This book discusses group theoretical methods and their applications in physics, chemistry, and biology. It covers traditional subjects including Lie group and representation theory, special functions, foundations of quantum mechanics, and elementary particle, nuclear, atomic, and molecular physics. More recent areas discussed are supersymmetry, superstrings and quantum gravity, integrability, nonlinear systems and quantum chaos, semigroups, time asymmetry and resonances, condensed matter,...

'Written by young theoretical physicists who are experts in the field, this volume is meant both to provide an introduction to the field and to offer a review of the latest developments, not discussed in many other existing books, for senior researchers. It will also appeal to scientists who do not work directly on LQG but are interested in issues at the interface of general relativity and quantum physics.'CERN CourierThis volume presents a snapshot of the state-of-the-art ...

The important changes quantum mechanics has undergone in recent years are reflected in this approach for students. A strong narrative and over 300 worked problems lead the student from experiment, through general principles of the theory, to modern applications. Stepping through results allows students to gain a thorough understanding. Starting with basic quantum mechanics, the book moves on to more advanced theory, followed by applications, perturbation methods and special fields, and end...

We have written this book in order to provide a single compact source for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as for professional physicists who want to understand the essentials of supersymmetric quantum mechanics. It is an outgrowth of a seminar course taught to physics and mathematics juniors and seniors at Loyola University Chicago, and of our own research over a quarter of a century.

Going beyond standard introductory texts, Mathematical Optics: Classical, Quantum, and Computational Methods brings together many new mathematical techniques from optical science and engineering research. Profusely illustrated, the book makes the material accessible to students and newcomers to the field.Divided into six parts, the text presents state-of-the-art mathematical methods and applications in classical optics, quantum optics, and image processing.

This book provides an introductory albeit solid presentation of path integration techniques as applied to the field of stochastic processes. The subject began with the work of Wiener during the 1920's, corresponding to a sum over random trajectories, anticipating by two decades Feynman's famous work on the path integral representation of quantum mechanics. However, the true trigger for the application of these techniques within nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and stochastic processes ...

The search for a quantum theory of the gravitational field is one of the great open problems in theoretical physics. This book presents a self-contained discussion of the concepts, methods and applications that can be expected in such a theory. The two main approaches to its construction -- the direct quantisation of Einstein's general theory of relativity and string theory -- are covered. Whereas the first attempts to construct a viable theory for the gravitational field alone, string theory...

The concept of time has fascinated humanity throughout recorded history, and it remains one of the biggest mysteries in science and philosophy. Time is clearly one of the fundamental building blocks of the universe and thus a deeper understanding of nature at a fundamental level also demands a comprehension of time. Furthermore, the origins of the universe are closely intertwined with the puzzle of time: Did time emerge at the Big Bang? Why does the arrow of time ‘conspire’ with the order ...

As a record of an international meeting devoted to the physical and mathematical aspects of group theory, GROUP 24: Physical and Mathematical Aspects of Symmetries provides an important selection of informative articles describing recent advances in the field. The applications of group theory presented in this book deal not only with the traditional fields of physics, but also include such disciplines as chemistry and biology. Plenary session contributions are represented by 18 longer arti...

This book contains contributions from the Spanish Relativity Meeting, ERE 2012, held inGuimarães, Portugal, September 2012. It features more than 70 papers on a range of topics in general relativity and gravitation, from mathematical cosmology, numerical relativity and black holes to string theory and quantum gravity.Under the title "Progress in Mathematical Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology," ERE 2012 was attended by an exceptional international list of over a hundred particip...

This book aims to provide a compact and unified introduction to the most important aspects in the physics of non-equilibrium systems. It first introduces stochastic processes and some modern tools and concepts that have proved their usefulness to deal with non-equilibrium systems from a purely probabilistic angle. The aim is to show the important role played by fluctuations in far-from-equilibrium situations, where noise can promote order and organization, switching among non-equilibrium s...

Quantum entanglement (QE) is one of the most, if not the most, mysterious, and yet most promising subjects of current physics. With applications in cryptographic space-to-space, space-to-earth, and fiber communications, in addition to teleportation and quantum computing, QE goes beyond fascination and into the pragmatic spheres of commerce and the military.With the growing population of engineers in need of a transparent, pragmatic, and direct introduction to QE and its application...