Femtosecond optics involves the study of ultra-short pulses of light. Understanding the behaviour of these light pulses makes it possible to develop ultra-fast lasers with a wide range of applications in such areas as medical imaging, chemical analysis and micro-machining. Written by two leading experts in the field, this book reviews the theory of the interaction of femtosecond light pulses with matter, femtosecond lasers and laser systems, and the principles of femtosecond coherent spectroscopy of impurity amorphous media.
reviews the theory of the interaction of femtosecond light pulses with matterDiscusses femtosecond lasers and laser systemsConsiders the principles of femtosecond coherent spectroscopy of impurity amorphous media

This open access book explores the intersection of property law, relocation, and resettlement processes in the United States and among communities that grapple with migration as an adaptation strategy. As communities face the prospect of relocating because of rising seas, policy makers, disaster specialists, and community leaders are scrambling to understand what adaptation pathways are legally possible. While in its ideal application, law functions blindly and without variation, the authors find that legal contradictions come to bear on resettlement processes and place certain communities further in harm’s way. This book will unearth these contradictions in order to understand why successful community-based resettlement has presented such a challenge to communities that are experiencing land deterioration as a result of climate change.

The book highlights three types of technologies being developed for autonomous solution of navigation problems. These technologies are based on the polarization structure, ultra-broadband and the fluctuation characteristics (slow and fast) of the radiolocation signals. The book presents the problems of intrinsic thermal radio emission polarization and change in radio waves polarization when they are reflected from objects with non-linear properties. The purpose of this book is to develop the foundations for creating autonomous radionavigation systems to provide aviation with navigation systems that will substantially increase its capabilities, specifically acting where satellite technologies do not work. The book is intended for specialists involved in the development and operation of aviation-technical complexes, as well as for specialists of national aviation regulators and ICAO experts dealing with the problems of improving flight safety.

This book explores Soviet prosecution records to tell the hidden story of ordinary citizens who were arrested for expressing discontent during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years.

Starting from fundamentals of classical stability theory, an overview is given of the transition phenomena in subsonic, wall-bounded shear flows. At first, the consideration focuses on elementary small-amplitude velocity perturbations of laminar shear layers, i.e. instability waves, in the simplest canonical configurations of a plane channel flow and a flat-plate boundary layer. Then the linear stability problem is expanded to include the effects of pressure gradients, flow curvature, boundary-layer separation, wall compliance, etc. related to applications. Beyond the amplification of instability waves is the non-modal growth of local stationary and non-stationary shear flow perturbations which are discussed as well. The volume continues with the key aspect of the transition process, that is, receptivity of convectively unstable shear layers to external perturbations, summarizing main paths of the excitation of laminar flow disturbances. The remainder of the book addresses the instability phenomena found at late stages of transition. These include secondary instabilities and nonlinear features of boundary-layer perturbations that lead to the final breakdown to turbulence. Thus, the reader is provided with a step-by-step approach that covers the milestones and recent advances in the laminar-turbulent transition. Special aspects of instability and transition are discussed through the book and are intended for research scientists, while the main target of the book is the student in the fundamentals of fluid mechanics. Computational guides, recommended exercises, and PowerPoint multimedia notes based on results of real scientific experiments supplement the monograph. These are especially helpful for the neophyte to obtain a solid foundation in hydrodynamic stability. To access the supplementary material go to extras.springer.com and type in the ISBN for this volume.

This volume of Current Topics in Membranes focuses on Membrane Fusion, beginning with fusion and fission of lipid bilayers, with reviews focused on hemifusion and dynamic remodeling of membranes catalyzed by dynamin. Other topics discussed include viral fusion, intracellular fusion, developmental cell fusion, and theoretical modeling.

Ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) is a rare and severe genetic disorder affecting children. A-T is a multisystem disease characterized by progressive neurodegeneration, immunodeficiency and cancer predisposition. This detailed volume explores the ever expanding field of research into the ATM (ataxia-telangiectasia, mutated) gene and the role played by ATM kinase in DNA damage signaling and diverse cellular processes. What follows is a handy desktop reference for both seasoned A-T researchers and postgraduate students, as it demonstrates the breadth of recent developments in A-T studies. Written for the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Both classic and cutting-edge techniques are described, including ATM gene mutation detection, assays for radiosensitivity and radioresistant DNA synthesis, new methods to measure ATM kinase activity by imaging microscopy and high content screening as well as proteomics, phosphoproteomics and bioinformatics approaches to decipher ATM-dependent signalling pathways. Additional methods include generation of patient-specific stem cells and approaches to study ATM functions in the nervous system. Comprehensive and practical, ATM Kinase: Methods and Protocols aims to ignite and attract the interest of colleagues from diverse fields to A-T research in an effort to bring their expertise and fresh ideas to resolve many A-T puzzles still waiting to be pieced together and to alleviate the suffering of A-T children and their families.

This book continues the biannual series of conference proceedings, which has become a classical reference resource in traffic and granular research alike. It addresses new developments at the interface between physics, engineering and computational science. Complex systems, where many simple agents, be they vehicles or particles, give rise to surprising and fascinating phenomena. The contributions collected in these proceedings cover several research fields, all of which deal with transport. Topics include highway, pedestrian and internet traffic, granular matter, biological transport, transport networks, data acquisition, data analysis and technological applications. Different perspectives, i.e. modeling, simulations, experiments and phenomenological observations, are considered.

Both the Russian and Western press now recognize the importance of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin as a Soviet historical figure. Fifty years after his execution in Stalinist Russia, Bukharin has been rehabilated by the Communist Party and invoked as the intellectual antecedent of Gorbachev. Challenging this view, contributors to this volume reevaluate the intellectual and political legacy of this Bolshevik revolutionary. They cover aspects of his thoughts and activities previously left unexplored or misinterpreted. They conclude that Bukharin's legacy is easily distorted when he is torn from his own political and historical context and appropriated for contemporary political movements.

Contributors to this Centenary Appraisal reexamine issues central to Bukharin's intellectual and political legacy: the social, economic, and political forms needed for transition from capitalism to socialism; the nature of the modern capitalist state; and the meaning of imperialism as a stage in the development of capitalist world economy. Also covered are his activities in the Communist International and his work in the history, philosophy, and politics of science.

The adverse consequences of pollution impact on terrestrial ecosystems have been under careful investigation since the beginning of the twentieth century. Several thousand case studies have documented the biotic effects occurring in contaminated areas. However, after more than a century of research, ecologists are still far from understanding the effects of pollution on biota. Only a few generalisations have been made on the basis of extensive monitoring programs and numerous expe- ments with industrial contaminants. The need to reveal general patterns in the responses of terrestrial biota to ind- trial pollution and to identify the sources of variation in these responses became obvious more than a decade ago. At about that time, our team initiated a quanti- tive research synthesis of the biotic effects caused by industrial pollution, based on 1 a meta-analysis of published data. All meta-analyses conducted so far (covering diversity and abundance of soil microfungi, diversity of vascular plants, diversity and abundance of terrestrial arthropods, and plant growth and reproduction) c- sistently showed high heterogeneity in the responses of terrestrial biota to industrial pollution. At the same time, they demonstrated an unexpected shortage of infor- tion suitable for meta-analyses, as well as a considerable influence of methodology of primary studies on the outcome of the research syntheses. To overcome the identified problems, we designed a comparative study, the results of which are reported in this book.

This book presents a comprehensive survey of the origin of turbulence in near-wall shear layer flows. Instead of going too far into details modern approaches to the problem are discussed in a conceptual treatment. The transition from laminar to turbulent flows in shear layers is described including the generation of flow perturbations, their amplification and development, the breakdown of the initial laminar state, and transformation to a turbulent regime. This book also presents new approaches to boundary-layer transitions with strong external-flow perturbations and to the prediction and control of the presented near-wall transitions to turbulence. This book is addressed to researchers, lecturers and students in engineering, physics and mathematics.

