This thesis proposes new power converter topologies suitable for aircraft systems. It also proposes both AC-DC and DC-DC types of converters for different electrical loads to improve the performance these systems. To increase fuel efficiency and reduce environmental impacts, less efficient non-electrical aircraft systems are being replaced by electrical systems. However, more electrical systems requires more electrical power to be generated in the aircraft. The increased consumption of electrical power in both civil and military aircrafts has necessitated the use of more efficient electrical power conversion technologies. This book presents acomprehensive mathematical analysis and the design and digital simulation of the power converters. Subsequently it discusses the construction of the hardware prototypes of each converter and the experimental tests carried out to verify the benefits of the proposed solutions in comparison to the existing solutions.

This is a unique book devoted to the important class of nitride semiconductors and devices. Numerous tables and figures detailing properties and performance devices are compiled. Structural, electrical and optical properties of nitrides and substrates on which they are deposited, band structures of nitrides, optical processes, deposition and fabrication technologies (contacts), dopant incorporation and analyses, pn-junctions, light-emitting diodes, and blue lasers are treated succinctly. Attention is paid to both technological issues and fundamentals.

This book presents a coherent overview of the use of ultrasonic methods to study properties of both magnetic materials and non-magnetic metals. Much of the recent work in this area was done in the former Soviet Union and is not widely known in the West.
The authors discuss not only the experimental techniques for using polarization effects with ultrasonic measurements, but also the theoretical basis for interpreting the data. Such experiments yield information not only about the vibrational spectra of the material over a wide range of frequencies, but also about electromagnetic properties.
The book should interest workers in the areas of materials science and engineering, solid state physics, and physical acoustics. It includes an extensive and up-to-date bibliography with more than 200 references to the published literature.

Market: Physicists, chemists, biochemists, and biologists. Here's the first book to gather the vast range of experimental data in electron spin resonance (ESR) into a single volume. Concise yet comprehensive, it offers an easy-to-use collection of up-to-date experimental data, methods, and theory. The Handbook includes key contributions from leading scientists and provides over 200 tables and figures. Although specific ESR subfields are covered in numerous books and journals, the Handbook of Electron Spin Resonance is the only comprehensive reference to present extensive tabulation of data and experimental results. The Handbook also provides introductions to theoretical backgrounds, methods, and instrumentation.

Experimental progress over the past few years has made it possible to test a n- ber of fundamental physical concepts related to the motion of electrons in low dimensions. The production and experimental control of novel structures with typical sizes in the sub-micrometer regime has now become possible. In parti- lar, semiconductors are widely used in order to con?ne the motion of electrons in two-dimensional heterostructures. The quantum Hall e?ect was one of the ?rst highlights of the new physics that is revealed by this con?nement. In a further step of the technological development in semiconductor-heterostructures, other arti?cial devices such as quasi one-dimensional 'quantum wires' and 'quantum dots' (arti?cial atoms) have also been produced. These structures again di?er very markedly from three- and two-dimensional systems, especially in relation to the transport of electrons and the interaction with light. Although the technol- ical advances and the experimental skills connected with these new structures are progressing extremely fast, our theoretical understanding of the physical e?ects (such as the quantum Hall e?ect) is still at a very rudimentary level. In low-dimensional structures, the interaction of electrons with one another and with other degrees of freedoms such as lattice vibrations or light gives rise to new phenomena that are very di?erent from those familiar in the bulk ma- rial. The theoretical formulation of the electronic transport properties of small devices may be considered well-established, provided interaction processes are neglected.

This book presents selected contributions of the Ultra-Wideband Short-Pulse Electromagnetics 7 Conference, including electromagnetic theory, scattering, Ultrawideband (UWB) antennas, UWB systems, ground penetrating radar, UWB communications, pulsed-power generation, time-domain computational electromagnetics, UWB compatibility, target detection and discrimination, propagation through dispersive media, and wavelet and multi-resolution techniques.

