This highly acclaimed series provides survey articles on the present state and future direction of research in important branches of applied solid and fluid mechanics.Mechanics is defined as a branch of physics that focuses on motion and on the reaction of physical systems to internal and external forces.
The field of phase transitions and critical phenomena continues to be active in research, producing a steady stream of interesting and fruitful results. No longer an area of specialist interest, it has acquired a central focus in condensed matter studies. The major aim of this serial is to provide review articles that can serve as standard references for research workers in the field, and for graduate students and others wishing to obtain reliable information on important recent developments.The two review articles in this volume complement each other in a remarkable way. Both deal with what might be called the modern geometricapproach to the properties of macroscopic systems. The first article by Georgii (et al.) describes how recent advances in the application ofgeometric ideas leads to a better understanding of pure phases and phase transitions in equilibrium systems. The second article by Alava (et al.)deals with geometrical aspects of multi-body systems in a hands-on way, going beyond abstract theory to obtain practical answers. Thecombination of computers and geometrical ideas described in this volume will doubtless play a major role in the development of statisticalmechanics in the twenty-first century.
Ode to a Quantum Physicist celebrates the scientific achievements of Marlan O. Scully on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It combines personal reminiscences from other renowned physicists who have known and worked with him over the years and 60+ scientific articles from the frontiers of Quantum Optics inspired by the work of M. O. Scully. The topics of these articles, published in the special volume 179 of Optics Communications, range from classical optics via atomic physics and quantum mechanics to non-linear optics.The book opens with special greetings from Tony Siegman, the former president of the Optical Society of America and Benjamin Bederson, the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Physical Review. A long time friend, Ali Javan, dating back to Marlan's MIT days, highlights some of Marlan's scientific contributions.Heidi Fearn's poems humanize physical phenomena and set the stage for the more personal reminiscences to come.Friends and colleagues of Marlan from the various stages of his scientific life shed some light on his human side. These stories reflect the admiration and respect the quantum physics community holds for Marlan and bring out many humorous anecdotes of their interactions with him. Judy Scully, his wife, takes us through Marlan's youth and college years in Wyoming. Leon Cohen illuminates the Yale days and Marlan's interactions with Willis E. Lamb. Pierre Meystre describes his arrival in Tucson fromSwitzerland for his first postdoctoral position with Marlan. The move from Tucson to Albuquerque is one of Suhail Zubairy's memories. Herbert Walther shines light on the impact of the multi-national Marlan and in particular, on the Max-Planck-Institut fü Quantenoptik. Wolfgang Schleich looks at his mentorMarlan from a graduate student's point of view and opens the arena for Reesor Woodling's description of Marlan's cattle business. We conclude the trail by the article of Thomas Walther, Ed Fry and George Welsch, who bring us up to date with Marlan's activities in Texas A & M. The actual birthday party and scientific celebration took place as a special two-day colloquium on Modern Trends in Quantum Optics at the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptic in Garching, Germany on June 29-30, 1999. Included in this book is the program of this meeting, as wel as some excerpts from the celebration, such as, the after dinner speech by Roy J. Glauber followed by a photo album of Marlan's life. The poems by Olga Kocharovskaya poetically describe Marlan's scientific achievements. The concluding talk by Bruce Shore, given at this meeting, begins the connection to the papers by Don Kobe, Danny Greenberger and Mark Hillary, and Shi-Yao Zhu et al. covering topics from gauge invariance via unbreakable codes to photonic band gaps. The articles from the special issue of Optics Communications conclude this Festschrift.
Just as in the pervious five symposia, the aim of this symposium was to link the recent advances in technology with fundamental problems in quantum mechanics. It provided a unique interdisciplinary forum where scientists with different backgrounds were given the opportunity to discuss basic problems of common interest in quantum science and technology from various aspects. This included not only an examination of the topic in terms of quantum optics and mesoscopic physics, but also in terms of the physics of precise measurement, macroscopic quantum phenomena, complex systems, and other fundamental problems in quantum physics. Two new important fields were also dealt with - the field of quantum computing, including quantum teleportation, quantum information, and cryptography, and the field of laser cooling, including Bose-Einstein condensation and atom interferometry.The resulting proceedings will be welcomed both as a good introductory book on quantum coherence and decoherence by newcomers to the field and as a reference book for experts in this dynamic area.
