The growing number of scientific and technological applications of plasma physics in the field of Aerospace Engineering requires that graduate students and professionals understand their principles. This introductory book is the expanded version of class notes of lectures I taught for several years to students of Aerospace Engineering and Physics. It is intended as a reading guide, addressed to students and non-specialists to tackle later with more advanced texts. To make the subject more accessible the book does not follow the usual organization of standard textbooks in this field and is divided in two parts. The first introduces the basic kinetic theory (molecular collisions, mean free path, etc.) of neutral gases in equilibrium in connection to the undergraduate physics courses. The basic properties of ionized gases and plasmas (Debye length, plasma frequencies, etc.) are addressed in relation to their equilibrium states and the collisional processes at the microscopic level. The physical description of short and long-range (Coulomb) collisions and the more relevant collisions (elementary processes) between electrons' ions and neutral atoms or molecules are discussed. The second part introduces the physical description of plasmas as a statistical system of interacting particles introducing advanced concepts of kinetic theory, (non-equilibrium distribution functions, Boltzmann collision operator, etc). The fluid transport equations for plasmas of electron ions and neutral atoms and the hydrodynamic models of interest in space science and plasma technology are derived. The plasma production in the laboratory in the context of the physics of electric breakdown is also discussed. Finally, among the myriad of aerospace applications of plasma physics, the low pressure microwave electron multipactor breakdown and plasma thrusters for space propulsion are presented in two separate chapters.

It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponise the atom, the United States marshalled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction of inconceivable explosive power. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs. In the desert of eastern Washington State, far from prying eyes, scientists Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi and thousands of others-the physicists, engineers, labourers and support staff at the facility-manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and for the bombs in the current American nuclear arsenal, enabling the construction of weapons with the potential to end human civilisation. With his characteristic blend of scientific clarity and storytelling, Steve Olson asks why Hanford has been largely overlooked in histories of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Olson, who grew up just twenty miles from Hanford's B Reactor, recounts how a small Washington town played host to some of the most influential scientists and engineers in American history as they sought to create the substance at the core of the most destructive weapons ever created. The Apocalypse Factory offers a new generation this dramatic story of human achievement and ultimately, of lethal hubris. *2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the United States' detonation of nuclear weapons over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945.

Advances in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics provides a comprehensive compilation of recent developments in a field that is in a state of rapid growth, as new experimental and theoretical techniques are used on many problems, both old and new. Topics covered include related applied areas, such as atmospheric science, astrophysics, surface physics, and laser physics, with timely articles written by distinguished experts that contain relevant review material and detailed descriptions of important developments in the field.

This volume presents a series of articles concerning current important topics in quantum chemistry.

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.

This book provides an itinerary to quantum mechanics taking into account the basic mathematics to formulate it. Specifically, it features the main experiments and postulates of quantum mechanics pointing out their mathematical prominent aspects showing how physical concepts and mathematical tools are deeply intertwined. The material covers topics such as analytic mechanics in Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian formulations, theory of light as formulated in special relativity, and then why quantum mechanics is necessary to explain experiments like the double-split, atomic spectra, and photoelectric effect. The Schroedinger equation and its solutions are developed in detail. It is pointed out that, starting from the concept of the harmonic oscillator, it is possible to develop advanced quantum mechanics. Furthermore, the mathematics behind the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is constructed towards advanced quantum mechanical principles. Relativistic quantum mechanics is finally considered.The book is devoted to undergraduate students from University courses of Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry, and Engineering. It consists of 50 self-contained lectures, and any statement and theorem are demonstrated in detail. It is the companion book of "A Mathematical Journey to Relativity", by the same Authors, published by Springer in 2020.

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).

This book introduces the research process and principles of the controlled super-coupling nuclear fusion experiment at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) nuclear fusion reactor in Hefei, China. It uses straightforward language to explain how nuclear fusion can provide safe, environmentally friendly, clean, and inexhaustible energy in future. EAST is the world's first fully superconducting, non-circular cross-section tokamak nuclear fusion experimental device, independently developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This book helps demonstrate China's cutting-edge scientific and technological advances to the rest of the world, helps spread the scientific spirit to people around the globe, and promotes prosperity and development. The book is intended for all non-experts who would like to learn more about nuclear energy and related technologies.

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.