This volume is the first comprehensive treatment of combinatorial algebraic topology in book form. The first part of the book constitutes a swift walk through the main tools of algebraic topology. Readers - graduate students and working mathematicians alike - will probably find particularly useful the second part, which contains an in-depth discussion of the major research techniques of combinatorial algebraic topology. Although applications are sprinkled throughout the second part, they are principal focus of the third part, which is entirely devoted to developing the topological structure theory for graph homomorphisms.

The history of a building site in Moscow where Russian rulers since Alexander I have planned, constructed, and destroyed monuments of colossal proportions This book surveys two centuries of Russian history through a succession of ambitious architectural projects designed for a single construction site in central Moscow. Czars, Bolshevik rulers, and contemporary Russian leaders alike have dreamed of glorious monuments to themselves and their ideologies on this site. The history of their efforts reflects the story of the nation itself and its repeated attempts to construct or reconstruct its identity and to repudiate or resuscitate emblems of the past. In the nineteenth century Czar Alexander I began to construct the largest cathedral (and the largest building) in the world at the time. His successor, Nicholas I, changed both the site and the project. Completed by Alexander III, the cathedral was demolished by Stalin in the 1930s to make way for the tallest building in the world, the Palace of Soviets, but that project was ended by the war. During the Khrushchev years the excavation pit was transformed into an outdoor heated swimming pool-the world's largest, of course-and under Yeltsin's direction the pool was replaced with a reconstruction of the destroyed cathedral. The book explores each project intended for this ideologically-charged site and documents with 60 illustrations the grand projects that were built as well as those that were only dreamed.

The main purpose of the book is to acquaint mathematicians, physicists and engineers with classical mechanics as a whole, in both its traditional and its contemporary aspects. As such, it describes the fundamental principles, problems, and methods of classical mechanics, with the emphasis firmly laid on the working apparatus, rather than the physical foundations or applications. Chapters cover the n-body problem, symmetry groups of mechanical systems and the corresponding conservation laws, the problem of the integrability of the equations of motion, the theory of oscillations and perturbation theory.

This work brings together previously unpublished notes contributed by participants of the IUTAM Symposium on Hamiltonian Dynamics, Vortex Structures, Turbulence (Moscow, 25-30 August 2006). The study of vortex motion is of great interest to fluid and gas dynamics: since all real flows are vortical in nature, applications of the vortex theory are extremely diverse, many of them (e.g. aircraft dynamics, atmospheric and ocean phenomena) being especially important.

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The book is dedicated to the construction of particular solutions of systems of ordinary differential equations in the form of series that are analogous to those used in Lyapunov s first method. A prominent place is given to asymptotic solutions that tend to an equilibrium position, especially in the strongly nonlinear case, where the existence of such solutions can t be inferred on the basis of the first approximation alone.

The book is illustrated with a large number of concrete examples of systems in which the presence of a particular solution of a certain class is related to special properties of the system s dynamic behavior. It is a book for students and specialists who work with dynamical systems in the fields of mechanics, mathematics, and theoretical physics.

This book highlights the capabilities and limitations of radar and air navigation. It discusses issues related to the physical principles of an electromagnetic field, the structure of radar information, and ways to transmit it. Attention is paid to the classification of radio waves used for transmitting radar information, as well as to the physical description of their propagation media. The third part of the book addresses issues related to the current state of navigation systems used in civil aviation and the prospects for their development in the future, as well as the history of satellite radio navigation systems. The book may be useful for schoolchildren, interested in the problems of radar and air navigation.

