These lecture notes are dedicated to the most recent theoretical applications of Black Hole solutions in high-energy physics. The main motivation of this volume is to present the latest black hole backgrounds that are relevant for gauge/gravity correspondence. Leading scientists in the field explain effective techniques for finding singular and cosmological solutions embedded in gauged supergravity, shedding light on underlying properties and symmetries. Starting from a basic level, the mathematical structures underlying black holes and cosmologies are revealed, helping the reader grasp the connection between theoretical approaches and physical observations with insights into possible future developments from both a theoretical and experimental point of view. The topics covered in this volume are based on lectures delivered during the "Theoretical Frontiers in Black Holes and Cosmology" school, held in Natal in June 2015.

Based on the concept of a physical system, this book offers a new philosophical interpretation of classical mechanics and the Special Theory of Relativity. According to Belkind's view the role of physical theory is to describe the motions of the parts of a physical system in relation to the motions of the whole. This approach provides a new perspective into the foundations of physical theory, where motions of parts and wholes of physical systems are taken to be fundamental, prior to spacetime, material properties and laws of motion. He defends this claim with a constructive project, deriving basic aspects of classical theories from the motions of parts and wholes. This exciting project will challenge readers to reevaluate how they understand the structure of the physical world in which we live.

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There is a wide field of tasks left that can only be satisfyingly attacked with the help of old-fashioned analogue technology, and one of the most important are amplifiers for analogue signals. The strongly expanded content of the second edition of "the sound of silence" leads to affordable amplifier design approaches which will end up in lowest-noise solutions not far away from the edge of physical boundaries set by room temperature and given cartridges - thus, fully compatible with very expensive so called "high-end" or "state-of-the-art" offers on today markets - and, from a noise point of view in most cases outperforming them

With easy to follow mathematical treatment it is demonstrated as well that theory is not far away from reality. Measured SNs will be found within 1dB off the calculated ones and deviations from the exact amplifier transfer won't cross the 0.1dB tolerance lines. Additionally, the book presents measurement set-ups and results. Consequently, comparisons with measurement results of test magazine will soon become easier to perform.

This new edition includes a new chapters about reference levels, Noise in Amp Input sections, Humming Problems, and much more."

The content of this book is multidisciplinary by nature. It uses mathematical tools from the theories of probability and stochastic processes, partial differential equations, and asymptotic analysis, combined with the physics of wave propagation and modeling of time reversal experiments. It is addressed to a wide audience of graduate students and researchers interested in the intriguing phenomena related to waves propagating in random media. At the end of each chapter there is a section of notes where the authors give references and additional comments on the various results presented in the chapter.

This hard bound spinoff from a special issue of the Journal of Elasticity (volume 100: 1-2) features an English translation of an important 1955 paper by Walter Noll, Die Herteitung der Grundgleichungen der Thermomechanik der Kontinua aus der statistischen Mechanik. In this paper, Noll addresses and analyses the seminal paper of Irving and Kirkwood, published five years earlier, on The Statistical Mechanical Theory of Transport Processes. IV, The Equations of Hydrodynamics. Noll gives new interpretations and provides a firm setting for ideas advanced by Irving & Kirkwood that clearly and directly relate to the basic principles of continuum mechanics. However, the original German paper of Noll seems not to have gained the attention that it deserved as the field of statistical mechanics grew both fundamentally and in applications. By providing an English translation of Noll s paper, Lehoucq & Von Lilienfeld-Toal have provided a great service to the scientific community. The Noll translation is presented here to expose fundamental ideas of statistical mechanics that are of major importance in the modeling of small-scale behavior and its link to macroscopic observations. In recent years there has been a rapidly increasing reliance upon and interest in multi scale methods in computation. This has accentuated the need to establish meaningful connections between atomistic and continuum descriptions of contact interactions such as stress and heat flux. In recognition of Noll s contribution, the translation is accompanied by four relevant and invited papers, including one, entitled Thoughts on the Concept of Stress, by Noll himself.