Our understanding of subatomic particles developed over many years, although a clear picture of the different particles, their interactions and their inter-relationships only emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century. The first ""subatomic particles"" to be investigated were those which exhibit readily observable macroscopic behavior, specifically these are the photon, which we observe as light and the electron, which is manifested as electricity. The true nature of these particles, however, only became clear within the last century or so. The development of the Standard Model provided clarification of the way in which various particles, specifically the hadrons, relate to one another and the way in which their properties are determined by their structure. The final piece, perhaps, of the final model, that is the means by which some particles acquire mass, has just recently been clarified with the observation of the Higgs boson. Since the 1970s it has been known that the measured solar neutrino flux was inconsistent with the flux predicted by solar models. The existence of neutrinos with mass would allow for neutrino flavor oscillations and would provide an explanation for this discrepancy. Only in the past few years, has there been clear experimental evidence that neutrinos have mass. The description of particle structure on the basis of the Standard Model, along with recent discoveries concerning neutrino properties, provides us with a comprehensive picture of the properties of subatomic particles. Part I of the present book provides an overview of the Standard Model of particle physics including an overview of the discovery and properties of the Higgs boson. Part II of the book summarizes the important investigations into the physics of neutrinos and provides an overview of the interpretation of these studies.

This book provides an introduction to the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics, with particular focus on its relation to quantum information and its implications for quantum computers and next generation quantum technologies. The text, aimed at graduate level physics students with a working knowledge of quantum mechanics and statistical physics, provides a brief overview of the development of classical thermodynamics and its quantum formulation in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 then explores typical thermodynamic settings, such as cycles and work extraction protocols, when the working material is genuinely quantum. Finally, Chapter 3 explores the thermodynamics of quantum information processing and introduces the reader to some more state of-the-art topics in this exciting and rapidly developing research field.

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.

An understanding of the effects of electronic correlations in quantum systems is one of the most challenging problems in physics, partly due to the relevance in modern high technology. Yet there exist hardly any books on the subject which try to give a comprehensive overview on the field covering insulators, semiconductors, as well as metals. The present book tries to fill that gap.It intends to provide graduate students and researchers a comprehensive survey of electron correlations, weak and strong, in insulators, semiconductors and metals. This topic is a central one in condensed matter and beyond that in theoretical physics. The reader will have a better understanding of the great progress which has been made in the field over the past few decades.

A standard view of elementary particles and forces is that they determine everything else in the rest of physics, the whole of chemistry, biology, geology, physiology and perhaps even human behavior.This reductive view of physics is popular among some physicists. Yet, there are other physicists who argue this is an oversimplified and that the relationship of elementary particle physics to these other domains is one of emergence. Several objections have been raised from physics against proposals for emergence (e.g., that genuinely emergent phenomena would violate the standard model of elementary particle physics, or that genuine emergence would disrupt the lawlike order physics has revealed). Many of these objections rightly call into question typical conceptions of emergence found in the philosophy literature. This book explores whether physics points to a reductive or an emergent structure of the world and proposes a physics-motivated conception of emergence that leaves behind many of the problematic intuitions shaping the philosophical conceptions. Examining several detailed case studies reveal that the structure of physics and the practice of physics research are both more interesting than is captured in this reduction/emergence debate. The results point to stability conditions playing a crucial though underappreciated role in the physics of emergence. This contextual emergence has thought-provoking consequences for physics and beyond, and will be of interest to physics students, researchers, as well as those interested in physics.

This is an in-depth look at baryon number violation in the Standard Model including the necessary background in finite temperature field theory, plasma dynamics and how to calculate the out of equilibrium evolution of particle number densities throughout a phase transition. It is a self-contained pedagogical review of the theoretical background to electroweak baryogenesis as well as a summary of the other prevailing mechanisms for producing the asymmetry between matter and antimatter using the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model as a pedagogical tool whenever appropriate.

Electrostatic Accelerators have been at the forefront of modern technology since the development by Sir John Cockroft and Ernest Walton in 1932 of the first accelerator, which was the first to achieve nuclear transmutation and earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1951. The applications of Cockroft and Walton's development have been far reaching, even into our kitchens where it is employed to generate the high voltage needed for the magnetron in microwave ovens. Other electrostatic accelerator related Nobel prize winning developments that have had a major socio-economic impact are; the electron microscope where the beams of electrons are produced by an electrostatic accelerator, X-rays and computer tomography (CT) scanners where the X-rays are produced using an electron accelerator and microelectronic technology where ion implantation is used to dope the semiconductor chips which form the basis of our computers, mobile phones and entertainment systems. Although the Electrostatic Accelerator field is over 90 years old, and only a handful of accelerators are used for their original purpose in nuclear physics, the field and the number of accelerators is growing more rapidly than ever. The objective of this book is to collect together the basic science and technology that underlies the Electrostatic Accelerator field so it can serve as a handbook, reference guide and textbook for accelerator engineers as well as students and researchers who work with Electrostatic Accelerators.