This book systematically introduces electromagnetic theories and their applications in practice: electrostatic energy, Poynting theorem, the polarization of waves, the conservation law, the electromagnetic symmetry, the conformal mapping method, the electromagnetic loss. The parameters and theorems of electromagnetic theories are discussed in detail, making the book an essential reference for researchers, and engineers in electromagnetics field.

Our department nominated this thesis for a Springer award because we regard it as an outstanding piece of work, carried out with a remarkable level of independence. Andreas Rost joined us in 2005, as one of the inaugural Prize Students of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance. Our research group has been working on Sr Ru O , in collaboration with our colleagues in the group of Professor Y. Maeno 3 2 7 at Kyoto, since 1998. By early 2005 we had tantalising evidence that a novel phase was forming at very low temperatures, in an overall phase diagram dominated by quantum ?uctuations. We knew that comprehensive thermodynamic information would be needed in order to understand how this was happening, and that the demanding constraints of low temperature and high magnetic ?eld meant that bespoke apparatus would need to be constructed. Andreas had studied the speci?c heat of glasses below 50 mK during his diploma thesis work at Heidelberg, and was brimming with ideas about how to proceed. We gave him advice, and constantly discussed the physics with him, but quickly realised that the best way to proceed practically was to give him a budget, and let him take the main design decisions, double-checking with us from time to time.

Understanding the nature of vortices in high-Tc superconductors is a crucial subject for research on superconductive electronics, especially for superconducting interference devices (SQUIDs), it is also a fundamental problem in condensed-matter physics. Recent technological progress in methods for both direct and indirect observation of vortices, e.g. scanning SQUID, terahertz imaging, and microwave excitation, has led to new insights into vortex physics, the dynamic behavior of vortices in junctions and related questions of noise. This book presents the current status of research activity and provides new information on the applications of SQUIDs, including magnetocardiography, immunoassays, and laser-SQUID microscopes, all of which are close to being commercially available.

Ongoing developments in nanofabrication technology and the availability of novel materials have led to the emergence and evolution of new topics for mesoscopic research, including scanning-tunnelling microscopic studies of few-atom metallic clusters, discrete energy level spectroscopy, the prediction of Kondo-type physics in the transport properties of quantum dots, time dependent effects, and the properties of interacting systems, e.g. of Luttinger liquids. The overall understanding of each of these areas is still incomplete; nevertheless, with the foundations laid by studies in the more traditional systems there is no doubt that these new areas will advance mesoscopic electron transport to a new phenomenological level, both experimentally and theoretically. Mesoscopic Electron Transport highlights selected areas in the field, provides a comprehensive review of such systems, and also serves as an introduction to the new and developing areas of mesoscopic electron transport.

This book presents a theory for unconventional superconductivity driven by spin excitations. Using the Hubbard Hamiltonian and a self-consistent treatment of the spin excitations, the interplay between magnetism and superconductivity in various unconventional superconductors is discussed. In particular, the monograph applies this theory for Cooper-pairing due to the exchange of spin fluctuations to the case of singlet pairing in hole- and electron-doped high-Tc superconductors, and to triplet pairing in
Sr2RuO4. Within the framework of a generalized Eliashberg-like treatment, calculations of both many normal and superconducting properties as well as elementary excitations are performed. The results are related to the phase diagrams of the materials which reflect
the interaction between magnetism and superconductivity.

The material for these volumes has been selected from the past twenty years' examination questions for graduate students at University of California at Berkeley, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, MIT, State University of New York at Buffalo, Princeton University and University of Wisconsin.

This volume comprises 440 problems and is divided into five parts:

(I) Electrostatics;

(II) Magnetostatic Field and Quasi-Stationary Electromagnetic Field;

(III) Circuit Analysis;

(IV) Electromagnetic Waves;

(V) Relativistic Particle-Field Interactions.

At present, the marketplace for professionals, researchers, and graduate students in solid-state physics and materials science lacks a book that presents a comprehensive discussion of ferroelectrics and related materials in a form that is suitable for experimentalists and engineers. This book proposes to present a wide coverage of domain-related issues concerning these materials. This coverage includes selected theoretical topics (which are covered in the existing literature) in addition to a plethora of experimental data which occupies over half of the book.

