This volume is a collection of the Nobel Lectures delivered by the prizewinners, together with their biographies, portraits and the presentation speeches for the period 1996 ? 2000. Each Nobel Lecture is based on the work that won the prize. This volume of inspiring lectures by outstanding physicists should be on the bookshelf of every keen student, teacher and professor of physics as well as of those in related fields.Below is a list of the prizewinners during the period 1996 ? 2000 with a description of the works which won them their prizes.(1996) D M LEE, D D OSHEROFF & R C RICHARDSON ? for their discovery of superfluidity in helium-3; (1997) S CHU, C COHEN-TANNOUDJI & W D PHILLIPS ? for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light; (1998) R B LAUGHLIN, H L ST™RMER & D C TSUI ? for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations; (1999) G 't HOOFT & M J G VELTMAN ? for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics; (2000) Z I ALFEROV & H KROEMER ? for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed and opto-electronics and; J S KILBY ? for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.

In this richly-illustrated 2004 book the author combines history with real science. Using an original approach he presents the major achievements of twentieth-century physics - for example, relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic and nuclear physics, the invention of the transistor and the laser, superconductivity, binary pulsars, and the Bose-Einstein condensate - each as they emerged as the product of the genius of those physicists whose labours, since 1901, have been crowned with a Nobel Prize. Here, in the form of a year-by-year chronicle, biographies and revealing personal anecdotes help bring to life the main events of the past hundred years. The work of the most famous physicists of the twentieth century - great names, like the Curies, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Rutherford, and Schrödinger - is presented, often in the words and imagery of the prize-winners themselves.

It is not an exaggeration to say that one of the most exciting predictions of Einstein's theory of gravitation is that there may exist "black holes": putative objects whose gravitational fields are so strong that no physical bodies or signals can break free of their pull and escape. The proof that black holes do exist, and an analysis of their properties, would have a significance going far beyond astrophysics. Indeed, what is involved is not just the discovery of yet another even if extremely remarkable, astro physical object, but a test of the correctness of our understanding of the properties of space and time in extremely strong gravitational fields. Theoretical research into the properties of black holes, and into the possible corol laries of the hypothesis that they exist, has been carried out with special vigor since the beginning of the 1970's. In addition to those specific features of black holes that are important for the interpretation of their possible astrophysical manifestations, the theory has revealed a number of unexpected characteristics of physical interactions involving black holes. By the middle of the 1980's a fairly detailed understanding had been achieved of the properties of the black holes, their possible astrophysical manifestations, and the specifics of the various physical processes involved. Even though a completely reliable detection of a black hole had not yet been made at that time, several objects among those scrutinized by astrophysicists were considered as strong candidates to be confirmed as being black holes.

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The exploration of the subnuclear world is done through increasingly complex experiments covering a wide range of energy and performed in a large variety of environments from particle accelerators, underground detectors to satellites and space laboratory. The achievement of these research programs calls for novel techniques, new materials and instrumentation to be used in detectors, often of large scale. Therefore, fundamental physics is at the forefront of technological advance and also leads to many applications. Among these, medical applications have a particular importance due to health and social benefits they bring to the public.

Introduced as a quantum extension of Maxwell's classical theory, quantum electrodynamics has been the first example of a Quantum Field Theory (QFT). Eventually, QFT has become the framework for the discussion of all fundamental interactions at the microscopic scale except, possibly, gravity. More surprisingly, it has also provided a framework for the understanding of second order phase transitions in statistical mechanics. As this work illustrates, QFT is the natural framework for the discussion of most systems involving an infinite number of degrees of freedom with local couplings. These systems range from cold Bose gases at the condensation temperature (about ten nanokelvin) to conventional phase transitions (from a few degrees to several hundred) and high energy particle physics up to a TeV, altogether more than twenty orders of magnitude in the energy scale. Therefore, this text sets out to present a work in which the strong formal relations between particle physics and the theory of critical phenomena are systematically emphasized. This option explains some of the choices made in the presentation. A formulation in terms of field integrals has been adopted to study the properties of QFT. The language of partition and correlation functions has been used throughout, even in applications of QFT to particle physics. Renormalization and renormalization group properties are systematically discussed. The notion of effective field theory and the emergence of renormalisable theories are described. The consequences for fine tuning and triviality issue are emphasized. This fifth edition has been updated and fully revised, e.g. in particle physics with progress in neutrino physics and the discovery of the Higgs boson. The presentation has been made more homogeneous througout the volume, and emphasis has been put on the notion of effective field theory and discussion of the emergence of renormalisable theories.

This volume is a collection of dedicated reviews covering all aspects of theoretical high energy physics and some aspects of solid state physics. Some of the papers are broad reviews of topics that span the entire field while others are surveys of authors' personal achievements. This is the most comprehensive review collection reflecting state of the art at the end of 2004. An important and unique aspect is a special effort the authors have invested in making the presentation pedagogical.

Photonic Quantum Technologies Brings together top-level research results to enable the development of practical quantum devices In Photonic Quantum Technologies: Science and Applications, the editor Mohamed Benyoucef and a team of distinguished scientists from different disciplines deliver an authoritative, one-stop overview of up-to-date research on various quantum systems. This unique book reviews the state-of-the-art research in photonic quantum technologies and bridges the fundamentals of the field with applications to provide readers from academia and industry, in one-location resource, with cutting-edge knowledge they need to have to understand and develop practical quantum systems for application in e.g., secure quantum communication, quantum metrology, and quantum computing. The book also addresses fundamental and engineering challenges en route to workable quantum devices and ways to circumvent or overcome them. Readers will also find: A thorough introduction to the fundamentals of quantum technologies, including discussions of the second quantum revolution (by Nobel Laureate Alain Aspect), solid-state quantum optics, and non-classical light and quantum entanglement Comprehensive explorations of emerging quantum technologies and their practical applications, including quantum repeaters, satellite-based quantum communication, quantum networks, silicon quantum photonics, integrated quantum systems, and future vision Practical discussions of quantum technologies with artificial atoms, color centers, 2D materials, molecules, atoms, ions, and optical clocks Perfect for molecular and solid-state physicists, Photonic Quantum Technologies: Science and Applications will also benefit industrial and academic researchers in photonics and quantum optics, graduate students in the field; engineers, chemists, and computer and material scientists.

TheFifthHEIDELBERGInternationalConferenceonDarkMatterinAst- and Particle Physics, DARK 2004, took place at Texas A&M University, College Station Texas, USA, October 3–9, 2004. It was, after Cape Town 2002, the second conference of this series held outside Germany. The earlier meetings, starting in 1996, were held in Heidelberg. Dark Matter is still one of the most exciting and central ?elds of ast- physics, particle physics and cosmology. The conference covered, as usual for this series, a large range of topics, theoretical and experimental. Theoretical talks covered SUSY/SUGRA phenomenology, which provides at present a preferred theoretical framework for the existence of cold dark matter. Also included were other possible explanations of dark matter such as SUSY Q balls, exciting New Symmetries, etc. The most important experiments in the underground search for cold and hot dark matter were presented. Talks describing the current experimental dark matter bounds, what might be obtained in the near future, and the reach of future large (i.e. one ton) detectors were given. The potential of future colliders to correlate accelerator physics with dark matter searches was also outlined. Thus the reader will be able to see the present status and future prospects in the search for dark matter. The exciting astronomical evidence for dark matter and corresponding observations concerning the Milky Way’s black hole, high-redshift clusters, wakes in dark matter halos were other important topics at the conference.