While there are many good books in particle physics, very seldom if ever a non-specialist comprehensive description of Quantum Field Theory has appeared. The intention of this short book is to offer a guided tour of that innermost topic of Theoretical Physics, in plain words and avoiding the mathematical apparatus, but still describing its various facets up to the research frontier, with the aim to give a glimpse of what the human mind has been capable of imagining for dealing with the behavior of Nature at the most fundamental level.
The world of single-board computing puts powerful coding tools in the palm of your hand. The portable Raspberry Pi computing platform with the power of Linux yields an exciting exploratory tool for beginning scientific computing. Science and Computing with Raspberry Pi takes the enterprising researcher, student, or hobbyist through explorations in a variety of computing exercises with the physical sciences. The book has tutorials and exercises for a wide range of scientific computing problems while guiding the user through: * Configuring your Raspberry Pi and Linux operating system * Understanding the software requirements while using the Pi for scientific computing * Computing exercises in physics, astronomy, chaos theory, and machine learning
This short monograph presents the theory of electromagnetic pulses in a simple and physical way. All pulses discussed are exact solutions of the Maxwell equations, and have finite energy, momentum and angular momentum. There are five chapters: on Fundamentals, Solutions of the Wave Equation, Electromagnetic Pulses, Angular Momentum, and Lorentz Transformations. Nine Appendices cover mathematical or associated aspects, such as chiral measures of electromagnetic fields. The subject matter is restricted to free-space classical electrodynamics, but contact is made with quantum theory in proofs that causal pulses are equivalent to superpositions of photons.
Scattering of light by light is a fundamental process arising at the quantum level through vacuum fluctuations. This short book will explain how, remarkably enough, this quantum process can entirely be described in terms classical quantities. This description is derived from general principles, such as causality, unitarity, Lorentz, and gauge symmetries. The reader will be introduced into a rigorous formulation of these fundamental concepts, as well as their physical interpretation and applications.
This book is an introduction to the basics of surface science. The Nobel Prize winner Wolfgang Pauli's statement, 'God made solids, but surfaces were the work of the devil!' emphasizes the diabolic nature of surfaces. Surfaces are the external border of materials to the external worlds, thus by exploring surfaces one can investigate the material. In the last few decades new and exciting surface properties have been explored in nanomaterials, low-dimensional structures in electronic and photonic devices and other numerous applications.
The complexity and vulnerability of the human body has driven the development of a diverse range of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques in modern medicine. The Nuclear Medicine procedures of Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) and Radionuclide Therapy are well-established in clinical practice and are founded upon the principles of radiation physics. This book will offer an insight into the physics of nuclear medicine by explaining the principles of radioactivity, how radionuclides are produced and administered as radiopharmaceuticals to the body and how radiation can be detected and used to produce images for diagnosis. The treatment of diseases such as thyroid cancer, hyperthyroidism and lymphoma by radionuclide therapy will also be explored.
For almost three quarters of a century, the United States has spent billions of dollars and countless person-hours in the pursuit of a national missile defense system that would protect the country from intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) carrying nuclear warheads. The system currently in place consists of 44 long-range antiballistic missiles stationed in Alaska and California to protect the United States from a possible nuclear weapon carrying ICBM attack from North Korea. After all this effort, this systemis still imperfect, being successful only 10 out of 18 tests. This book will provide an historical description of past efforts in national missile defenses to understand the technical difficulties involved. It will also explain how national security concerns, the evolving international environment, and the complexities of US politics have all affected the story. The book will also describe the current systems in place to protect allies and troops in the field from the threat of shorter range missiles. Finally, the book will describe the current US vision for the future of missile defenses and provide some suggestions for alternative paths.
Lissajous Figures are produced by combining two oscillations at right angles to each other. The figures, drawn by mechanical devices called Harmonographs, have scientific uses, but are also enjoyed for their own beauty. The author has been working with harmonographs since his undergraduate days, has built several of them, lectured about them and has written articles about them. This book is intended for people who enjoy physics or art or both. Certainly physics professionals, both students and faculty members, will enjoy reading about an interesting byway of physics. The book is mainly designed for the reader who has some scientific literacy, but who may not be a scientist. If your mathematics is rusty, a preliminary section on mathematics supplies the necessary background for reading the rest of the book.
This book gives a rigorous yet 'physics-focused' introduction to mathematical logic that is geared towards natural science majors. We present the science major with a robust introduction to logic, focusing on the specific knowledge and skills that will unavoidably be needed in calculus topics and natural science topics in general (rather than taking a philosophical math fundamental oriented approach that is commonly found in mathematical logic textbooks).
This book and its prequel (Theories of Matter, Space, and Time: Classical Theories) grew out of courses that are taught by the authors on the undergraduate degree program in physics at Southampton University, UK. The authors aim to guide the full MPhys undergraduate cohort through some of the trickier areas of theoretical physics that undergraduates are expected to master. To move beyond the initial courses in classical mechanics, special relativity, electromagnetism and quantum theory to more sophisticated views of these subjects and their interdependence. This approach keeps the analysis as concise and physical as possible whilst revealing the key elegance in each subject discussed. This second book of the pair looks at ideas to the arena of Quantum Mechanics. First quickly reviewing the basics of quantum mechanics which should be familiar to the reader from a first course, it then links the Schrodinger equation to the Principle of Least Action introducing Feynman's path integral methods. Next, it presents the relativistic wave equations of Klein, Gordon and Dirac. Finally, Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism are converted to a wave equation for photons and make contact with Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) at a first quantized level. Between the two volumes the authors hope to move a student's understanding from their first courses to a place where they are ready to embark on graduate level courses on quantum field theory.