This book offers a brief, practically complete, and relatively simple introduction to functional analysis. It also illustrates the application of functional analytic methods to the science of continuum mechanics. Abstract but powerful mathematical notions are tightly interwoven with physical ideas in the treatment of nontrivial boundary value problems for mechanical objects.

This second edition includes more extended coverage of the classical andabstract portions of functional analysis. Taken together, the first three chapters now constitute a regular text on applied functional analysis. This potential use of the book is supported by a significantly extended set of exercises with hints and solutions. A new appendix, providing a convenient listing of essential inequalities and imbedding results, has been added.

The book should appeal to graduate students and researchers in physics, engineering, and applied mathematics.

Reviews of first edition:

"This book covers functional analysis and its applications to continuum mechanics. The presentation is concise but complete, and is intended for readers in continuum mechanics who wish to understand the mathematical underpinnings of the discipline. Detailed solutions of the exercises are provided in an appendix." (L Enseignment Mathematique, Vol. 49 (1-2), 2003)

"The reader comes away with a profound appreciation both of the physics and its importance, and of the beauty of the functional analytic method, which, in skillful hands, has the power to dissolve and clarify these difficult problems as peroxide does clotted blood. Numerous exercises test the reader s comprehension at every stage. Summing Up: Recommended." (F. E. J. Linton, Choice, September, 2003)

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Single-channel hands-free teleconferencing systems are becoming popular. In order to enhance the communication quality of these systems, more and more stereophonic sound devices with two loudspeakers and two microphones are deployed. Because of the coupling between loudspeakers and microphones, there may be strong echoes, which make real-time communication very difficult. The best way we know to cancel these echoes is via a stereo acoustic echo canceller (SAEC), which can be modelled as a two-input/two-output system with real random variables. In this work, the authors recast this problem into a single-input/single-output system with complex random variables thanks to the widely linear model. From this new convenient formulation, they re-derive the most important aspects of a SAEC, including identification of the echo paths with adaptive filters, double-talk detection, and suppression.

The Stroh formalism is a powerful and elegant mathematical method developed for the analysis of the equations of anisotropic elasticity. The purpose of this exposition is to introduce the essence of this formalism and demonstrate its effectiveness in both static and dynamic elasticity. The equations of elasticity are complicated, because they constitute a system and, particularly for the anisotropic cases, inherit many parameters from the elasticity tensor. The Stroh formalism reveals simple structures hidden in the equations of anisotropic elasticity and provides a systematic approach to these equations. This work will appeal to students and researchers in applied mathematics, mechanics, and engineering science.

This volume shows how collective magnetic excitations determine most of the magnetic properties of itinerant electron magnets. Previous theories were mainly restricted to the Curie-Weiss law temperature dependence of magnetic susceptibilities. Based on the spin amplitude conservation idea including the zero-point fluctuation amplitude, this book shows that the entire temperature and magnetic field dependence of magnetization curves, even in the ground state, is determined by the effect of spin fluctuations. It also shows that the theoretical consequences are largely in agreement with many experimental observations. The readers will therefore gain a new comprehensive perspective of their unified understanding of itinerant electron magnetism.

This book presents a systematic attempt to generalize several fundamental physical laws related to subsurface fluid flow that are important for a number of contemporary applications in the areas of hydrogeology, reservoir engineering and rock mechanics. It also covers the history of discovering these physical laws, their respective scope of validity, and their generalizations or extensions. The physical laws discussed include Darcy's law, Darcy-Buckingham law and Hooke's law. Darcy's law is the fundamental law for subsurface fluid flow. For low-permeability media, it is not always adequate because of the strong fluid-solid interaction. Though the Darcy-Buckingham law is often used for modeling subsurface multiphase flow, it is only valid under the local equilibrium condition. This condition does not hold in many cases, especially when fingering flow occurs. It is well known that subsurface fluid flow is coupled with mechanical deformation of subsurface media; in some applications, this coupling can play a dominant role. The continuum-scale elastic deformation of natural rock, however, does not always follow the traditional form of Hooke's law. The book also presents applications of the proposed generalizations of the physical laws to several important engineering projects.

