Società italiana di fisica

William Daniel Phillips

F. Strumia

E. Arimondo

The recent fascinating progress on laser cooling is the result of the close connection between theoretical work and the rapid technological advances in laser sources, particularly in the field of powerful semiconductor and solid-state lasers operating over a wide range of optical and near-infrared frequencies. The very close international and personal collaboration amongst the researchers resulting in a direct link between experimental data and theoretical calculations which characterize work in this field, have been important factors in the rapid comprehension of the subtle and beautiful phenomena involved in laser manipulation. This Enrico Fermi school is the first formal school fully devoted to this topic. The theoretical part of the book includes contributions on the framework for the study of the photon momentum exchanges in the absence of relaxation, recent mechanisms of laser cooling, an analysis of the cooling forces, analysis of atomic and molecular beams, cooling through coherent population trapping and the relation between laser cooling and quantum nondemolition measurements. The experimental section deals with topics such as, an analysis of atomic and molecular beams, methods and applications of laser cooling, advances in laser cooling and the new exciting field of atomic interferometry. All students and researchers working in this field will welcome this excellent review of research and progress in laser cooling, so strongly linked to the fundamental understanding of physics.

Varenna on Lake Como, Villa Monastero, 9-19 July 1991

Laser Manipulation of Atoms and Ions

The field of cold atomic gases faced a revolution in 1995 when Bose-Einstein condensation was achieved. The quest for ultra-cold Fermi gases started shortly after the 1995 discovery, and quantum degeneracy in a gas of fermionic atoms was obtained in 1999. This work covers experimental techniques for the creation and study of Fermi quantum gases.

Gas Di Fermi Ultrafreddi

The lifetime of a positron inside a solid is normally less than a fraction of nanosecond. This is a very short time on a human scale, but is long enough to enable the positron to visit an extended region of the material, and to sense the atomic and electronic structure of the environment. Thus, we can inject a positron in a sample to draw from it some signal giving us information on the microscopic properties of the material. This idea has been successfully developed in a number of positron-based techniques of physical analysis, with resolution in energy, momentum, or position. The complex of these techniques is what we call now positron spectroscopy of solids. The field of application of the positron spectroscopy extends from advanced problems of solid-state physics to industrial applications in the area of characterization of high-tech materials. This volume focuses the attention on the physics that can be learned from positron-based methods, but also frames those methods in a wider context including other experimental approaches. It can be considered as a textbook on positron spectroscopy of solids, the sort of book that the newcomer takes for his approach to this field, but also as a useful research tool for the expert.

Positron Spectroscopy of Solids

B. Maraviglia

The evolution of the magnetic-resonance area is expanding all the time with respect both to the theoretical foundations and to the applied research in more and more fields. Magnetic double resonances were introduced some decades ago with immediate impact on several subjects. The example of the Overhauser effect with its theoretical and practical consequences is sufficient to stress the role of double resonances, which have spread to almost every section of magnetic resonances. The dynamic field of space-resolved NMR, both with NMR imaging and in vivo spectroscopy, has not yet taken advantage of all double-resonance methods used in spectroscopy. There is also great interest in the development of advanced methodologies. For these reasons an advanced school was organised in which these issues were addressed.The resulting book covers Pound-Overhauser double resonance, cross-relaxation and spin coherence double resonance together with spin decoupling dynamics and other fundamental concepts. Equal attention is given to several applications of liquids and solids, but first applications of double resonances to space-resolved double NMR like heteronuclear imaging, proton-electron double-resonance imaging, etc. receive special attention.

