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    • Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 30
      • December 15, 2000
      • K.A. Gschneidner + 2 more
      • English
      • Hardback
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      • Paperback
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      • eBook
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      This volume of the Handbook is the first of a two-volume set of reviews devoted to the rare-earth-based high-temperature oxide superconductors (commonly known as hiTC superconductors). The history of hiTC superconductors is a few months short of being 14 years old when Bednorz and Müller published their results which showed that (La,BA)2CuO4 had a superconducting transition of ~30 K, which was about 7K higher than any other known superconducting material. Within a year the upper temperature limit was raised to nearly 100K with the discovery of an ~90K superconducting transition in YBa2Cu3O7-&dgr;. The announcement of a superconductor with a transition temperature higher than the boiling point of liquid nitrogen set-off a frenzy of research on trying to find other oxide hiTC superconductors. Within a few months the maximum superconducting transition reached 110 K (Bi2Sr2Ca2Cu3010, and then 122K (TlBa2Ca3Cu4O11. It took several years to push TC up another 11 K to 133 K with the discovery of superconductivity in HgBa2Ca2Cu3O8, which is still the record holder today.

    • Progress in Optics

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 41
      • December 13, 2000
      • English
      • Hardback
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      • eBook
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      The first volume of this text was published in 1961, only a few months after the invention of the laser. This event triggered a wealth of developments, many of which were reported in the 240 review articles which were published in this series since its inception. The present volume contains seven articles covering a wide range of subjects. The first article presents a review of various optical effects in spherical and circular micro-cavities capable of supporting high-Q resonant modes (commonly referred to as morphology-dependent resonances (MDRs) or whispering gallery modes (WGMs)). The second presents a comprehensive review of the theory and practice of optical disk data storage. Other articles include discussions on delay control systems for wideband phased array antennas, and quantum statistical properties of optical beams interacting in nonlinear couplers.

    • Quantum Theoretic Machines

      • 1st Edition
      • December 8, 2000
      • A. Stern
      • English
      • Hardback
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      • Paperback
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      • eBook
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      Making Sense of Inner Sense'Terra cognita' is terra incognita. It is difficult to find someone not taken abackand fascinated by the incomprehensible but indisputable fact: there are material systems which are aware of themselves. Consciousness is self-cognizing code. During homo sapiens's relentness and often frustrated search for self-understanding various theories of consciousness have been and continue to be proposed. However, it remains unclear whether and at what level the problems of consciousness and intelligent thought can be resolved. Science's greatest challenge is to answer the fundamental question: what precisely does a cognitive state amount to in physical terms?Albert Einstein insisted that the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and can be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. When one thinks about the complexities which present themselves in modern physics and even more so in the physics of life, one may wonder whether Einstein really meant what he said. Are we to consider the fundamental problem of the mind, whose understanding seems to lie outside the limits of the mind, to be essentially simple too? Knowledge is neither automatic nor universally deductive. Great new ideas are typically counterintuitive and outrageous, and connecting them by simple logical steps to existing knowledge is often a hard undertaking. The notion of a tensor was needed to provide the general theory of relativity; the notion of entropy had to be developed before we could get full insight into the laws of thermodynamics; the notice of information bit is crucial for communication theory, just as the concept of a Turing machine is instrumental in the deep understanding of a computer. To understand something, consciousness must reach an adequate intellectual level, even more so in order to understand itself. Reality is full of unending mysteries, the true explanation of which requires very technical knowledge, often involving notions not given directly to intuition. Even though the entire content and the results of this study are contained in the eight pages of the mathematical abstract, it would be unrealistic and impractical to suggest that anyone can gain full insight into the theory that presented here after just reading abstract.In our quest for knowledge we are exploring the remotest areas of the macrocosm and probing the invisible particles of the microcosm, from tiny neutrinos and strange quarks to black holes and the Big Bang. But the greatest mystery is very close to home: the greatest mystery is human consciousness. The question before us is whether the logical brain has evolved to a conceptual level where it is able to understand itself.

    • Molecular Mechanisms in Visual Transduction

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 3
      • November 30, 2000
      • D.G. Stavenga + 2 more
      • English
      • Hardback
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      • eBook
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      Molecular mechanisms in visual transduction is presently one of the most intensely studied areas in the field of signal transduction research in biological cells. Because the sense of vision plays a primary role in animal biology, and thus has been subject to long evolutionary development, the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying vision have a high degree of sensitivity and versatility. The aims of visual transduction research are firstto determine which molecules participate, and then to understand how they act in concert to produce the exquisite electrical responses of the photoreceptor cells.Since the 1940s [1] we have known that rod vision begins with the capture of a quantum of energy, a photon, by a visual pigment molecule, rhodopsin. As the function of photon absorption is to convert the visual pigment molecule into a G-protein activating state, the structural details of the visual pigments must beexplained from the perspective of their role in activating their specific G-proteins. Thus, Chapters 1-3 of this Handbook extensively cover the physico-chemical molecular characteristics of the vertebrate rhodopsins. Following photoconversion and G-protein activation, the phototransduction cascade leads to modifications of the population of closed and open ion channels in the photoreceptor plasma membrane, and thereby to the electrical response. The nature of the channels of vertebrate photoreceptors is examined in Chapter 4, and Chapter 5 integrates the present body of knowledge of the activation steps in the cascade into a quantitative framework. Once the phototransduction cascade is activated, it must be subsequently silenced. The various molecular mechanisms participating in inactivation aretreated in Chapters 1-4 and especially Chapter 5. Molecular biology is now an indispensable tool in signal transduction studies. Numerous vertebrate (Chapter 6) and invertebrate (Chapter 7) visual pigments have been characterized and cloned. The genetics and evolutionary aspects of this great subfamily of G-protein activating receptors are intriguing as they present a natural probe for the intimate relationship between structure and function of the visual pigments. Understanding the spectral characteristics from the molecular composition can be expected to