This book deals with the electronic and optical properties of two low-dimensional systems: quantum dots and quantum antidots and is divided into two parts. Part one is a self-contained monograph which describes in detail the theoretical and experimental background for exploration of electronic states of the quantum-confined systems. Starting from the single-electron picture of the system, the book describes various experimental methods that provide important information on these systems. Concentrating on many-electron systems, theoretical developments are described in detail and their experimental consequences are also discussed. The field has witnessed an almost explosive growth and some of the future directions of explorations are highlighted towards the end of the monograph. The subject matter is dealt with in such a way that it is both accessible to beginners and useful for expert researchers as a comprehensive review of most of the developments in the field.Furthermore the book contains 37 reprinted articles which have been selected to provide a first-hand picture of the overall developments in the field. The early papers have been arranged to portray the developments chronologically, and the more recent papers provide an overview of future direction in the research.
This highly acclaimed series provides survey articles on the present state and future direction of research in important branches of applied mechanics.
This text focuses on the physics of symmetries, developing symmetries and transformations through concrete physical examples and contexts rather than presenting the information axiomatically, mathematically, and abstractly. Readers are introduced gradually to advanced mathematical procedures, including the Wigner and Racah algebras and their applications to various symmetry groups. The book also includes some of the latest research on the use of non-invariance and non-compact groups in the consideration of relativistic and many-particle problems of atoms and nuclei.This book is an updated replacement for the text Irreducible Tensorial Sets (Academic Press, 1959). Parts A and B of the present book grew out of occasional lectures in the intervening decades at the University of Chicago, where it became neccessary to update or elaborate upon certain points. Part C has been built more recently to deal with innovations and new information in the field of mathematical physics. The book as a whole develops the subject of symmetry from a physical point of view, allowing students and researchers to gain new insight on their subject. This book can be used both as a text and as a reference by students and scientists in the field.
While for the majority of physicists the problem of the deciphering of the brain code, the intelligence code, is a matter for future generations, the author boldly and forcefully disagrees. Breaking with the dogma of classical logic he develops in the form of the conversion postulate a concrete working hypothesis for the actual thought mechanism.The reader is invited on a fascinating mathematical journey to the very edges of modern scientific knowledge. From lepton and quark to mind, from cognition to a logic analogue of the Schrödinger equation, from Fibonacci numbers to logic quantum numbers, from imaginary logic to a quantum computer, from coding theory to atomic physics - the breadth and scope of this work is overwhelming. Combining quantum physics, fundamental logic and coding theory this unique work sets the stage for future physics and is bound to titillate and challenge the imagination of physicists, biophysicists and computer designers. Growing from the author's matrix operator formalization of logic, this work pursues a synthesis of physics and logic methods, leading to the development of the concept of infophysics.The experimental verification of the proposed quantum hypothesis of the brain is presently in preparation in cooperation with the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK, and, if proved positive, would have major theoretical implications. Even more significant should be the practical applications in such fields as molecular electronics and computer science, biophysics and neuroscience, medicine and education. The new possiblities that could be opened up by quantum level computing could be truly revolutionary.The book aims at researchers and engineers in technical sciences as well as in biophysics and biosciences in general. It should have great appeal for physicists, mathematicians, logicians and for philosophers with a mathematical bent.
In modern physics, the classical vacuum of tranquil nothingness has been replaced by a quantum vacuum with fluctuations of measurable consequence. In The Quantum Vacuum, Peter Milonni describes the concept of the vacuum in quantum physics with an emphasis on quantum electrodynamics. He elucidates in depth and detail the role of the vacuum electromagnetic field in spontaneous emission, the Lamb shift, van der Waals, and Casimir forces, and a variety of other phenomena, some of which are of technological as well as purely scientific importance.This informative text also provides an introduction based on fundamental vacuum processes to the ideas of relativistic quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, including renormalization and Feynman diagrams. Experimental as well as theoreticalaspects of the quantum vacuum are described, and in most cases details of mathematical derivations are included. Chapter 1 of The Quantum Vacuum - published in advance in The American Journal of Physics (1991)-was later selected by readers as one of the Most Memorable papers ever published in the 60-year history of the journal. This chapter provides anexcellent beginning of the book, introducing a wealth of information of historical interest, the results of which are carefully woven into subsequent chapters to form a coherent whole.