This biography explores the life and career of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, which is also the story of thirty years that transformed physics and forever changed our understanding of matter and the universe: nuclear physics and elementary particle physics were born, nuclear fission was discovered, the Manhattan Project was developed, the atomic bombs were dropped, and the era of "big science" began.It would be impossible to capture the full essence of this revolutionary period without first understanding Fermi, without whom it would not have been possible. Enrico Fermi: The Obedient Genius attempts to shed light on all aspects of Fermi's life - his work, motivation, influences, achievements, and personal thoughts - beginning with the publication of his first paper in 1921 through his death in 1954. During this time, Fermi demonstrated that he was indeed following in the footsteps of Galileo, excelling in his work both theoretically and experimentally by deepening our understanding of the Pauli exclusion principle, winning the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the fundamental properties of slow neutrons, developing the theory of beta decay, building the first nuclear reactor, and playing a central role in the development of the atomic bomb. Interwoven with this fascinating story, the book details the major developments in physics and provides the necessary background material to fully appreciate the dramatic changes that were taking place. Also included are appendices that provide a timeline of Fermi's life, several primary source documents from the period, and an extensive bibliography. This book will enlighten anyone interested in Fermi's work or the scientific events that led to the physics revolution of the first half of the twentieth century.

This book discusses the development of Fano-based techniques and reveals the characteristic properties of various wave processes by studying interference phenomena. It explains that the interaction of discrete (localized) states with a continuum of propagation modes leads to Fano interference effects in transmission, and explores novel coherent effects such as bound states in the continuum accompanied by collapse of Fano resonance. Originating in atomic physics, Fano resonances have become one of the most appealing phenomena of wave scattering in optics, microwaves, and terahertz techniques. The generation of extremely strong and confined fields at a deep subwavelength scale, far beyond the diffraction limit, plays a central role in modern plasmonics, magnonics, and in photonic and metamaterial structures. Fano resonance effects take advantage of the coupling of these bound states with a continuum of radiative electromagnetic waves. With their unique physical properties and unusual combination of classical and quantum structures, Fano resonances have an application potential in a wide range of fields, from telecommunication to ultrasensitive biosensing, medical instrumentation and data storage. Including contributions by international experts and covering the essential aspects of Fano-resonance effects, including theory, modeling and design, proven and potential applications in practical devices, fabrication, characterization and measurement, this book enables readers to acquire the multifaceted understanding required for these multidisciplinary challenges.

In this thesis the author contributes to the analysis of neutrino beam data collected between 2010 and 2013 to identify e events at the Super-Kamiokande detector. In particular, the author improves the pion-nucleus interaction uncertainty, which is one of the dominant systematic error sources in T2K neutrino oscillation measurement. In the thesis, the measurement of e oscillation in the T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) experiment is presented and a new constraint on CP is obtained. This measurement and the analysis establish, at greater than 5 significance, the observation of e oscillation for the first time in the world. Combining the T2K e oscillation measurement with the latest findings on oscillation parameters including the world average value of 13 from reactor experiments, the constraint on the value of CP at the 90% confidence level is obtained. This constraint on CP is an important step towards the discovery of CP violation in the lepton sector.

This theses reports on an experimental search for an exotic hadron, +(1540) pentaquark, which is a genuine exotic hadron with a five-quark system of uuddsbar. The results of this book support that the existence of + was strongly constrained. The + pentaquark was searched for via the - p K- X reaction using a beam momentum of 2.01 GeV/c at the J-PARC hadron experimental facility, taking advantage of high-statistics and high-resolution compared with previous experiments, some of which claimed the evidence of +. In order to realize a good missing-mass resolution of 2 MeV, the beam spectrometer and superconducting kaon spectrometer were constructed. No clear peak was observed in the missing mass spectrum of the - p K- X reaction, and the upper limit of the production cross section was found to be less than 0.28 b/sr at the 90% confidence level in a mass region of 1500-1560 MeV/c2. This upper limit is an order of magnitude smaller than that of the previous KEK experiment. Compared with a theoretical calculation using the effective Lagrangian approach, the decay width of + was evaluated. The upper limits on the decay width were estimated to be 0.36 and 1.9 MeV for the + spin-parity of 1/2+ and 1/2-, respectively. These are quite small for a width of ordinary hadron resonances, and the existence of + was strongly constrained and is doubtful.