The book presents experimental findings and theoretical understanding of ferroic (non-magnetic) domains developed during the past 60 years. It addresses the situation by looking specifically at bulk crystals and thin films, with a particular focus on recently-developed microelectronic applications and methods for observations of domains with techniques such as scanning force microscopy, polarized light microscopy, scanning optical microscopy, electron microscopy, and surface decorating techniques.

"Domains in Ferroic Crystals and Thin Films" covers a large area of material properties and effects connected with static and dynamic properties of domains, which are extremely relevant to materials referred to as ferroics. In other textbooks on solid state physics, one large group of ferroics is customarily covered: those in which magnetic properties play a dominant role. Numerous books are specifically devoted to magnetic ferroics and cover a wide spectrum of magnetic domain phenomena. In contrast, "Domains in Ferroic Crystals and Thin Films" concentrates on domain-related phenomena in nonmagnetic ferroics. These materials are still inadequately represented in solid state physics textbooks and monographs.

The 11th International Conference on X-Ray Lasers had contributions in the following topical areas: Transient Collisional X-Ray Lasers, Table-Top High Repetition Rate X-Ray Lasers, Optical-Field Ionised (OFI) X-Ray Lasers, Theory and Simulation of X-Ray Lasers, High Order Harmonic Generation, XUV Optics and X-Ray Laser Applications, Capillary Discharge X-Ray Lasers, Alternative Sources of coherent XUV Radiation.

The proceedings of this conference constitute a comprehensive source of reference for scientists involved in researching the development and application of coherent X-Ray sources.

The motto of connectivity and superconductivity is that the solutions of the Ginzburg--Landau equations are qualitatively influenced by the topology of the boundaries, as in multiply-connected samples. Special attention is paid to the "zero set", the set of the positions (also known as "quantum vortices") where the order parameter vanishes. The effects considered here usually become important in the regime where the coherence length is of the order of the dimensions of the sample. It takes the intuition of physicists and the awareness of mathematicians to find these new effects. In Connectivity and Superconductivity, theoretical and experimental physicists are brought together with pure and applied mathematicians to review these surprising results. This volume is intended to serve as a reference book for graduate students and researchers in physics or mathematics interested in superconductivity, or in the Schrödinger equation as a limiting case of the Ginzburg--Landau equations.

Here is a comprehensive introduction to the least-squares finite element method (LSFEM) for numerical solution of PDEs. It covers the theory for first-order systems, particularly the div-curl and the div-curl-grad system. Then LSFEM is applied systematically to permissible boundary conditions for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, to show that the divergence equations in the Maxwell equations are not redundant, and to derive equivalent second-order versions of the Navier-Stokes equations and the Maxwell equations. LSFEM is simple, efficient and robust, and can solve a wide range of problems in fluid dynamics and electromagnetics, including incompressible viscous flows, rotational inviscid flows, low-Mach-number compressible flows, two-fluid and convective flows, scattering waves, etc.

Narrow gap semiconductors have provided an exciting field of research and show a number of extreme physical and material characteristics. They are the established material systems for infrared detectors and emitters, and with new developments in the technology these materials are emerging as a viable route to high speed, low power electronics. New kinds of narrow gap semiconductor, such as graphene and other composite nanocrystals, are also providing renewed interest in the underlying physics.

The Thirteenth International Conference on Narrow Gap Semiconductors (NGS-13) was held at the University of Surrey, Guildford, UK in July 2007. The conference brought together experts and young scientists to discuss the latest findings and developments in the field. This book contains the invited and contributed papers which were presented at this meeting and serves to provide a broad overview of the current worldwide activities in narrow gap semiconductor research. The subjects covered are theoretical and material physics of narrow gap semiconductors and quantum heterostructures, spin related phenomenon including carrier dynamics and magnetotransport, carbon nanotubes and graphene as novel narrow gap material, as well as device physics including transistors, mid and far-infrared lasers and detectors.

