This book is a concise primer on galactic radio astronomy for undergraduate and graduate students, and provides wide coverage of galactic astronomy and astrophysics such as the physics of interstellar matter and the dynamics and structure of the Milky Way Galaxy and galaxies. Radio astronomy and its technological development have led to significant progress in galactic astronomy and contributed to understanding interstellar matter and galactic structures.The book begins with the fu...

This book on astronomical measurement takes a fresh approach to teaching the subject. After discussing some general principles, it follows the chain of measurement through atmosphere, imaging, detection, spectroscopy, timing, and hypothesis testing. The various wavelength regimes are covered in each section, emphasising what is the same, and what is different. The author concentrates on the physics of detection and the principles of measurement, aiming to make this logically coherent.

The high accuracy of modern astronomical spatial-temporal reference systems has made them considerably complex. This book offers a comprehensive overview of such systems. It begins with a discussion of ‘The Problem of Time’, including recent developments in the art of clock making (e.g., optical clocks) and various time scales. The authors address the definitions and realization of spatial coordinates by reference to remote celestial objects such as quasars. After an extensive treatment of...

This book lays out a new, general theory of light propagation and imaging through Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. Current theory is based on the – now widely doubted – assumption of Kolmogorov turbulence. The new theory is based on a generalized atmosphere, the turbulence characteristics of which can be established, as needed, from readily measurable properties of point-object, or star, images.The pessimistic resolution predictions of Kolmogorov theory led to lax optical tolerance pr...

This thesis covers a diverse set of topics related to space-based gravitational wave detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). The core of the thesis is devoted to the preprocessing of the interferometric link data for a LISA constellation, specifically developing optimal Kalman filters to reduce arm length noise due to clock noise. The approach is to apply Kalman filters of increasing complexity to make optimal estimates of relevant quantities such as constellation ...

The search for gravitational radiation with optical interferometers is gaining momentum worldwide. Beside the VIRGO and GEO gravitational wave observatories in Europe and the two LIGOs in the United States, which have operated successfully during the past decade, further observatories are being completed (KAGRA in Japan) or planned (ILIGO in India). The sensitivity of the current observatories, although spectacular, has not allowed direct discovery of gravitational waves. The advanced dete...

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...

Synchrotron radiation is today extensively used for fundamental and applied research in many different fields of science. Its exceptional characteristics in terms of intensity, brilliance, spectral range, time structure and now also coherence pushed many experimental techniques to previously un-reachable limits, enabling the performance of experiments unbelievable only few years ago.The book gives an up-to-date overview of synchrotron radiation research today with a view to the fut...

In this book the applicability and the utility of two statistical approaches for understanding dark energy and dark matter with gravitational lensing measurement are introduced.For cosmological constraints on the nature of dark energy, morphological statistics called Minkowski functionals (MFs) to extract the non-Gaussian information of gravitational lensing are studied. Measuring lensing MFs from the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope Lensing survey (CFHTLenS), the author clearly shows...

This book provides the reader with a detailed and captivating account of the story where, for the first time, physicists ventured into proposing a new force of nature beyond the four known ones - the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, and gravitation - based entirely on the reanalysis of existing experimental data.Back in 1986, Ephraim Fischbach, Sam Aronson, Carrick Talmadge and their collaborators proposed a modification of Newton’s Law of universal gravitation. Underlying ...

This thesis describes one of the most precise experimental tests of Lorentz symmetry in electrodynamics by light-speed anisotropy measurement with an asymmetric optical ring cavity. The author aims to answer the fundamental, hypothetical debate on Lorentz symmetry in the Universe. He concludes that the symmetry is protected within an error of 10-15, which means providing one of the most stringent upper limits on the violation of the Lorentz symmetry in the framework of the Standard Model E...

The work presented in this book is a major step towards understanding and eventually suppressing background in the direct search for dark matter particles scattering off germanium detectors. Although the flux of cosmic muons is reduced by many orders of magnitude in underground laboratories, the remaining energetic muons induce neutrons through various processes, neutrons that can potentially mimic a dark matter signal. This thesis describes the measurement of muon-induced neutrons over mo...