Some of the unfunded opportunities (UFOs), like the TR3B or TR6, are already flying; with this in mind, it may appear that this book is published too late. However, this is not the case. Both extraterrestrials and humans have developed craft of similar a planform. Officials and the media continuously feed the masses incorrect information. Drive technology of the honestly endeavoring human is outdated. It seems to have been copied from some ancient Indian scriptures. Indeed, electrostatic, electromagnetic and rotating plasma drives deliver fermionic power, but they are far from allowing humanity to harness the power of a hyperspace jump. In 2017, NASA ensured us that for the near future, [a] warp drive remains a dream. As a matter of fact, both human and extraterrestrial humanoids have hypothesized the use anti-gravity, warping and time travelling vehicles, even what they call living vessels. However, both have no theory, no theoretical foundations for nuclear time travel technology. This book delivers a few necessary basics concerning the possible future where this nuclear time travel could potentially become a reality.

This fourteenth volume in the Poincare Seminar Series is devoted to Niels Bohr, his foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory and their continuing importance today. This book contains the following chapters: - Tomas Bohr, Keeping Things Open; - Olivier Darrigol, Bohr's Trilogy of 1913; -John Heilbron, The Mind that Created the Bohr Atom; - Serge Haroche & Jean-Michel Raimond, Bohr's Legacy in Cavity QED; - Alain Aspect, From Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger to Bell and Feynman: a New Quantum Revolution?; - Antoine Browaeys, Interacting Cold Rydberg Atoms: A Toy Many-Body System; - Michel Bitbol & Stefano Osnaghi, Bohrs Complementarity and Kants Epistemology. Dating from their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience these seven chapters are of high educational value. This volume is of general interest to physicists, mathematicians and historians.

This thesis describes the experimental work that finally led to a successful measurement of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering-a process proposed forty-three years ago. The experiment was performed at the Spallation Neutron Source facility, sited at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee. Of all known particles, neutrinos distinguish themselves for being the hardest to detect, typically requiring large multi-ton devices for the job. The process measured here involves the difficult detection of very weak signals arising from nuclear recoils (tiny neutrino-induced "kicks" to atomic nuclei), but leads to a much larger probability of neutrino interaction when compared to all other known mechanisms. As a result of this, "neutrino technologies" using miniaturized detectors (the author's was handheld and weighed only 14 kg) become a possibility. A large community of researchers plans to continue studying this process, facilitating an exploration of fundamental neutrino properties that is presently beyond the sensitivity of other methods.

This book looks at the early history of nuclear power, at what happened next, and at its longer-term prospects. The main question is: can nuclear power overcome the problems that have emerged? It was once touted as the ultimate energy source, freeing mankind from reliance on dirty, expensive fossil energy. Sixty years on, nuclear only supplies around 11.5% of global energy and is being challenged by cheaper energy options. While the costs of renewable sources, like wind and solar, are falling rapidly, nuclear costs have remained stubbornly high. Its development has also been slowed by a range of other problems, including a spate of major accidents, security concerns and the as yet unresolved issue of what to do with the wastes that it produces. In response, a new generation of nuclear reactors is being developed, many of them actually revised versions of the ideas first looked at in the earlier phase. Will this new generation of reactors bring nuclear energy to the forefront of energy production in the future?

This thesis unites the fields of optical atomic clocks and ultracold molecular science, laying the foundation for optical molecular measurements of unprecedented precision. Building upon optical manipulation techniques developed by the atomic clock community, this work delves into attaining surgical control of molecular quantum states. The thesis develops two experimental observables that one can measure with optical-lattice-trapped ultracold molecules: extremely narrow optical spectra, and angular distributions of photofragments that are ejected when the diatomic molecules are dissociated by laser light pulses. The former allows molecular spectroscopy approaching the level of atomic clocks, leading into molecular metrology and tests of fundamental physics. The latter opens the field of ultracold chemistry through observation of quantum effects such as matter-wave interference of photofragments and tunneling through reaction barriers. The thesis also describes a discovery of a new method of thermometry that can be used near absolute zero temperatures for particles lacking cycling transitions, solving a long-standing experimental problem in atomic and molecular physics.

This book looks at the early history of nuclear power, at what happened next, and at its longer-term prospects. The main question is: can nuclear power overcome the problems that have emerged? It was once touted as the ultimate energy source, freeing mankind from reliance on dirty, expensive fossil energy. Sixty years on, nuclear only supplies around 11.5% of global energy and is being challenged by cheaper energy options. While the costs of renewable sources, like wind and solar, are falling rapidly, nuclear costs have remained stubbornly high. Its development has also been slowed by a range of other problems, including a spate of major accidents, security concerns and the as yet unresolved issue of what to do with the wastes that it produces. In response, a new generation of nuclear reactors is being developed, many of them actually revised versions of the ideas first looked at in the earlier phase. Will this new generation of reactors bring nuclear energy to the forefront of energy production in the future?

