Thierry Lahaye - Böcker

This book gathers the lecture notes of courses given at Session CVII of the summer school in physics, entitled "Current Trends in Atomic Physics" and held in July, 2016 in Les Houches, France. Atomic physics provides a paradigm for exploring few-body quantum systems with unparalleled control. In recent years, this ability has been applied in diverse areas including condensed matter physics, high energy physics, chemistry and ultra-fast phenomena as well as foundational aspects of quantum physics. This book addresses these topics by presenting developments and current trends via a series of tutorials and lectures presented by international leading investigators.

In many fields of modern physics, classical mechanics plays a key role. However, the teaching of mechanics at the undergraduate level often confines the applications to old-fashioned devices such as combinations of springs and masses, pendulums, or rolling cylinders.This book provides an illustration of classical mechanics in the form of problems (at undergraduate level) inspired — for the most part — by contemporary research in physics, and resulting from the teaching and research experience of the authors. A noticeable feature of this book is that it emphasizes the experimental aspects of a large majority of problems. All problems are accompanied by detailed solutions: the calculations are clarified and their physical significance commented on in-depth. Within the solutions, the basic concepts from undergraduate lectures in classical mechanics, necessary to solve the problems, are recalled when needed. The authors systematically mention recent bibliographical references (most of them freely accessible via the Internet) allowing the reader to deepen their understanding of the subject, and thus contributing to the building of a general culture in physics.