Random inhomogeneous media may possess unique physical properties that are significantly enhanced and may attain a level of practical importance and versatility that rivals or surpasses their geometrically ordered counterparts. Making judicious use of these enhancement effects, as well as of other aspects of the many complex resonances that distinguish these systems, can lead to new and unexpected physics and many applications. Localization of various sorts of optical excitations occur and recur in a wide gamut of disordered systems, leading to the enhancement of many optical phenomena, especially nonlinear processes. The book reviews recent advances in the nonlinear optics of random media and discusses numerous applications based on the unique properties of nanostructured composite materials. The contributing authors are world best experts in the field and provide a state-of-the-art description of the world of the optics of random media.

The NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Coherent Optical Processes in Semiconductors was held in Cambridge, England on August 11-14,1993. The idea of holding this Workshop grew from the recent upsurge in activity on coherent transient effects in semiconductors. The development of this field reflects advances in both light sources and the quality of semiconductor structures, such that tunable optical pulses are now routinely available whose duration is shorter than the dephasing time for excitonic states in quantum wells. It was therefore no surprise to the organisers that as the programme developed, there emerged a heavy emphasis on time-resolved four-wave mixing, particularly in quantum wells. Nevertheless, other issues concerned with coherent effects ensured that several papers on related problems contributed some variety. The topics discussed at the workshop centred on what is a rather new field of study, and benefited enormously by having participants representing many of the principal groups working in this area. Several themes emerged through the invited contributions at the Workshop. One important development has been the careful examination of the two-level model of excitonic effects; a model which has been remarkably successful despite the expected complexities arising from the semiconductor band structure. Indeed, modest extensions to the two level model have been able to offer a useful account for some of the complicated polarisation dependence of four-wave mixing signals from GaAs quantum wells. This work clearly is leading to an improved understanding of excitons in confined systems.

"Great progress has been made in electrical science, chiefly in Germany, by cultivators of the theory of action at a distance. The valuable electrical measurements of W. Weber are interpreted by him according to this theory, and the electromagnetic speculation which was originated by Gauss, and carried on by Weber, Riemann, F. and C. Neumann, Lorenz, etc. , is founded on the theory of action at a distance, but depending either directly on the relative velocity of the particles, or on the gradual propagation of something, whether potential or force, from the one particle to the other. The great success which these eminent men have attained in the application of mathematics to electrical phenomena, gives, as is natural, additional weight to their theoretical speculations, so that those who, as students of electricity, turn to them as the greatest authorities in mathematical electricity, would probably imbibe, along with their mathematical methods, their physical hypothesis. These physical hypotheses, however, are entirely alien from the way of looking at things which I adopt, and one object which I have in view is that some of those who wish to study electricity may, by reading this treatise, come to see that there is another way of treating the subject, which is no less fitted to explain the phenomena, and which, though in some parts it may appear less definite, corresponds, as I think, more faithfuHy with our actual knowledge, both in what it affirms and in what it leaves undecided.

This review consists of three parts. The first part provides basic information about the physics and materials science of high-temperature superconductors for applications in magnet and energy technology. It addresses more than is required by a newcomer in this field, by putting together information from very different areas such as physical chemistry, materials science and condensed matter physics, which otherwise would have to be collected from various textbooks and original literature. In an introductory chapter potential applications are presented and the limitations of the materials are discussed. Part I closes with a final chapter on the present state of the art, where the latest results in this field are briefly reviewed. Parts II and III contain the most recent results on the preparation and characterization of Bi-2212 (Bi2Sr2CaCu2O5) wires and tapes, and Bi-2223

Since the major discovery of 'giant magnetoresistance' (GMR) in 1988, spin-dependent transport phenomena in magnetic nanostructures have received much attention from an academic and a technological point of view. This cutting-edge book, edited by two of the world's leading authorities, introduces and explains the basics physics and applications of a variety of spin-dependent transport phenomena in magnetic nanostructures with particular emphasis on magnetic multilayers and magnetic tunnel junctions.