This book is an introduction to the theory, practice, and implementation of the Lattice Boltzmann (LB) method, a powerful computational fluid dynamics method that is steadily gaining attention due to its simplicity, scalability, extensibility, and simple handling of complex geometries. The book contains chapters on the method's background, fundamental theory, advanced extensions, and implementation. To aid beginners, the most essential paragraphs in each chapter are highlighted, and the introductory chapters on various LB topics are front-loaded with special "in a nutshell" sections that condense the chapter's most important practical results. Together, these sections can be used to quickly get up and running with the method. Exercises are integrated throughout the text, and frequently asked questions about the method are dealt with in a special section at the beginning. In the book itself and through its web page, readers can find example codes showing how the LB method can be implemented efficiently on a variety of hardware platforms, including multi-core processors, clusters, and graphics processing units. Students and scientists learning and using the LB method will appreciate the wealth of clearly presented and structured information in this volume.

This book deals with the problem of dynamics of bodies with time-variable mass and moment of inertia. Mass addition and mass separation from the body are treated. Both aspects of mass variation, continual and discontinual, are considered. Dynamic properties of the body are obtained applying principles of classical dynamics and also analytical mechanics. Advantages and disadvantages of both approaches are discussed. Dynamics of constant body is adopted, and the characteristics of the mass variation of the body is included. Special attention is given to the influence of the reactive force and the reactive torque. The vibration of the body with variable mass is presented. One and two degrees of freedom oscillators with variable mass are discussed. Rotors and the Van der Pol oscillator with variable mass are displayed. The chaotic motion of bodies with variable mass is discussed too. To support learning, some solved practical problems are included.

This book applies a step-by-step treatment of the current state-of-the-art of ordinary differential equations used in modeling of engineering systems/processes and beyond. It covers systematically ordered problems, beginning with first and second order ODEs, linear and higher-order ODEs of polynomial form, theory and criteria of similarity, modeling approaches, phase plane and phase space concepts, stability optimization and ending on chaos and synchronization.

Presenting both an overview of the theory of the introductory differential equations in the context of applicability and a systematic treatment of modeling of numerous engineering and physical problems through linear and non-linear ODEs, the volume is self-contained, yet serves both scientific and engineering interests. The presentation relies on a general treatment, analytical and numerical methods, concrete examples and engineering intuition.

The scientific background used is well balanced between elementary and advanced level, making it as a unique self-contained source for both theoretically and application oriented graduate and doctoral students, university teachers, researchers and engineers of mechanical, civil and mechatronic engineering.

Contact mechanics is an active research area with deep theoretical and numerical roots. The links between nonsmooth analysis and optimization with mechanics have been investigated intensively during the last decades, especially in Europe. The study of complementarity problems, variational -, quasivariational- and hemivariational inequalities arising in contact mechanics and beyond is a hot topic for interdisciplinary research and cooperation. The needs of industry for robust solution algorithms suitable for large scale applications and the regular updates of the respective elements in major commercial computational mechanics codes, demonstrate that this interaction is not restricted to the academic environment. The contributions of this book have been selected from the participants of the CMIS 2009 international conference which took place in Crete and continued a successful series of specialized contact mechanics conferences.

This book presents a history of shock compression science, including development of experimental, material modeling, and hydrodynamics code technologies over the past six decades at Sandia National Laboratories. The book is organized into a discussion of major accomplishments by decade with over 900 references, followed by a unique collection of 45 personal recollections detailing the trials, tribulations, and successes of building a world-class organization in the field. It explains some of the challenges researchers faced and the gratification they experienced when a discovery was made. Several visionary researchers made pioneering advances that integrated these three technologies into a cohesive capability to solve complex scientific and engineering problems. What approaches worked, which ones did not, and the applications of the research are described. Notable applications include the turret explosion aboard the USS Iowa and the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact on Jupiter. The personal anecdotes and recollections make for a fascinating account of building a world-renowned capability from meager beginnings. This book will be inspiring to the expert, the non expert, and the early-career scientist. Undergraduate and graduate students in science and engineering who are contemplating different fields of study should find it especially compelling.