This book develops two exciting areas of particle physics research. It applies the recent new insights about the usefulness of helicity amplitudes in understanding gauge theory to the long-standing effort to understand theories with both electric and magnetic charges. It is known that for some supersymmetric theories there is an exact duality that relates two descriptions of the physics, one where the electric charges are weakly coupled and another where the electric charges are strongly coupled. The calculations in this thesis suggest that this duality can also hold in the low-energy limit of nonsupersymmetric gauge theories. The idea of addressing the hierarchy problem of the standard model Higgs mechanism using conformal symmetry is also explored. Analogously to "Little Higgs" models, where divergences are cancelled only at one-loop order, models are studied that have infrared conformal fixed points which related gauge and Yukawa couplings, allowing for a cancellation between seemingly unrelated quantum loop diagrams.

While neutron halos were discovered 30 years ago, this is the first book written on the subject of this exotic form of nuclei that typically contain many more neutrons than stable isotopes of those elements. It provides an introductory description of the halo and outlines the discovery and evidence for its existence. It also discusses different theoretical models of the halo's structure as well as models and techniques in reaction theory that have allowed us to study the halo. This is written at a level accessible to graduate students starting a PhD in nuclear physics. Halo nuclei are an exotic form of atomic nuclei that contain typically many more neutrons than stable isotopes of those elements. To give you a famous example, an atom of the element lithium has three electrons orbiting a nucleus with three protons and, usually, either 3 or 4 neutrons. The difference in the number of neutrons gives us two different isotopes of lithium, Li6 and Li7. But if you keep adding neutrons to the nucleus you will eventually reach Li11, with still 3 protons (that means it's lithium) but with 8 neutrons. This nucleus is so neutron-rich that the last two are very weakly bound to the rest of the nucleus (a Li9 core). What happens is a quantum mechanical effect: the two outer neutrons float around beyond the rest of the nuclear core at a distance that is beyond the range of the force that is holding them to the core. This is utterly counterintuitive. It means the nucleus looks like a core plus extended diffuse cloud of neutron probability: the halo. The author of the book, Jim Al-Khalili, is a theoretician who published some of the key papers on the structure of the halo in the mid and late 90s and was the first to determine its true size. This monograph is based on review articles he has written on the mathematical models used to determine the halo structure and the reactions used to model that structure.

This book details groundbreaking experiments for the sensing and imaging of terahertz-frequency electromagnetic radiation (THz) using Rydberg atoms. The major advances described include the development and implementation of a new technique for THz imaging using atomic fluorescence; the demonstration of a THz-driven phase transition in room-temperature atomic vapour; and a novel method for probing the excited-state dynamics of atoms using quantum beats. The work has formed the basis for several articles published in journals including Nature Photonics and the Physical Review, and has sparked industry interest, becoming the subject of ongoing collaborative research and development. This exceptionally well-written book provides a definitive account of terahertz sensing with Rydberg atoms.

This book tells the curious story of an unexpected finding that sheds light on a crucial moment in the development of physics: the discovery of artificial radioactivity induced by neutrons. The finding in question is a notebook, clearly written in Fermi's handwriting, which records the frenzied days and nights that Fermi spent experimenting alone, driven by his theoretical ideas on beta decay. The notebook was found by the authors while browsing through documents left by Oscar D'Agostino, the chemist among Fermi's group. From Fermi's notes, they reconstruct with skill and expertise the detailed timeline of the critical days leading up to his vital discovery. While much is already known about the road that led Fermi to his important result, this is the first time that it has been possible to reconstruct precisely when and how the initial evidence of neutron-induced decay was obtained. In relating this fascinating story, the book will be of great interest not only to those with a passion for the history of science but also to a wider audience.

This edited, multi-author volume contains selected, peer-reviewed contributions based on the presentations given at the 21th International Workshop on Quantum Systems in Chemistry, Physics, and Biology (QSCP-XXI), held in Vancouver, Canada, in July 2016. This book is primarily aimed at scholars, researchers and graduate students working at universities and scientific laboratories and interested in the structure, properties, dynamics and spectroscopy of atoms, molecules, biological systems and condensed matter.