Varenna on Lake Como, Villa Monastero, 13-21 October 1992

Nuclear Magnetic Double Resonance

R. A. Ricci

R. A. Broglia

Carlo H. Dasso

Varenna on Lake Como, Villa Monastero, 9th-21st July 1979

Nuclear Structure and Heavy-ion Collisions

Physicists have devoted much effort to reproducing the conditions of the primordial universe in laboratory conditions in their quest to work out a comprehensive theory of the appearance and evolution of nuclear matter. Whether it be trying to recreate the predicted primordial state of high-energy density matter in which quarks and gluons are effectively deconfined - the so-called Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) - or exploring the structure and reaction properties of very unstable nuclei in experiments using radioactive beams, they have striven to understand the events which characterized the Big Bang and the various nucleosynthesis mechanisms which occur in the stars. This book contains the proceedings of the 2010 Enrico Fermi summer school held in Varenna, Italy, in July 2010, and devoted to the present understanding of the primordial universe and the origin of the elements, as achieved by studying nuclei and their constituents in extreme regimes of energy and composition. Subjects covered include: QGP formation; exotic nuclei, their degrees of freedom from the ground state and the properties of the excited states; the complex, but appealing theory describing the supernovae explosion and neutron stars; dark energy and matter; Big Bang nucleosynthesis and energy and solar neutrino production; nuclear cosmochronology; beta and gamma decay relevant for the nucleosynthesis of heavy nuclei. The annual Enrico Fermi summer school is internationally renowned and this book will be of great interest to all those involved in the field of nuclear physics.

From the Big Bang to the Nucleosynthesis

C. Pellegrini

Developments in High-power Lasers and Their Applications

Theo W. Hänsch

"This volume can be justified by the following three facts, the need to provide, from time to time, a co-ordinated set of lectures which present the relevant progress in Metrology, the increasing intertwining between Fundamental Physics and the practice of Metrological Measurements, and, third, the flurry of new and unexpected discoveries in this field, with a correlated series of Nobel Prizes bestowed to individuals working in Fundamental Constants research and novel experimental methods. One of the most fascinating and exciting characteristics of metrology is its intimate relationship between fundamental physics and the leading edge of technology which is needed to perform advanced and challenging experiments and measurements, as well as the determination of the values and interrelations between the Fundamental Constants. In some cases, such as the caesium fountains clocks or the optical frequency standards, the definition of the value of a quantity is, in the laboratory, in the region of 10-16 and experiments are under way to reach 10-18. Many of these results and the avenues leading to further advances are discussed in this volume, along a major step in metrology, expected in the near future, which could change the old definition of the kilogram, still based on a mechanical artefact, toward a new definition resting on a fixed value of a fundamental constant."

Metrology and Fundamental Constants

Scuola internazionale di fisica

Physicomathematical Aspects of Biology

"This study is devoted to the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (S-Z) effect, and important related topics in cluster and CMB research. S-Z science is about to be significantly enhanced by unique, multi-faceted cluster and cosmological yield, at a level of precision in accord with the high standards of the current era that was heralded by spectacular achievements in cosmological CMB research. The pedagogical reviews and technical seminars included in this volume represent most of the important current topics in S-Z work and in the astrophysics of clusters. The publication touches upon all relevant aspects of the S-Z effect and its use as a precise cluster and cosmological probe. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the detection of the CMB by Penzias and Wilson (in 1964), there is a chapter devoted to the history of this discovery. In his fascinating account of their work, he outlines also some lessons pertinent to current scientific issues. Other chapters discuss very interesting related observational work in Europe and the US."

Background Microwave Radiation and Intracluster Cosmology

The lectures collected in this book present a comprehensive review of the current knowledge of heavy-quark physics, from the points of view of both theory and experiment. Heavy Flavour Physics has accomplished enormous progress during the last few years: the last heavy quark has been discovered and the quality of the collected data on the other relatively lighter quarks has dramatically improved. On the theory side, noticeable progress has been reported on new calculations of decay rates based on various techniques, such as QCD sum rules, heavy-quark mass expansion and lattice QCD. The theory of heavy quark production is constantly improving and awaiting new results. Nevertheless there are strong reasons to believe that the Standard Model of High Energy Physics is incomplete. It exhibits very peculiar patterns for which it offers no explanation. The basic constituents of matter are arranged into three seemingly identical generations or families of quarks and leptons, differing merely in their masses. The pattern in the fermion masses, why they are families and why there are three of them is not yet understood. Furthermore it is known that at least within the standard model there is an intimate connection between the replication of families and the gateway of CP violation, in addition, the latter phenomenon is a crucial ingredient in explaining why our universe is made up almost exclusively of matter rather than being more or less matter-antimatter symmetric. How and to what extent can Heavy Flavour Physics impact on these questions? Does it offer novel windows onto New Physics beyond the Standard Model in general and onto new symmetries, such as Supersymmetry in particular? These questions constitute the central theme of this book. The material treated in this publication may serve as reference for the segment of the high-energy community actively engaged in heavy-quark physics.

