lectures, there, reviewed activity from the previous two decades, during which the approach to the subject had not changed greatly. In 1983, a highly successful NATO Advanced Research Workshop was held at Bonas, France, under the directorship of G. Birnbaum. An important outcome of that meeting was the demonstration of the maturity and sophistication of current experimental and theoretical techniques.

This series, Finite Systems and Multipartide Dynamics, is intended to provide timely reviews of current research topics, written in a style sufficient ly pedagogic so as to allow a nonexpert to grasp the underlying ideas as well as understand technical details. The series is an outgrowth of our involvement with three interdisciplin ary activities, namely, those arising from the American Physical Society's Topical Group on Few-Body Systems and Multipartide Dynamics, the series of Gordon Research Conferences first known by the title "Few-Body Problems in Chemistry and Physics" and later renamed "Dynamics of Simple Systems in Chemistry and Physics," and the series of Sanibel Symposia, sponsored in part by the University of Florida. The vitality of these activities and the enthusiastic response to them by researchers in various subfields of physics and chemistry have convinced us that there is a place-even a need-for a series of timely reviews on topics of interest not only to a narrow band of experts but also to a broader, interdisciplinary readership. lt is our hope that the emphasis on pedagogy will permit at least some of the books in the series to be useful in graduate-level courses. Rather than use the adjective "Few-Body" or "Simple" to modify the word "Systems" in the title, we have chosen "Finite. " It better expresses the wide range of systems with which the reviews of the series may deal."

Il capitano generale lagrimo per allegrezza e nomino quel capo: Deseado, perehe l'avevamo gia gran tempo desiderato. Antonio Pigafetta Il Primo Viaggo in torno al Mondo I would like to take some poetic license in introducing this volume in a way that seems appropriate for a country, like Chile, that Iooks to the ocean. I believe it was Heisenberg who compared different times in physics with sailing a ship. He said that most of the time we keep our ships in port, or in the protection of a bay. But on a few occasions we go into the open sea, and those occasions are really the great times in theoretical physics, when everything can change. It does not seem totally unwarranted to hope that we are now entering one of those times. In that spirit, I would like to mention a wonderful book, which in English would be called something like Chile, Or a Crazy Geography.

The book is a fairly non-technical introduction to modern supersymmetry phenomenology, approaching the subject in new and unique ways. It is suitable both for theorists and experimentalists, and emphasizes an intuitive grasp of the subject. Theoretical and experimental motivations, and the status and prospects of low-energy supersymmetry are discussed. It is shown by explicit construction that the stabilization of any perturbative theory which contains fundamental scalar bosons naturally leads to the notion of supersymmetry. The minimal supersymmetric extension of the standard model is then pedagogically defined and its experimental status is summarized. Renormalization of the models, including unification, is discussed and the linkage between high and low energies is demonstrated, providing a potential probe of Planck-scale physics such as unified theories. Besides a host of other phenomena, Higgs physics is discussed and the Higgs mass is shown to provide a crucial test of nearly all supersymmetric theories.

This book is a new look at one of the hottest topics in contemporary science, Dark Matter. It is the pioneering text dedicated to sterile neutrinos as candidate particles for Dark Matter, challenging some of the standard assumptions which may be true for some Dark Matter candidates but not for all. So, this can be seen either as an introduction to a specialized topic or an out-of-the-box introduction to the field of Dark Matter in general. No matter if you are a theoretical particle physicist, an observational astronomer, or a ground based experimentalist, no matter if you are a grad student or an active researcher, you can benefit from this text, for a simple reason: a non-standard candidate for Dark Matter can teach you a lot about what we truly know about our standard picture of how the Universe works.

This book contains the expanded lecture notes of the 32nd Saas-Fee Advanced Course. The three contributions present the central themes in modern research on the cold universe, ranging from cold objects at large distances to the physics of dust in cold clouds.

Materials scientists are currently facing the challenge of synthesising carbon nanostructures that can reproduce or even improve on the remarkable performance of fullerenes and nanotubes, but in a robust, three-dimensional structure. Recent advances in the assembling of clusters, manipulation and functionalisation, and the extension from pure graphite-like and diamond-like materials to mixed sp2/sp3 carbon-based materials with a controlled nanostructure are leading to an impressive array of advanced applications. This volume is an up-to-date account of progress in these areas, special attention being paid to the synthesis, structural and physical characterisation, theoretical simulation and technological applications of nanostructured carbon in its innumerable forms. Readership: Graduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field of nanophysics and related technologies.