This book presents a range of fundamentally new approaches to solving problems involving traditional molecular models. Fundamental molecular symmetry is shown to open new avenues for describing molecular dynamics beyond standard perturbation techniques. Traditional concepts used to describe molecular dynamics are based on a few fundamental assumptions, the ball-and-stick picture of molecular structure and the respective perturbative treatment of different kinds of couplings between otherwise separate motions. The book points out the conceptual limits of these models and, by focusing on the most essential idea of theoretical physics, namely symmetry, shows how to overcome those limits by introducing fundamentally new concepts. The book begins with an introduction to molecular symmetry in general, followed by a discussion of nuclear spin symmetry. Here, a new correlation between identical particle exchange and spin angular momentum symmetry of nuclei is exhibited. The central part of the book is the discussion of extremely floppy molecules, which are not describable in the framework of traditional theories. The book introduces a fundamentally new approach to describing the molecular dynamics of these molecules - the super-rotor model, which is based on a five-dimensional symmetry that has never been observed in molecules before. By applying the super-rotor theory to the prototype of floppy molecules, protonated methane, this model can consistently predict the symmetry and energy of low-energy states, which were characterized experimentally only a few years ago. The theoretical predictions agree with the experimental results, which makes the prospect of further developing the super-rotor theory and applying it to other molecules a promising one. In the final section, the book also covers the topic of ultrafast rotations, where usual quantum calculations reach their natural limits. A semi-classical method for determining rotational energies, developed in the early 1990s, is shown to be attachable to quantum calculations of the vibrational states. This new combined method is suitable for efficiently calculating ro-vibrational energies, even for molecular states with large angular momentum.

This second edition of an extremely well-received book presents more than 250 nonrelativistic quantum mechanics problems of varying difficulty with the aim of providing students didactic material of proven value, allowing them to test their comprehension and mastery of each subject. The coverage is extremely broad, from themes related to the crisis of classical physics through achievements within the framework of modern atomic physics to lively debated, intriguing aspects relating to, for example, the EPR paradox, the Aharonov-Bohm effect, and quantum teleportation. Compared with the first edition, a variety of improvements have been made and additional topics of interest included, especially focusing on elementary potential scattering. The problems themselves range from standard and straightforward ones to those that are complex but can be considered essential because they address questions of outstanding importance or aspects typically overlooked in primers. The book offers students both an excellent tool for independent learning and a ready-reference guide they can return to later in their careers.

This is the physical chemistry textbook for students with an affinity for computers! It offers basic and advanced knowledge for students in the second year of chemistry masters studies and beyond. In seven chapters, the book presents thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, quantum mechanics and molecular structure (including an introduction to quantum chemical calculations), molecular symmetry and crystals. The application of physical-chemical knowledge and problem solving is demonstrated in a chapter on water, treating both the water molecule as well as water in condensed phases. Instead of a traditional textbook top-down approach, this book presents the subjects on the basis of examples, exploring and running computer programs (Mathematica (R)), discussing the results of molecular orbital calculations (performed using Gaussian) on small molecules and turning to suitable reference works to obtain thermodynamic data. Selected Mathematica (R) codes are explained at the end of each chapter and cross-referenced with the text, enabling students to plot functions, solve equations, fit data, normalize probability functions, manipulate matrices and test physical models. In addition, the book presents clear and step-by-step explanations and provides detailed and complete answers to all exercises. In this way, it creates an active learning environment that can prepare students for pursuing their own research projects further down the road. Students who are not yet familiar with Mathematica (R) or Gaussian will find a valuable introduction to computer-based problem solving in the molecular sciences. Other computer applications can alternatively be used. For every chapter learning goals are clearly listed in the beginning, so that readers can easily spot the highlights, and a glossary in the end of the chapter offers a quick look-up of important terms.

This thesis presents valuable contributions to several aspects of the rapidly growing field of gravitational wave astrophysics. The potential sources of gravitational waves in globular clusters are analyzed using sophisticated dynamics simulations involving intermediate mass black holes and including, for the first time, high-order post-Newtonian corrections to the equations of motion. The thesis further demonstrates our ability to accurately measure the parameters of the sources involved in intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals of stellar-mass compact objects into hundred-solar-mass black holes. Lastly, it proposes new techniques for the computationally efficient inference on gravitational waves. On 14 September 2015, the LIGO observatory reported the first direct detection of gravitational waves from the merger of a pair of black holes. For a brief fraction of a second, the power emitted by this merger exceeded the combined output of all stars in the visible universe. This has since been followed by another confirmed detection and a third candidate binary black hole merger. These detections heralded the birth of an exciting new field: gravitational-wave astrophysics.