Impressive progress has been made in the field of laser-plasma acceleration in the last decade, with outstanding achievements from both experimental and theoretical viewpoints. Closely exploiting the development of ultra-intense, ultrashort pulse lasers, laser-plasma acceleration has developed rapidly, achieving accelerating gradients of the order of tens of GeV/m, and making the prospect of miniature accelerators a more realistic possibility.This book presents the lectures delivered at the Enrico Fermi International School of Physics and summer school: 'Laser-Plasma Acceleration', held in Varenna, Italy, in June 2011.

The Earth is the only planet in the Solar System where liquid water is present on the surface, a condition that seems necessary for the development of life. Its sisters Venus and Mars are extremely different. Why did these three planets, born under fairly comparable conditions, evolve to the conditions we observe today? Understanding the physical or chemical factors that are at the origin of such divergent evolutions is a first step in an approach to the problem of the origin of life on Earth.

This book illustrates new developments in the fields of space and solar physics, stellar physics, extragalactic physics and cosmology. It also elaborates upon the progress of laboratory plasma physics. One of the topics discussed is the existence of collective processes, both linear and non-linear, that can explain key elements of accretion physics, magnetic reconnection, the formation of 'strange' particle distributions, particle scattering phenomena, etc. Astrophysical plasma are dominated by turbulent or quasi-turbulent processes which interactively associate instabilities, radiation processes and plasma-wave scattering. The resulting scenario, which is outside thermodynamics and conventional statistical physics, is too difficult to describe theoretically, but today there are large-scale experiments and powerful computational tools allowing for the exploration of an almost similarly complex variety of phenomena. Several contributions to this book present indications of the influence of nonlinear phenomena in astrophysical applications. This work marks the fast growth of plasma astrophysics thanks to new observations in the high energy band of the spectrum on the one hand and the possibility of validating and bringing to light relevant new theories by increasingly sophisticated machines on the other.

A self-contained guide to the role played by neutrinos in the Universe and how their properties influence cosmological and astrophysical observations.

From July to December in 1945, ten German scientists, Bagge, Diebner, Gerlach, Hahn, Harteck, Heisenberg, Korsching, von Laue, von Weizsacker, and Wirtz, were held and clandestinely recorded by the British. The scientists discuss their progress and react to the bombing of Hiroshima.

An introduction to cosmology, this text has an emphasis on the basic principles of the subject. It seeks to explain the application of mechanics, thermodynamics and particle physics to questions on the universe as a whole. The volume also explores: general equations of state; unifying the treatment of dust; radiation; cosmological constant, or exotic components; and the treatment of inhomogeneities (clumpy universe) and their effects on observations.

"Neutrinos in Particle Physics, Astronomy and Cosmology" provides a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to neutrino physics, neutrino astronomy and neutrino cosmology. The intrinsic properties and fundamental interactions of neutrinos are described, as is the phenomenology of lepton flavor mixing, seesaw mechanisms and neutrino oscillations. The cosmic neutrino background, stellar neutrinos, supernova neutrinos and ultrahigh-energy cosmic neutrinos, together with the cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry and other roles of massive neutrinos in cosmology, are discussed in detail. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the fields of particle physics, particle astrophysics and cosmology. Dr. Zhizhong Xing is a professor at the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; Dr. Shun Zhou is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Physics, Germany.

This book is a new look at one of the hottest topics in contemporary science, Dark Matter. It is the pioneering text dedicated to sterile neutrinos as candidate particles for Dark Matter, challenging some of the standard assumptions which may be true for some Dark Matter candidates but not for all. So, this can be seen either as an introduction to a specialized topic or an out-of-the-box introduction to the field of Dark Matter in general. No matter if you are a theoretical particle physicist, an observational astronomer, or a ground based experimentalist, no matter if you are a grad student or an active researcher, you can benefit from this text, for a simple reason: a non-standard candidate for Dark Matter can teach you a lot about what we truly know about our standard picture of how the Universe works.