This first book to focus on the use of SPMs to actively manipulate molecules and nanostructures on surfaces goes way beyond conventional treatments of scanning microscopy merely for imaging purposes. It reviews recent progress in the use of SPMs on such soft materials as polymers, with a particular emphasis on chemical discrimination, mechanical properties, tip-induced reactions and manipulations, as well as their nanoscale electrical properties. Detailing the practical application potential of this hot topic, this book is of great interest to specialists of wide-ranging disciplines, including physicists, chemists, materials scientists, spectroscopy experts, surface scientists, and engineers.

In this unique book, Arieh Ben-Naim invites the reader to experience the joy of appreciating something which has eluded understanding for many years entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The book has a two-pronged message: first, that the Second Law is not infinitely incomprehensible as commonly stated in textbooks of thermodynamics but can, in fact, be comprehended through sheer common sense; and second, that entropy is not a mysterious quantity that has resisted understanding but a simple, familiar and easily comprehensible concept. Written in an accessible style, the book guides the reader through an abundance of dice games and examples from everyday life. The author paves the way for readers to discover for themselves what entropy is, how it changes, and most importantly, why it always changes in one direction in a spontaneous process.

Three quarters of a century elapsed between Ampere's definition of electrodynamics and Einstein's reform of the concepts of space and time. The two events occurred in utterly different worlds: the French Academy of Sciences of the 1820s seems very remote from the Bern patent office of the early 1900s, and the forces between two electric currents quite foreign to the optical synchronization of clocks. Yet Ampere's electrodynamics and Einstein's relativity are firmly connected through an historical chain involving German extensions of Ampere's work, competition with British field conceptions, Dutch synthesis, and fin de siecle criticism of the aether-matter connection. Darrigol's book retraces this intriguing evolution, with a physicist's attention to conceptual and instrumental developments, and with an historian's awareness of their cultural and material embeddings. This
book exploits a wide range of sources, and incorporates the many important insights of other scholars. Thorough accounts are given of crucial episodes such as Faraday's redefinition of charge and current, the genesis of Maxwell's field equations, or Hertz' experiments on fast electric oscillations.

Beginning with influential aspects of nineteenth-century physics, Einstein's Wake qualifies the notion that Einstein alone was responsible for literary "relativity"; it goes on to examine the fine detail of his legacy in literary appropriations of scientific metaphors, with particular attention to Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot.

Since the publication of the first edition over 50 years ago, Introduction to Solid State Physics has been the standard solid state physics text for physics students. The author's goal from the beginning has been to write a book that is accessible to undergraduates and consistently teachable. The emphasis in the book has always been on physics rather than formal mathematics. With each new edition, the author has attempted to add important new developments in the field without sacrificing the book's accessibility and teachability.

This book provides a collection of up-to-date lectures on the physics of CP violation. As such it covers all relevant modern fields of elementary particle, nuclear and astrophysics. Special attention is paid to the neutral meson systems and the recent confirmation of CP violation in the B meson system. The theory and the novel methods needed for these experiments are given in detail. The classical and ongoing searches for the electric dipole moment of the neutron and other null tests of time-reversal symmetry are included. An elementary introduction is given to the astrophysical implications of CP violation, to tackle the puzzle of matter–antimatter asymmetry in our Universe.

This volume contains the edited versions of some selected lectures delivered at the famous “Schladming Winter School”, devoted to “Flavor Physics” in the present case. Flavor physics is one of the hot topics in contemporary elementary particle physics, because it relates to fundamental questions like the origin of masses, the size and strength of CP violation and the oscillations between various neutrino species. This volume will be useful for graduate students wishing to get more acquainted with the field as well as for lecturers in search of material for seminars of special lectures and courses in quantum field theory.

Soft matter and biological systems pose many challenges for theoretical, experimental and computational research. From the computational point of view, these many-body systems cover variations in relevant time and length scales over many orders of magnitude. Indeed, the macroscopic properties of materials and complex fluids are ultimately to be deduced from the dynamics of the microsopic, molecular level. In these lectures, internationally renowned experts offer a tutorial presentation of novel approaches for bridging these space and time scales in realistic simulations.

Derived from a course given at the University of Maryland for advanced graduate students, this book deals with some of the latest developments in our attempts to construct a unified theory of the fundamental interactions of nature. Among the topics covered are spontaneous symmetry breaking, grand unified theories, supersymmetry, and supergravity. the book starts with a quick review of elementary particle theory and continues with a discussion of composite quarks, leptons, Higgs bosons, and CP violation.