By Todor M Mishonov and Evgeni S Penev World Scientific
Hardback: £57 $88
E-book: $114
Drawing from the broad spectrum of phenomena, described in more than 100,000 articles on high-Tc superconductivity, the authors analyse the basic properties that can be understood within the framework of traditional methods of theoretical physics, e.g. for the overdoped cuprates. The book gives a pedagogical derivation of formulae describing the electron band-structure, penetration depth, specific heat, fluctuation conductivity, etc. Prediction of plasmons and their application for a new type of terahertz generators is also considered.
By H Fukaya et al. (ed.) World Scientific
Hardback: £93 $150
E-book: $195
This workshop was the sixth Nagoya strong-coupling gauge theory (SCGT) workshop and the first after Yoichiro Nambu, Makato Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in dynamical symmetry breaking. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss both theoretical and phenomenological aspects of SCGTs, with emphasis on the models to be tested in the LHC experiments.
By Anatoly Radyushkin World Scientific
Hardback: £109 $175
E-book: $223
These proceedings include talks given at the 4th Workshop on Exclusive Reactions at High Momentum Transfer at Jefferson Lab. The workshop focused on the application of a variety of exclusive reactions at high momentum-transfer, utilizing unpolarized and polarized beams and targets, to obtain information about nucleon ground-state and excited-state structure at short distances. This subject is central to the programmes of current accelerators and especially for planned future facilities.
By Lowry Kirkby Scion Publishing Ltd
Paperback: £27.99 $50
Lowry Kirkby once turned down an offer to study physics at Manchester University and instead went to Oxford. This was Manchester’s loss; she was clearly a model student, assiduous in producing, collating and annotating her lecture notes and using them to help her graduate with a top first-class degree in 2007. She has now turned these notes into a “student companion”.
As companions go, this is an excellent one and it should become a best friend to all physics undergraduates, particularly in those important, lonely weeks of study in the run-up to examinations. I encourage all lecturers to recommend this book to their students.
Lowry covers the bulk of the core physics required in degree programmes accredited by the Institute of Physics in the UK and most of the syllabus for the Graduate Record Examination in the US. This includes Newtonian mechanics and special relativity; electromagnetism; waves and optics; quantum physics; and thermal physics. These are taken to about the end of the second year of university study for a student majoring in physics. So, for example, the material goes as far as Fraunhofer diffraction in wave-optics, time-independent perturbation theory in quantum mechanics and the grand canonical partition function in statistical mechanics.
Clearly a single, relatively slim volume such as this (400 pages) cannot serve as a textbook for all these topics. But that is not its intention; it is meant as a supplement to the textbooks, a digest for students who have already studied and understood the details.
There are five aspects to the presentation of the material, which can be described as: commentary, summaries, boxed equations, derivations and worked examples. It all sits together very well indeed as a single-volume study aid. In a book with so much detail and so many equations, I found remarkably few errors or misprints. The author, proofreaders and editor are to be commended on the high standards of the production.
Do physics students still have bookshelves? If they do, then this book should have a place on all of them. But smart phones, tablets and e-readers now seem to be the preferred media. While the book is reasonably portable, an e-version would be just the sort of thing that today’s physics students would always want to have to hand.
By Barry M McCoy Oxford University Press
Hardback: £57.70 $99
Statistical mechanics is the study of systems where the number of interacting particles becomes infinite. Tremendous advances have been made over the past 50 years that have required the invention of entirely new fields of mathematics, such as quantum groups and affine Lie algebras. These have provided profound insights into both condensed matter physics and quantum field theory, but none of these advances are taught in graduate courses in statistical mechanics. This book is an attempt to correct this, beginning with theorems on the existence (and lack) of order for crystals and magnets and with the theory of critical phenomena, it continues by presenting the methods and results of 50 years of analytic and computer computations of phase transitions.