Heavy Flavour Physics: a Probe of Nature’s Grand Design

Edward F. Redish

Matilde Vicentini

Physics Education research is a young field with a strong tradition in many countries. However, it has only recently received full recognition of its specificity and relevance for the growth and improvement of the culture of Physics in contemporary Society for different levels and populations. This may be due on one side to the fact that teaching, therefore education, is part of the job of university researchers and it has often been implicitly assumed that the competences required for good research activity also guarantee good teaching practice. On the other side, and perhaps more important, is the fact that the problems to be afforded in doing research in education are complex problems that require a knowledge base not restricted to the disciplinary physics knowledge but enlarged to include cognitive science, communication science, history and philosophy. The topics discussed here look at some of the facets of the problem by considering the interplay of the development of cognitive models for learning Physics with some reflections on the Physics contents for contemporary and future society with the analysis of teaching strategies and the role of experiments the issue of assessmen"

Research on Physics Education

Advanced Plasma Theory

" For a long time after the discovery in 1964, by Christenson, Cronin, Fitch and Turlay, that the long-lived neutral kaon decays both into three and into two pions, which has since been taken as proof of CP violation, successive new and more precise experiments confirmed the original evidence and provided results compatible with a phenomenological description confining the CP violation to the mixing between neutral kaons and antikaons. However the Standard Model, with three generations of quarks, linking as it does CP violation to the presence of a single non trivial phase in the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa quark mixing matrix, implies that if CP violation exists at all, then it is a general property of weak interactions, appearing in transitions were amplitudes involving all three quark families interfere with each other, producing effects with a magnitude related to that of the CKM coefficients. This fact has stimulated an impressive amount of theoretical work leading in many cases to precise predictions. This publication reviews the field, from both the theoretical and experimental point of view, while planning for the forthcoming experimentation at LHC and considering possible new facilities for kaon, B meson and neutrino physics. "

From Quarks to Leptons

CP Violation

Vladimir Moiseevich Agranovich

Giuseppe C. La Rocca

This volume explores high-pressure phenomena, the third fundamental variable altering materials (after the variables of temperature and chemical composition). Pressure is in many ways the most remarkable as it spans some 60 orders of magnitude in the universe.

Science and Applications

Organic Nanostructures

Jürgen Ehlers

Isolated Gravitating Systems in General Relativity, Varenna on Lake Como, Villa Monastero, 28th June-10th July 1976

The nucleus and its constituents are a challenging problem. The lectures collected in this book present a broad and comprehensive review of the current knowledge about nuclei.They cover topics such as searching for signatures of the quarks in nuclei with electromagnetic probes and, at much higher energies, for signatures of the quark-gluon plasma in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions. The attempts to obtain new nuclei in the laboratory are also discussed, as well as the central role played by nuclear physics in the development of weak interactions. Progress in all these areas rests on a deeper theoretical handling of the nuclear and nucleon’s structure. The latter can also be addressed by relying on numerical solutions of QCD on a discrete space-time lattice. The advancement of computational capabilities has spurred a growing interest in this approach. Finally, the book deals with different paths toward solving non-perturbative QCD.

Unfolding the Matter of Nuclei

International School of Physics Enrico Fermi

Although first proposed by Einstein in 1924, Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in a gas was not achieved until 1995 when, using a combination of laser cooling and trapping, and magnetic trapping and evaporation, it was first observed in rubidium and then in lithium and sodium, cooled down to extremely low temperatures. This book brought together many leaders in both theory and experiment on Bose-Einstein condensation in gases. Their lectures provided a detailed coverage of the experimental techniques for the creation and study of BEC, as well as the theoretical foundation for understanding the properties of this novel system. This volume provides the first systematic review of the field and the many developments that have taken place in the past three years.

Condensazione Di Bose-Einstein Nei Gas Atomici

Alfredo Dupasquier

Allen P. Mills

Roberto S. Brusa

Divided in two parts, this book presents results and speculations regarding future experiments where positron-positron interaction is an essential factor, as well as experiments with single positrons which nevertheless require positron storage or intense primary sources. It also focuses on the production of high positron fluxes and densities.

Società italiana di fisica

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