Linear acoustics was thought to be fully encapsulated in physics texts of the 1950s, but this view has been changed by developments in physics during the last four decades. There is a significant new amount of theory that can be used to address problems in linear acoustics and vibration, but only a small amount of reported work does so. This book is an attempt to bridge the gap between theoreticians and practitioners, as well as the gap between quantum and acoustic. Tutorial chapters provide introductions to each of the major aspects of the physical theory and are written using the appropriate terminology of the acoustical community. The book will act as a quick-start guide to the new methods while providing a wide-ranging introduction to the physical concepts.

This book is a translation of 'Physik und Technik des Ultraschalls', originally published in 1988 by S. Hirzel Verlag, Stuttgart. As in the German edition, it is based on lectures on ultrasound which the author has given over the past fifteen years to students of electrical engineer ing and physics at the Rheinisch-Westfiilische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany. Its purpose is to explain and describe the peculiarities of high frequency sound with general acoustics as a foundation. It is these peculiarities which have led to the development of specific methods of sound generation and sound detection on the one hand and are relevant to the way ultrasound propagates in various materials, and which are the origin of a wide range of technical applications on the other. The first part of the book is devoted to the fundamentals of ultrasonics. Since the reader is not expected to have a knowledge of general acoustics, introductory chapters survey the basic ideas and laws of acoustics without systematically deriving the formulae pre sented. Likewise, the third chapter, which deals with the radiation and diffraction of sound, is still fairly general, although it is somewhat more adapted to the specific requirements of ultrasound. In the three subsequent chapters, the generation and detection or measurement of ultrasound is dealt with. The seventh chapter is a digression on the peculiarities of the hypersonic range.

This book contains 17 invited papers and 80 communicated papers presented at the International Symposium on Physical Acoustics, held at the University Campus of Kortrijk, Belgium, from 19-22 June 1990. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Campus was celebrated with special activi ties such as concerts, exhibitions and scientific meetings. This symposium was a part of the celebration. The 120 participants came from 18 different countries. Among the largest groups we mention 32 French contributions and 19 contributions from the U.S.S.R. We especially thank Prof. V.V. Proklov from Moscow and Prof. S.V. Kulakov from Leningrad who helped us with the distribution of invitations in the U.S.S.R. We also thank Prof. G. Quentin and Ir B. Poiree from Paris who endeav oured to inform all French acousticians. We thank all the lecturers for their effort in producing the material for the book in time. The invited lectures have been collected and retyped by Prof. M. Breazeale (U.S.A.), while the contributed papers were collec ted by Prof. O. Leroy and retyped in Belgium. The first 200 pages of the book comprise the invited lectures, not classified by topic, but are in alphabetical order with reference to the first author. The second part of the book contains the contributed papers and posters also classified in alphabetical order according to the first author.

This study is devoted to the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (S-Z) effect, and important related topics in cluster and CMB research. S-Z science is about to be significantly enhanced by unique, multi-faceted cluster and cosmological yield, at a level of precision in accord with the high standards of the current era that was heralded by spectacular achievements in cosmological CMB research. The pedagogical reviews and technical seminars included in this volume represent most of the important current topics in S-Z work and in the astrophysics of clusters. The publication touches upon all relevant aspects of the S-Z effect and its use as a precise cluster and cosmological probe. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the detection of the CMB by Penzias and Wilson (in 1964), there is a chapter devoted to the history of this discovery. In his fascinating account of their work, he outlines also some lessons pertinent to current scientific issues. Other chapters discuss very interesting related observational work in Europe and the US.

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.

This collection of papers presented at the Enrico Fermi School considers the subject of synergetics as a firmly established field of interdisciplinary research, ranging from physics, chemistry and biology, to subjects like economy and sociology. These proceedings focus on the natural sciences.

This book is a snapshot of the vision shared by outstanding scientists on the key theoretical and experimental issues in Mesoscopic Physics. Quantum properties of electrons in solid state devices and transport in semiconducting and superconducting low-dimensional systems, are discussed, as well as the basis of quantum computing (entanglement, noise decoherence and read-out). Each chapter collects the material presented at a Varenna School course of last year, by leading experts in the field. The reader gets a flavour of how theorists and experimentalists are paving the way to the physical realization of solid state qubits, the basic units of the new logic and memory elements for quantum processing. He will be surprised in finding that mesoscopic solid state devices, which were invented only yesterday (think of the Single Electron Transistor, or the Cooper Pair Box) are currently used as charge-sensing applications in the equipment of frontier research laboratories. These devices contribute as probing systems to produce evidence on still unsettled questions in topics like the metal-insulator transition in disordered two dimensional systems, quantum Hall conductance in heterostructur"

This volume explores high-pressure phenomena, the third fundamental variable altering materials (after the variables of temperature and chemical composition). Pressure is in many ways the most remarkable as it spans some 60 orders of magnitude in the universe.