Proceedings Of The International School Of Physics Enrico Fermi

Metrology is the study of measurement. It includes all theoretical and practical aspects of measurement and may be divided into three subfields: Scientific or fundamental metrology concerns the establishment of measurement units, unit systems, development of new measurement methods, realization of measurement standards and the transfer of traceability from these standards to users in society. This handbook contains articles dealing with general topics of measurement and articles on particular subjects in mechanics and acoustics, electricity, optics, temperature, time and frequency, chemistry, medicine and particles. The contributions of the first part are sumamrized as follows. Introduction Units Fundamental Constants Fundamentals of Materials Measurement and Testing Measurement of Mass Desnity Measurement and Instrumentation of Flow Ultrasonics Measurement of Basic Electromagnetic Quantities Quantum Electrical Standards Metrology of Time and Frequency Temperature Measurement Metrology in Medicine

Impressive progress has been made in the field of laser-plasma acceleration in the last decade, with outstanding achievements from both experimental and theoretical viewpoints. Closely exploiting the development of ultra-intense, ultrashort pulse lasers, laser-plasma acceleration has developed rapidly, achieving accelerating gradients of the order of tens of GeV/m, and making the prospect of miniature accelerators a more realistic possibility.This book presents the lectures delivered at the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics and summer school: 'Laser-Plasma Acceleration', held in Varenna, Italy, in June 2011.

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.

This book focuses on quantum groups, i.e., continuous deformations of Lie groups, and their applications in physics. These algebraic structures have been studied in the last decade by a growing number of mathematicians and physicists, and are found to underlie many physical systems of interest. They do provide, in fact, a sort of common algebraic ground for seemingly very different physical problems. As it has happened for supersymmetry, the q-group symmetries are bound to play a vital role in physics, even in fundamental theories like gauge theory or gravity. In fact q-symmetry can be considered itself as a generalization of supersymmetry, evident in the q-commutator formulation. The hope that field theories on q-groups are naturally reguralized begins to appear founded, and opens new perspectives for quantum gravity. The topics covered in this book include: conformal field theories and quantum groups, gauge theories of quantum groups, anyons, differential calculus on quantum groups and non-commutative geometry, poisson algebras, 2-dimensional statistical models, (2+1) quantum gravity, quantum groups and lattice physics, inhomogeneous q-groups, q-Poincaregroup and deformed gravity and gauging of W-algebras.