North-Holland Personal Library – serie

Atomic collisions offer some unique opportunities to study atomic structure and reaction mechanisms in experiment and theory, especially for projectiles of high atomic number provided by modern accelerators. The book is meant as an introduction into the field and provides some basic theoretical understanding of the atomic processes occurring when a projectile hits another atom. It also furnishes the tools for a mathematical description, however, without going deeper into the technical details, which can be found in the literature given. With this aim, the focus is on reactions, in which only a single active electron participates. Collisional excitation, ionization and charge transfer are discussed for collision velocities ranging from slow to comparable to thespeed of light. For the highest projectile velocities, energy can be converted into mass, so that electron-positron pairs are created. In addition to the systematic treatment, a theoretical section specializes on electron-electroncorrelations and three chapters are devoted to selected highlights bordering to surface science and to physics with antiprotons.

The third edition of Van Kampen's standard work has been revised and updated. The main difference with the second edition is that the contrived application of the quantum master equation in section 6 of chapter XVII has been replaced with a satisfactory treatment of quantum fluctuations. Apart from that throughout the text corrections have been made and a number of references to later developments have been included. From the recent textbooks the following are the most relevant.C.W.Gardiner, Quantum Optics (Springer, Berlin 1991)D.T. Gillespie, Markov Processes (Academic Press, San Diego 1992)W.T. Coffey, Yu.P.Kalmykov, and J.T.Waldron, The Langevin Equation (2nd edition, World Scientific, 2004) Comprehensive coverage of fluctuations and stochastic methods for describing them A must for students and researchers in applied mathematics, physics and physical chemistry

The first edition of this highly successful book appeared in 1975 and evolved from lecture notes for classes in physical optics, diffraction physics and electron microscopy given to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. The book deals with electron diffraction and diffraction from disordered or imperfect crystals and employed an approach using the Fourier transform from the beginning instead of as an extension of a Fourier series treatment.This third revised edition is a considerably rewritten and updated version which now includes all important developments which have taken place in recent years.

This book offers an elementary and unified introduction to the non-perturbative results obtained in relativistic quantum field theory based on classical soliton and instanton solutions. Such solutions are derived for a variety of models and classified by topological indices. The methods are then developed for quantizing solitons to obtain quantum particles. Vacuum tunneling, &ugr;-vacua and the dilute-instanton-gas approximation are described in detail. Other instanton effects related to quark-quark forces, confinement, the U(1) problem and Borel summability are also discussed. The emphasis is on presenting the basic ideas in a simple pedagogical way. Technical tools like functional methods, Grassman integrals, homotopy classification, collective co-ordinates etc. are developed ab initio.The presentation of this work is kept at a fairly simple level and ideas are developed through illustrative examples. Techniques not covered in older field theory textbooks, such as functional integral methods, are presented in some detail to the necessary extent. These techniques are important in their own right. Although the book is mainly addressed to particle physicists and quantum field theorists, several portions will be of relevance to other branches of physics, particularly statistical mechanics. These include three chapters devoted to deriving classical soliton and instanton solutions and one on collective co-ordinates, as well as sections devoted to general techniques.