Radar technology is increasingly being used to monitor the environment. This monograph provides a review of polarimetric radar techniques for remote sensing. The first four chapters cover the basics of mathematical, statistical modelling as well as physical modelling based on radiowave scattering theory. The subsequent eight chapters summarize applications of polarimetric radar monitoring for various types of earth environments, including vegetation and oceans. The last two chapters provide a summary of Western as well as former Soviet Union knowledge and the outlook. This monograph is of value to students, scientists and engineers involved in remote sensing development and applications in particular for environmental monitoring.

The first systematic, self-contained presentation of a theory of arbitrary order ODEs with unbounded operator coefficients in a Hilbert or Banach space. Developed over the last 10 years by the authors, it deals with conditions of solvability, classes of uniqueness, estimates for solutions and asymptotic representations of solutions at infinity.

The collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s and 1930s forever altered the country's social and economic landscape. It became the first of a series of bloody landmarks that would come to define Stalinism. This revelatory book presents--with analysis and commentary--the most important primary Soviet documents dealing with the brutal economic and cultural subjugation of the Russian peasantry. Drawn from previously unavailable and in many cases unknown archives, these harrowing documents provide the first unimpeded view of the experience of the peasantry during the years 1927-1930.
The book, the first of four in the series, covers the background of collectivization, its violent implementation, and the mass peasant revolt that ensued. For its insights into the horrific fate of the Russian peasantry and into Stalin's dictatorship, "The War Against the Peasantry "takes""its place an as unparalleled resource."

Historical drama starring Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close. In 1183, after the death of his eldest son, King Henry II (Stewart) must decide which of his three remaining sons will succeed him. As the time for him to announce his successor approaches, Henry frees his imprisoned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Close), who he held captive after she plotted to overthrow him. It soon becomes clear, however, that Eleanor favours first child Richard (Andrew Howard), while Henry sees his youngest, John (Rafe Spall), as the next in line but, in the weeks ahead, the King begins to have serious doubts if any of his sons are capable of becoming the new ruler.

This book contains a mathematical exposition of analogies between classical (Hamiltonian) mechanics, geometrical optics, and hydrodynamics. This theory highlights several general mathematical ideas that appeared in Hamiltonian mechanics, optics and hydrodynamics under different names. In addition, some interesting applications of the general theory of vortices are discussed in the book such as applications in numerical methods, stability theory, and the theory of exact integration of equations of dynamics. The investigation of families of trajectories of Hamiltonian systems can be reduced to problems of multidimensional ideal fluid dynamics. For example, the well-known Hamilton-Jacobi method corresponds to the case of potential flows. The book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students interested in mathematical physics, mechanics, and the theory of differential equations.

"Distributed Computing Through Combinatorial Topology" describes techniques for analyzing distributed algorithms based on award winning combinatorial topology research. The authors present a solid theoretical foundation relevant to many real systems reliant on parallelism with unpredictable delays, such as multicore microprocessors, wireless networks, distributed systems, and Internet protocols.

Today, a new student or researcher must assemble a collection of scattered conference publications, which are typically terse and commonly use different notations and terminologies. This book provides a self-contained explanation of the mathematics to readers with computer science backgrounds, as well as explaining computer science concepts to readers with backgrounds in applied mathematics. The first section presents mathematical notions and models, including message passing and shared-memory systems, failures, and timing models. The next section presents core concepts in two chapters each: first, proving a simple result that lends itself to examples and pictures that will build up readers' intuition; then generalizing the concept to prove a more sophisticated result. The overall result weaves together and develops the basic concepts of the field, presenting them in a gradual and intuitively appealing way. The book's final section discusses advanced topics typically found in a graduate-level course for those who wish to explore further.
Named a 2013 Notable Computer Book for Computing Methodologies by "Computing Reviews"Gathers knowledge otherwise spread across research and conference papers using consistent notations and a standard approach to facilitate understandingPresents unique insights applicable to multiple computing fields, including multicore microprocessors, wireless networks, distributed systems, and Internet protocols Synthesizes and distills material into a simple, unified presentation with examples, illustrations, and exercises