In early April 1911 Albert Einstein arrived in Prague to become full professor of theoretical physics at the German part of Charles University. It was there, for the first time, that he concentrated primarily on the problem of gravitation. Before he left Prague in July 1912 he had submitted the paper Relativitat und Gravitation: Erwiderung auf eine Bemerkung von M. Abraham in which he remarkably anticipated what a future theory of gravity should look like.

At the occasion of the Einstein-in-Prague centenary an international meeting was organized under a title inspired by Einstein's last paper from the Prague period: "Relativity and Gravitation, 100 Years after Einstein in Prague." The main topics of the conference included: classical relativity, numerical relativity, relativistic astrophysics and cosmology, quantum gravity, experimental aspects of gravitation and conceptual and historical issues.

The conference attracted over 200 scientists from 31 countries, among them a number of leading experts in the field of general relativity and its applications. This volume includes abstracts of the plenary talks and full texts of contributed talks and articles based on the posters presented at the conference. These describe primarily original results of the authors. Full texts of the plenary talks are included in the volume "General Relativity, Cosmology and Astrophysics--Perspectives 100 Years after Einstein in Prague," eds. J. Bi ak and T. Ledvinka, published also by Springer Verlag."

"Statics and Dynamics of Rigid Bodies" presents an interdisciplinary approach to mechanical engineering through a close evaluation of the statics and dynamics of rigid bodies, presenting a concise introduction to both. This volume bridges the gap of interdisciplinary published texts linking fields like mechatronics and robotics with multi-body dynamics in order to provide readers with a clear path to understanding numerous sub-fields of mechanical engineering. Three-dimensional kinematics, rigid bodies in planar spaces and numerous vector and matrix operations are presented in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of mechanics through dynamics and rigid bodies.

This thesis presents an accurate and advanced numerical methodology to remedy difficulties such as direct numerical simulation of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), grid generation processes in tokamak fusion facilities, and the coupling between the surface tension force and Lorentz force in the metallurgical industry. In addition, on the basis of the numerical platform it establishes, it also investigates selected interesting topics, e.g. single bubble motion under the influence of either vertical or horizontal magnetic fields. Furthermore, it confirms the relation between the bubble's path instability and wake instability, and observes the anisotropic (isotropic) effect of the vertical (horizontal) magnetic field on the vortex structures, which determines the dynamic behavior of the rising bubble. The direct numerical simulation of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows has proven difficult in the field of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) research, because it not only concerns the coupling of the equations governing the electromagnetic field and the fluid motion, but also calls for suitable numerical methods for computing the electromagnetic field. In tokamak fusion facilities, where the MHD effect is significant and the flow domain is complex, the process of grid generation requires considerable time and effort. Moreover, in the metallurgical industry, where multiphase MHD flows are usually encountered, the coupling between the surface tension force and Lorentz force adds to the difficulty of deriving direct numerical simulations.

This book addresses a range of basic and essential topics, selected from the author's teaching and research activities, offering a comprehensive guide in three parts: Statics, Kinematics and Kinetics. Chapter 1 briefly discusses the history of classical and modern mechanics, while Chapter 2, presents preliminary knowledge, preparing readers for the subsequent chapters. Chapters 3 to 7 introduce statics, force analysis, simplification of force groups, equilibrium of the general coplanar force group, and the center of the parallel force group. The Kinematics section (Chapters 8 to 10), covers the motion of a particle, basic motion and planar motion of a rigid body. Lastly, the Kinetics section (Chapters 11 to 14) explores Newton's law of motion, theorem of momentum, theorem of angular momentum, and theorem of kinetic energy. With numerous examples from engineering, illustrations, and step-by-step tutorials, the book is suitable for both classroom use and self-study. After completing the course, students will be able to simplify complex engineering structures and perform force and motion analyses on particles and structures, preparing them for further study and research. The book can be used as a textbook for undergraduate courses on fundamental aspects of theoretical mechanics, such as aerospace, mechanical engineering, petroleum engineering, automotive and civil engineering, as well as material science and engineering.

