Super speed, incredible strength, the ability to fly, throw fire, read minds or change forms. What superpower would you choose if you could? Would you be the hero or the villain? And how would it affect your relationships?The challenge of connection, secrets, and the murky line between good and evil are explored in this collection of 11 original romances by:Kim Strattford – Flying Fast, Falling Hard (M/F)E.D. Gonzalez – Where There’s Smoke (M/M)Naomi Hinchen –...

The main goal of the book is to provide a systematic and didactic approach to the physics and technology of free-electron lasers. Numerous figures are used for illustrating the underlying ideas and concepts and links to other fields of physics are provided. After an introduction to undulator radiation and the low-gain FEL, the one-dimensional theory of the high-gain FEL is developed in a systematic way. Particular emphasis is put on explaining and justifying the various assumptions and app...

The book describes the experimental techniques employed to study surfaces and interfaces. The emphasis is on the experimental method. Therefore all chapters start with an introduction of the scientific problem, the theory necessary to understand how the technique works and how to understand the results. Descriptions of real experimental setups, experimental results at different systems are given to show both the strength and the limits of the technique. In a final part the new developments...

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the field of Higgs boson physics. It offers the first in-depth review of the complete results in connection with the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and based on the full dataset for the years 2011 to 2012. The fundamental concepts and principles of Higgs physics are introduced and the important searches prior to the advent of the Large Hadron Collider are briefly summarized.Lastly, the discovery and first ...

This dissertation focuses on the study of novel high-gain free-electron laser (FEL) operation schemes with external seed lasers. The technique of manipulating the phase space of the electron beam, which is widely used in novel seeded FEL schemes, is systematically studied. Several novel FEL schemes are proposed for the generation of intense coherent FEL pulses with short wavelength, sub-femtosecond pulse length or multiple carrier frequency properties, which meet the needs of FEL users. Re...

Nuclei and nuclear reactions offer a unique setting for investigating three (and in some cases even all four) of the fundamental forces in nature. Nuclei have been shown – mainly by performing scattering experiments with electrons, muons and neutrinos – to be extended objects with complex internal structures: constituent quarks; gluons, whose exchange binds the quarks together; sea-quarks, the ubiquitous virtual quark-antiquark pairs and last but not least, clouds of virtual mesons, surrou...

This volume provides detailed insight into the field of precision spectroscopy and fundamental physics with particles confined in traps. It comprises experiments with electrons and positrons, protons and antiprotons, antimatter and highly charged ions together with corresponding theoretical background. Such investigations represent stringent tests of quantum electrodynamics and the Standard model, antiparticle and antimatter research, test of fundamental symmetries, constants and their pos...

The main theme of this book is the interaction of electrons with electromagnetic waves in the presence of periodic and quasi-periodic structures in vacuum, in view of applications in the design and operation of particle accelerators.The first part of the book is concerned with the textbook-like presentation of the basic material, in particular reviewing elementary electromagnetic phenomena and electron dynamics. The second part of the book describes the current models for beam-wave...

This lecture note describes the main analytical approaches to stochastic cooling. The first is the time domain picture, in which the beam is rapidly sampled and a statistical analysis is used to describe the cooling behaviour. The second is the frequency domain picture, which is particularly useful since the observations made on the beam are mainly in this domain. This second picture is developed in detail to assess key components of modern cooling theory like mixing and signal shielding a...

In this book, the anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) model is explored by searching for charged winos with their subsequent decays collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).The author develops a new method, called “re-tracking,” to detect charged winos that decay before reaching the Semiconductor Tracker (SCT) detector. Because the nominal tracking algorithm at the ATLAS experiment requires at least seven successive hits in the inner tracking ...

Neutrons are extremely versatile probes for investigating structure and dynamics in condensed matter. Due to their large penetration depth, they are ideal for in-situ measurements of samples situated in sophisticated and advanced environments. The advent of new high-intensity neutron sources and instruments, as well as the development of new real-time techniques, allows the tracking of transformation processes in condensed matter on a microscopic scale. The present volume provides a review...

Solid state field-effect devices such as organic and inorganic-channel thin-film transistors (TFTs) have been expected to promote advances in display and sensor electronics. The operational stabilities of such TFTs are thus important, strongly depending on the nature and density of charge traps present at the channel/dielectric interface or in the thin-film channel itself.This book contains how to characterize these traps, starting from the device physics of field-effect transistor...