    • Topological Algebras

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 185
      • November 23, 2000
      • V.K. Balachandran
      • English
      • Paperback
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      • eBook
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      This book consists of nine chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to algebraic preliminaries. Chapter 2 deals with some of the basic definition and results concerning topological groups, topological linear spaces and topological algebras. Chapter 3 considered some generalizations of the norm. Chapter 4 is concerned with a generalization of the notion of convexity called p-convexity. In Chapter 5 some differential and integral analysis involving vector valued functions is developed. Chapter 6 is concerned with spectral analysis and applications. The Gelfand representation theory is the subject-matter of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 deals with commutative topological algebras. Finally in Chapter 9 an exposition of the norm uniqueness theorems of Gelfand and Johnson (extended to p-Banach algebras) is given.

    • From Peirce to Skolem

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 4
      • November 22, 2000
      • Geraldine Brady
      • English
      • Paperback
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      • eBook
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      This book is an account of the important influence on the development of mathematical logic of Charles S. Peirce and his student O.H. Mitchell, through the work of Ernst Schröder, Leopold Löwenheim, and Thoralf Skolem. As far as we know, this book is the first work delineating this line of influence on modern mathematical logic.

    • A Psychological Approach to Ethical Reality

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 132
      • November 16, 2000
      • K. Hillner
      • English
      • Hardback
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      • Paperback
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      The pre-eminent 19th century British ethicist, Henry Sidgwick once said: "All important ethical notions are also psychological, except perhaps the fundamental antitheses of 'good' and 'bad' and 'wrong', with which psychology, as it treats of what is and not of what ought to be, is not directly concerned" (quoted in T.N. Tice and T.P. Slavens, 1983). Sidgwick's statement can be interpreted to mean that psychology is relevant for ethics or that psychological knowledge contributes to the construction of an ethical reality. This interpretation serves as the basic impetus to this book, but Sidgwick's statement is also analyzed in detail to demonstrate why a current exposition on the relevance of psychology for ethical reality is necessary and germane.

    • Inflation, Employment and Business Fluctuations

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 35C
      • November 16, 2000
      • Bozzano G Luisa
      • English
      • Hardback
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      • Paperback
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      A Textbook on Macroeconomic Knowledge and Analysis

    • Quantum Theory, Deformation and Integrability

      • 1st Edition
      • Volume 186
      • November 9, 2000
      • R. Carroll
      • English
      • Paperback
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      About four years ago a prominent string theorist was quoted as saying that it might be possible to understand quantum mechanics by the year 2000. Sometimes new mathematical developments make such understanding appear possible and even close, but on the other hand, increasing lack of experimental verification make it seem to be further distant. In any event one seems to arrive at new revolutions in physics and mathematics every year. This book hopes to convey some of the excitment of this period, but will adopt a relatively pedestrian approach designed to illuminate the relations between quantum and classical. There will be some discussion of philosophical matters such as measurement, uncertainty, decoherence, etc. but philosophy will not be emphasized; generally we want to enjoy the fruits of computation based on the operator formulation of QM and quantum field theory. In Chapter 1 connections of QM to deterministic behavior are exhibited in the trajectory representations of Faraggi-Matone. Chapter 1 also includes a review of KP theory and some preliminary remarks on coherent states, density matrices, etc. and more on deterministic theory. We develop in Chapter 4 relations between quantization and integrability based on Moyal brackets, discretizations, KP, strings and Hirota formulas, and in Chapter 2 we study the QM of embedded curves and surfaces illustrating some QM effects of geometry. Chapter 3 is on quantum integrable systems, quantum groups, and modern deformation quantization. Chapter 5 involves the Whitham equations in various roles mediating between QM and classical behavior. In particular, connections to Seiberg-Witten theory (arising in N = 2 supersymmetric (susy) Yang-Mills (YM) theory) are discussed and we would still like to understand more deeply what is going on. Thus in Chapter 5 we will try to give some conceptual background for susy, gauge theories, renormalization, etc. from both a physical and mathematical point of view. In Chapter 6 we continue the deformation quantization then by exhibiting material based on and related to noncommutative geometry and gauge theory.

    • Analysis, Manifolds and Physics, Part II - Revised and Enlarged Edition

      • 1st Edition
      • November 8, 2000
      • Y. Choquet-Bruhat
      • C. DeWitt-Morette
      • English
      • Paperback
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      • Hardback
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      Twelve problems have been added to the first edition; four of them are supplements to problems in the first edition. The others deal with issues that have become important, since the first edition of Volume II, in recent developments of various areas of physics. All the problems have their foundations in volume 1 of the 2-Volume set Analysis, Manifolds and Physics. It would have been prohibitively expensive to insert the new problems at their respective places. They are grouped together at the end of this volume, their logical place is indicated by a number of parenthesis following the title.

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