Since the discovery that polymer single crystals are composed of chain folded macromolecules in 1957, the crystallization of polymers has attracted considerable interest and still provides fascinating and fruitful areas of research. Only a few books have been fully devoted to the crystallization of polymers in the past. This book contains the proceedings of the NATO ARW devoted to the `Crystallization of Polymers' which took place in September 1992 at the University of Mons-Hainaut (Belgium). In view of the variety of papers devoted to the crystallization of polymers, this book will be used in the next few years as a reference book for scientists concerned in the field of polymer physical chemistry. Crystallization of Polymers is mainly devoted to the experimental and theoretical study of the crystallization of synthetic polymers. As a kinetic study of the growth of polymer crystals should always be preceded by a morphological or a structural investigation, the structure, the morphology of polymer crystals and more particularly the lamellar and supralamellar organizations, as well as the nature of the crystal amorphous interface are reviewed and discussed.

Interpretation of IR and Raman Spectra provides the fundamentals of interpreting IR and Raman spectra of complex molecules primarily organic molecules. Examinations of theory provide a basis for predicting functional group frequency location in new molecular structures. * Generously enriched with sample exercises to help rapidly develop powerful interpretive skills. * Includes appendices with fourteen bibliographies by subject area.

The NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Fundamental Aspects of Inert Gases in Solids, held at Bonas, France from 16-22 September 1990, was the fifth in a series of meetings that have been held in this topic area since 1979. The Consultants' Meeting in that year at Harwell on Rare Gas Behaviour in Metals and Ionic Solids was followed in 1982 by the Jiilich Inter national Symposium on Fundamental Aspects of Helium in Metals. Two smaller meetings have followed-a CECAM organised workshop on Helium Bubbles in Metals was held at Orsay, France in 1986 while in February 1989, a Topical Symposium on Noble Gases in Metals was held in Las Vegas as part of the large TMS/AIME Spring Meeting. As is well known, the dominating feature of inert gas atoms in most solids is their high heat of solution, leading in most situations to an essentially zero solubility and gas-atom precipita tion. In organising the workshop, one particular aim was to target the researchers in the field of inert-gas/solid interactions from three different areas--namely metals, tritides and nuclear fuels-in order to encourage and foster the cross-fertilisation of approaches and ideas. In these three material classes, the behaviour of inert gases in metals has probably been most studied, partly from technological considerations-the effects of helium production via (n, a) reac tions during neutron irradiation are of importance, particularly in a fusion reactor environ ment-and partly from a more fundamental viewpoint."

The authors aim to hone the theory of electron-atom and electron-ion collisions by developing mathematical equations and comparing their results to the wealth of recent experimental data. This first of three parts focuses on potential scattering, and will serve as an introduction to many of the concepts covered in Parts II and III. As these processes occur in so many of the physical sciences, researchers in astrophysics, atmospheric physics, plasma physics, and laser physics will all benefit from the monograph.

For the first half of the 20th Century, low-energy nuclear physics was one of the dominant foci of all of science. Then accelerators prospered and energies rose, leading to an increase of interest in the GeV regime and beyond. The three articles comprising this end-of-century Advances in Nuclear Physics present a fitting and masterful summary of the energy regimes through which nuclear physics has developed and promises to develop in future. One article describes new information about fundamental symmetries found with kV neutrons. Another reviews our progress in understanding nucleon-nucleus scattering up to 1 GeV. The third analyzes dilepton production as a probe for quark-gluon plasmas generated in relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

Angle and spin resolved Auger emission physics deals with the theoretical and numerical description, analysis and interpretation of such types of experiments on free atoms and molecules. This monograph derives the general theory applying the density matrix formalism and, in terms of irreducible tensorial sets, so called state multipoles and order parameters, for parameterizing the atomic and molecular systems, respectively. It is the first book on angle and spin-resolved Auger emission.

Key features: Supported by the latest research and based on the state-of-the-art computational methods in high-accuracy computational spectroscopy of molecules Authored by an authority in the field Accessible to both experts and non-experts working in the area of computational and experimental spectroscopy, in addition to graduate students