By Marjorie C Malley Oxford University Press
Hardback: £14.99 $21.95
Between 1899 and 1902, Polish physicist Marie Curie processed 100 kg of radioactive pitchblende ore – in 20 kg batches – by hand, in the courtyard of a leaky shed in Paris. The feat provided her with the atomic weight of radium and earned her a Nobel prize. But the research also left her with lifelong medical complications from exposure to radioactivity.
Marjorie C Malley’s comprehensive history of radioactivity captures the excitement, promise and tragedy of the “mysterious” field from its inception in the late 19th century to the present day. The narrative spans two continents and two world wars, taking in decorative uranium glassware, radium spas and atom bombs along the way. Avoiding technical detail, Malley explores the cultural, technological and scientific forces that shaped research in radioactivity, and relates the important personalities and discoveries that drove the field forward.
Malley’s cast spreads across France, Germany, the UK and Canada. We are introduced to Wilhelm Röntgen, discoverer of X-rays; Henri Becquerel, who noticed that invisible rays from uranium registered on photographic plates, even in the dark; and Marie Curie, who first applied electrical techniques to understanding radioactive substances and who discovered the elements radium and polonium in the process.
In Canada, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy investigated further the radioactivity of both uranium and thorium and found that in the course of emitting radiation they change into different elements. The shock of atomic transmutation – with its undertones of alchemy – was almost heresy to chemists at the time. When they returned to the UK, Rutherford went on to discover the atomic nucleus, while Soddy was the first to form the concept of isotopes.
Two aspects of Malley’s narrative stand out for me: the “reasonable” hypotheses that scientists put forward for the origins of radioactivity, which seem so outlandish now; and the shocking ignorance of the true medical dangers of radiation that prevailed until relatively late in the 20th century.
In fluorescent paint factories of the 1920s, workers wetted the tips of their brushes with their lips, swallowing radioactive radium in the process. Alpha radiation from the paint often led to the death of jaw tissue and mysterious cancers. Researchers regularly mixed radioactive solutions with their fingers: physicist Stefan Meyer had to give up playing the bass viol because of radiation damage to his fingers.
Malley’s clearly written text captures the intellectual excitement of early research into radioactivity, though I found her section on the cultural forces shaping radioactivity rather weak. Although she notes that individuals, scientific ideals, culture and nationalism (among others) triggered the spurt of research interest in radioactivity, I was unconvinced that research into radioactivity deserves a special place among the countless other scientific advances of the 20th century. Was its development really that unique? I also felt that in a history of radioactivity, the implications of using nuclear power – for good or evil – were rather glossed over in deference to scientific papers and super scientists.
In Radioactivity, Malley weaves disparate historical threads into an accessible and engaging narrative for the nonexpert. I would recommend this book, describing it as a well written and useful overview of the topic for students and teachers. Those seeking in-depth analysis of the implications of the technology – or biographies of the scientists involved – should look elsewhere.
Luis Alvarez – one of the greatest experimental physicists of the 20th century – combined the interests of a scientist, an inventor, a detective and an explorer. He left his mark on areas that ranged from radar through to cosmic rays, nuclear physics, particle accelerators, detectors and large-scale data analysis, as well as particles and astrophysics. On 19 November, some 200 people gathered at Berkeley to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. Alumni of the Alvarez group – among them physicists, engineers, programmers and bubble-chamber film scanners – were joined by his collaborators, family, present-day students and admirers, as well as scientists whose professional lineage traces back to him. Hosted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of California at Berkeley, the symposium reviewed his long career and lasting legacy.
A recurring theme of the symposium was, as one speaker put it, a “Shakespeare-type dilemma”: how could one person have accomplished all of that in one lifetime?
Beyond his own initiatives, Alvarez created a culture around him that inspired others to, as George Smoot put it, “think big,” as well as to “think broadly and then deep” and to take risks. Combined with Alvarez’s strong scientific standards and great care in executing them, these principles led directly to the awarding of two Nobel prizes in physics to scientists at Berkeley – George Smoot in 2006 and Saul Perlmutter in 2011 – in addition to Alvarez’s own Nobel prize in 1968.