This volume provides a comprehensive selection of recent studies addressing insect hearing and acoustic communication. The variety of signalling behaviours and hearing organs makes insects highly suitable animals for exploring and analysing signal generation and hearing in the context of neural processing, ecology, evolution and genetics. Across a variety of hearing species like moths, crickets, bush-crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and flies, the leading researchers in the field cover recent scientific progress and address key points in current research, such as:

. How can we approach the evolution of hearing in insects and what is the developmental and neural origin of the auditory organs?

. How are hearing and sound production embedded in the natural lifestyle of the animals, allowing intraspecific communication but also predator avoidance and even predation?

. What are the functional properties of hearing organs and how are they achieved at the molecular, biophysical and neural levels?

. What are the neural mechanisms of central auditory processing and signal generation?

The book is intended for students and researchers both inside and outside of the fascinating field of bioacoustics and aims to foster understanding of hearing and acoustic communication in insects."

This volume contains eight state of the art contributions on mathematical aspects and applications of fast boundary element methods in engineering and industry. This covers the analysis and numerics of boundary integral equations by using differential forms, preconditioning of hp boundary element methods, the application of fast boundary element methods for solving challenging problems in magnetostatics, the simulation of micro electro mechanical systems, and for contact problems in solid mechanics. Other contributions are on recent results on boundary element methods for the solution of transient problems. This book is addressed to researchers, graduate students and practitioners working on and using boundary element methods. All contributions also show the great achievements of interdisciplinary research between mathematicians and engineers, with direct applications in engineering and industry.

This Volume 5 of the successful book package "Multiphase Flow Dynamics" is devoted to nuclear thermal hydraulics which is a substantial part of nuclear reactor safety. It provides knowledge and mathematical tools for adequate description of the process of transferring the fission heat released in materials due to nuclear reactions into its environment. It step by step introduces into the heat release inside the fuel, temperature fields in the fuels, the "simple" boiling flow in a pipe described using ideas of different complexity like equilibrium, non equilibrium, homogeneity, non homogeneity. Then the "simple" three-fluid boiling flow in a pipe is described by gradually involving the mechanisms like entrainment and deposition, dynamic fragmentation, collisions, coalescence, turbulence. All heat transfer mechanisms are introduced gradually discussing their uncertainty. Different techniques are introduced like boundary layer treatments or integral methods. Comparisons with experimental data at each step demonstrate the success of the different ideas and models. After an introduction of the design of the reactor pressure vessels for pressurized and boiling water reactors the accuracy of the modern methods is demonstrated using large number of experimental data sets for steady and transient flows in heated bundles. Starting with single pipe boiling going through boiling in the rod bundles the analysis of complete vessel including the reactor is finally demonstrated. Then a powerful method for nonlinear stability analysis of flow boiling and condensation is introduced. Models are presented and their accuracies are investigated for describing critical multiphase flow at different level of complexity. Therefore the book presents a complete coverage of the modern Nuclear Thermal Hydrodynamics. This present third edition includes various updates, extensions, improvements and corrections.

This book provides a broad overview of spaciousness in music theory, from mixing and performance practice, to room acoustics, psychoacoustics and audio engineering, and presents the derivation, implementation and experimental validation of a novel type of spatial audio system. Discussing the physics of musical instruments and the nature of auditory perception, the book enables readers to precisely localize synthesized musical instruments while experiencing their timbral variance and spatial breadth. Offering interdisciplinary insights for novice music enthusiasts and experts in the field of spatial audio, this book is suitable for anyone interested in the study of music and musicology and the application of spatial audio mixing, or those seeking an overview of the state of the art in applied psychoacoustics for spatial audio.

This book presents a new method of asymptotic analysis of boundary-layer problems, the Successive Complementary Expansion Method (SCEM). The first part is devoted to a general presentation of the tools of asymptotic analysis. It gives the keys to understand a boundary-layer problem and explains the methods to construct an approximation. The second part is devoted to SCEM and its applications in fluid mechanics, including external and internal flows.