Our world has been radioactive ever since! Humans are primarily exposed to natural radiation from the Sun, cosmic rays, and naturally-occurring radionuclides found in the Earth's crust. Besides the natural radioactivity, industries, which produce radioactive wastes during their normal operations or during their dismantling and decommissioning processes, do contaminate the environment through the release of radionuclides into the air, soil and water. Among them, nuclear power plants, NORM (Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials) related industries, hospitals, radionuclide production facilities, uranium mining and other nuclear facilities, along with radioactive/nuclear disposal sites are a potential source of environmental contamination by emission/discharging of natural/artificial radionuclides through water, air and soil to the other environmental compartments like plants, animals and foods. In a word, everything that makes our existence! The book ''Radionuclides: Properties, Behavior and Potential Health Effects" is a comprehensive overview of some information on radiation in the environment and human exposure to radioactivity. This book highlights the sources, properties, behaviors, and biological and ecological effects of radioactivity from both natural and anthropogenic sources. The emphasis is on the environmental aspects of radionuclides and their eventual effects on biota, particularly humans.

Vortices comprising swirling motion of matter are observable in classical systems at all scales ranging from atomic size to the scale of galaxies. In quantum mechanical systems, such vortices are robust entities whose behaviours are governed by the strict rules of topology. The physics of quantum vortices is pivotal to basic science of quantum turbulence and high temperature superconductors, and underpins emerging quantum technologies including topological quantum computation. This handbook is aimed at providing a dictionary style portal to the fascinating quantum world of vortices.

The Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), is the cornerstone of non-proliferation and disarmament efforts.Yet its negotiation and success were not inevitable. This book aims to address the developments that led to the negotiation of the treaty, examine its implementation, and address challenges that the NPT faces going forward.

The book describes how field-charges, split into isotopic pairs, can commute and identifies the group of transformations that governs this exchange between their states. Invariance under this group is defined as Hypersymmetry. The book develops the physical consequences of Hypersymmetry such as conserved property, quanta and mediating bosons of the interaction field. Since all this expands beyond the standard model, the work determines the energy limits of the applicability of Hypersymmetry and discusses, how to remove the unwanted mass of the predicted set of bosons. Finally, it presents how the model can be applied in the four fundamental interactions. * Comprehensive work covering recent research. * Detailed calculations for a step by step understanding. * Useful reading for master students and researchers in theoretical and experimental physics. * A practical textbook for courses on the physics of the isotopic field-charges, their conservation and interactions.

This book is an invaluable guide to calibrating any infrared spectrum using noble gases as a reference. Featuring a detailed graphical and tabular overview of highly excited (Rydberg) states of neutral noble gases in the infrared range of 700-7000 cm-1, it helps researchers by providing high-precision experimental data that can be used in almost every infrared spectroscopic laboratory.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe called on his fellow scientists to stop working on weapons of mass destruction. What drove Bethe, the head of Theoretical Physics at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, to renounce the weaponry he had once worked so tirelessly to create? That is one of the questions answered by Nuclear Forces, a riveting biography of Bethe's early life and development as both a scientist and a man of principle. As Silvan Schweber follows Bethe from his childhood in Germany, to laboratories in Italy and England, and on to Cornell University, he shows how these differing environments were reflected in the kind of physics Bethe produced. Many of the young quantum physicists in the 1930s, including Bethe, had Jewish roots, and Schweber considers how Liberal Judaism in Germany helps explain their remarkable contributions. A portrait emerges of a man whose strategy for staying on top of a deeply hierarchical field was to tackle only those problems he knew he could solve. Bethe's emotional maturation was shaped by his father and by two women of Jewish background: his overly possessive mother and his wife, who would later serve as an ethical touchstone during the turbulent years he spent designing nuclear bombs. Situating Bethe in the context of the various communities where he worked, Schweber provides a full picture of prewar developments in physics that changed the modern world, and of a scientist shaped by the unprecedented moral dilemmas those developments in turn created.

The development of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant scientific events of the twentieth century. This revised and updated 4th edition explores the challenges that faced the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project. It gives a clear introduction to fission weapons at the level of an upper-year undergraduate physics student by examining the details of nuclear reactions, their energy release, analytic and numerical models of the fission process, how critical masses can be estimated, how fissile materials are produced, and what factors complicate bomb design. An extensive list of references and a number of exercises for self-study are included. Revisions to this fourth edition include many upgrades and new sections. Improvements are made to, among other things, the analysis of the physics of the fission barrier, the time-dependent simulation of the explosion of a nuclear weapon, and the discussion of tamped bomb cores. New sections cover, for example, composite bomb cores, approximate methods for various of the calculations presented, and the physics of the polonium-beryllium "neutron initiators" used to trigger the bombs. The author delivers in this book an unparalleled, clear and comprehensive treatment of the physics behind the Manhattan project.

This book is about the structure of multielectron atoms and predominantly adopts a perturbative approach to the total Hamiltonian. A key concept is the central-field approximation and, beyond the standard LS-coupling and jj-coupling schemes, intermediate cases are also treated. After that, the book covers hyperfine structure and other nuclear effects, as well as interactions with static external fields. Throughout the book, an analytical approach is adopted. Working knowledge of basic quantum mechanics (including the non-relativistic hydrogen atom, basic angular momentum and perturbation theory) is assumed, and it begins with a brief recap of the hydrogen orbitals, before turning towards the symmetry aspects of multi-electron atoms, spin-orbit interaction and couplings of angular momenta.

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.

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 book presents the latest advances and future trends in electron and phonon spectrometrics, focusing on combined techniques using electron emissions, electron diffraction, and phonon absorption and reflection spectrometrics from a substance under various perturbations to obtain new information on bond-electron-phonon dynamics. Discussing the principles of the bond order-length-strength (BOLS) correlation, nonbonding electron polarization (NEP), local bond average (LBA), and multi-field lattice oscillation dynamics for systems under perturbation, the book covers topics like differential photoelectron/phonon spectrometrics (DPS), which distils transition of the length, energy, stiffness and the fraction of bonds upon chemical or physical conditioning; and the derived performance of electrons in various bands in terms of quantum entrapment and polarization. This book appeals to researchers, scientists and engineers in the fields of chemistry, physics, surface and interface science, and materials science and engineering who are interested in electron and phonon spectrometrics.

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.