Invaluable talents
Rich Muller, who was Alvarez’s last graduate student, described some of his mentor’s work during the Second World War. Alvarez’s talents as an inventor made him invaluable to the war effort. Among his contributions was the ground-controlled approach (GCA) that allowed planes to land at night and in poor visibility. For the rest of his life, at least once a year, Alvarez would bump into someone who thanked him for GCA, explaining: “I was a pilot in the Second World War and you saved my life.” In 1948, when the Soviets imposed a blockade of Berlin, GCA allowed the Berlin Airlift to succeed by assuring the cargo planes’ safe landing in difficult circumstances.
In the early post-war period, Alvarez’s inventions included the proton linear accelerator (with Wolfgang Panofsky) and a tandem Van de Graaff accelerator. Over his lifetime he was granted more than 40 US patents. He applied for his first in 1943 and his last in 1988, the year he died. He was one of the first inductees to the Inventor’s Hall of Fame. He loved thinking and, heeding the advice of his physiologist father, frequently made time to sit and think. Muller recalled that Alvarez told him that only one idea in 10 is worth pursuing, and only one in 100 might lead to a discovery. Considering how many of his ideas bore remarkable fruit, Muller concluded that Alvarez must have had thousands of them.
One such idea originated from his interactions in 1953 with Don Glaser, who invented the bubble chamber. Alvarez thought that a large liquid-hydrogen bubble chamber was needed to solve all of the puzzles generated by the many particles that had been recently discovered. He immediately put his two graduate students, Frank Crawford and Lynn Stevenson, and a number of his technicians to work on the project. The first tracks in a hydrogen bubble chamber were seen in the summer of 1954.
A succession of chambers then culminated in the 72-inch bubble chamber, which began operating in 1959. Jack Lloyd, an engineer in the Alvarez group at the time, believes that it was probably one of the largest tanks of liquid hydrogen ever made (400 l), interfaced with the most enormous piece of optical glass ever made. As Lloyd recalled: “It had to work at around 60 or 70 psi and it pulsed every 6 s, with about a 10 psi pulse, which is a frightening thing to an engineer because of potential fatigue problems.”
Observation of the traces left by particles in the bubble chamber needed additional equipment for scanning the photographs and measuring the tracks. In the end, it was necessary to use computers to handle the wealth of information coming from the measurements. The latter task was assigned to Art Rosenfeld, who came to the Alvarez group as a post-doc on the recommendation of Enrico Fermi. Fermi said that, given the politics of the two men, they would be on speaking terms about 80% of the time. “That was right,” Rosenfeld recalled. Keeping the peace was not among Alvarez’s strengths.
By 1967 the Alvarez group was analysing more than a million events a year. An army of scanners examined the films for events of interest and a battalion of computer programmers wrote code to analyse them. The bubble-chamber team was at that time the largest high-energy physics group in the world, totalling several hundred people. The development of the chamber and the analysis systems resulted in an explosion of new particle discoveries that helped to establish the quark model. It was this work that earned Alvarez the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968.
Among his other attention-grabbing ideas was the use of cosmic rays to search for secret chambers in Chephren’s pyramid in Giza. Jerry Anderson, who collaborated on the project in the late 1960s, told of Alvarez’s work in assembling a team of Egyptian and US scientists to design and carry out the experiment. After pointing detectors in several different directions they found no evidence of any voids in the solid pyramid. Afterwards, if anyone commented that the team had not found any hidden chambers, Alvarez would respond, “We found that there were no hidden chambers” – an important distinction.
Around that same time he became interested in a film taken with a home-movie camera that captured the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Charles Wohl, a student in his group, described Alvarez’s careful analysis of the film and his conclusions, which clarified some of the uncertainties in the official investigation of the assassination.
The Alvarez philosophy
More than one speaker quoted this passage from Alvarez’s autobiography: “I’m convinced that a controlled disrespect for authority is essential to a scientist. All of the good experimental physicists I have known have had an intense curiosity that no ‘Keep Out’ sign could mute.” Yet, Alvarez had a perfect safety record while building and operating the huge bubble chamber. Stanley Wojcicki, who was a graduate student in the group, said that when Alvarez was retiring as the head of the bubble-chamber group and a new head was about to be appointed, someone asked him about the replacement’s responsibilities. “He’s the person who talks to the widows after an accident,” was Alvarez’s response.
Saul Perlmutter, who was Muller’s graduate student, felt Alvarez’s influence keenly when he came to LBNL in 1982. He characterized it as a “can-do, cowboy spirit”. He explained: “As a physicist, you had the hunting licence to look at any problem whatsoever and also you had the arrogance to think you were going to be able to solve that problem – or at least be able to make a measurement that might be relevant to the problem. And if there was equipment around, you would use it; and if there was not equipment around, you would invent it. And you had the wealth of talent around you, of the engineers, mechanical and electrical, who knew how to put these things together and how to make them work.” That was fertile ground for discovery.
Perlmutter also benefited from Alvarez’s philosophy in another way. When he and Carl Pennypacker wanted to start looking for supernovae at greater distances, Muller was sceptical about their prospects for success. However, he had learnt from Alvarez that part of the job of a group leader is to support people in trying things even if you are not sure that they are the right things to do. This is what he did – and Perlmutter’s Nobel prize for that work attests to Muller’s (and Alvarez’s) wisdom.
In the final decade of his life, Alvarez’s “hunting licence” led him into geology and palaeontology. His son, Walter Alvarez, a geologist studying the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary in an outcropping in Italy, gave his father a rock showing the clay boundary separating a layer of limestone with abundant fossils of diverse species and a layer largely devoid of signs of life. Luis was intrigued and eventually conceived of a way of determining how long it took for this clay layer to accumulate. This would signal whether the mass extinction was sudden or gradual. Neutron activation analysis showed an anomalous abundance of iridium in the clay layer, a result that led eventually to the Alvarez’s theory that an impact from a comet or asteroid caused the dinosaurs and other species to die out. The announcement stirred a controversy that was only recently settled in their favour.
Other speakers during the day attested to Luis Alvarez’s inventive spirit and his fearlessness in asking original and important questions in far-flung fields in which he had no previous experience. He eagerly embraced new ideas and unhesitatingly took on new challenges throughout his career. The lively and enlightening day ended with a reception and dinner, where more family members and colleagues related their recollections of this icon of 20th-century science and technology.
By Paul S Wesson World Scientific
Hardback: £45 $65
E-book: $85
Aimed at a broad audience, Weaving the Universe provides a thorough but short review of the history and current status of ideas in cosmology. The coverage of cosmological ideas focuses on the early 1900s, when Einstein formulated relativity and when Sir Arthur Eddington was creating relativistic models of the universe. It ends with the completion of the LHC in late 2008, after surveying modern ideas of particle physics and astrophysics – weaved together to form a whole account of the universe.
By Stephen Haywood Imperial College Press
Hardback: £36 $58
Paperback: £17 $28
Group theory provides the language for describing how particles (and in particular, their quantum numbers) combine. This provides understanding of hadronic physics as well as physics beyond the Standard Model. The book examines symmetries and conservation laws in quantum mechanics and relates these to groups of transformations. The symmetries of the Standard Model associated with the electroweak and strong (QCD) forces are described by the groups U(1), SU(2) and SU(3). The properties of these groups are examined and the relevance to particle physics is discussed.
By Giovanni Montani, Marco Valerio Battisti, Riccardo Benini and Giovanni Imponente World Scientific
Hardback: £123 $199
E-book: $259
In this book the authors provide a self-consistent and complete treatment of the dynamics of the very early universe, passing through a concise discussion of the Standard Cosmological Model, a precise characterization of the role played by the theory of inflation, up to a detailed analysis of the anisotropic and inhomogeneous cosmological models. They trace clearly the backward temporal evolution of the universe, starting with the Robertson–Walker geometry and ending with the recent results of loop quantum cosmology on the “Big Bounce”.
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