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.

Revolutions in Physics is a sweeping history of the development of concepts of space, time, mass and force through the ages; it then culminates in a robust and courageous exploration of the emergent view that space-time is actually a highly potent energetic medium, capable of supporting entirely new classes of energy, propulsion, communications and health sciences technologies.

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.

From Nuclei to Stars

The recent fascinating progress on laser cooling is the result of the close connection between theoretical work and the rapid technological advances in laser sources, particularly in the field of powerful semiconductor and solid-state lasers operating over a wide range of optical and near-infrared frequencies. The very close international and personal collaboration amongst the researchers resulting in a direct link between experimental data and theoretical calculations which characterize work in this field, have been important factors in the rapid comprehension of the subtle and beautiful phenomena involved in laser manipulation. This Enrico Fermi school is the first formal school fully devoted to this topic. The theoretical part of the book includes contributions on the framework for the study of the photon momentum exchanges in the absence of relaxation, recent mechanisms of laser cooling, an analysis of the cooling forces, analysis of atomic and molecular beams, cooling through coherent population trapping and the relation between laser cooling and quantum nondemolition measurements. The experimental section deals with topics such as, an analysis of atomic and molecular beams, methods and applications of laser cooling, advances in laser cooling and the new exciting field of atomic interferometry. All students and researchers working in this field will welcome this excellent review of research and progress in laser cooling, so strongly linked to the fundamental understanding of physics.

This collection of lectures treats the dynamics of open systems with a strong emphasis on dissipation phenomena related to dynamical chaos. This research area is very broad, covering topics such as nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, environment-system coupling (decoherence) and applications of Markov semi-groups to name but a few. The book addresses not only experienced researchers in the field but also nonspecialists from related areas of research, postgraduate students wishing to enter the field and lecturers searching for advanced textbook material.

The exchange between physics and metrology is always fascinating and exciting. Many are the open problems in physics that call for extremely precise standards, many are the advances in metrology made possible by a deep and assiduous study of the underlying physics. One has just to think of the enormous sophistication required in the measurements of some absolute quantities such as the Avogadro, the gas, or the gravitational constants. It is also worth noticing that not only the units of a metrological system are interrelated through the fundamental constants, but also the latter find their full significance when they are determined through the most exacting metrological experiments. Over the past decade many improvements took place and these are discussed in this book; from one side the old caesium SI second definition has found a new realisation, with the “fountain” approach, replacing the classical thermal atomic beam. The use of “cold” atom techniques, in which bunches of inert atoms are collected, slowed down, and cooled, has opened a number of new and unexpected avenues for metrology and fundamental constants; one of these possibilities being the atom interferometry. Another important “quantum jump” was the demonstration of the possibility of performing a direct frequency division in the visible, using ultra short femtosecond pulses. In addition, the possibility of “counting” electrons or photons gave a fundamental support to the development of single-electron capacitance standards and to new scenarios in the absolute calibration of photo-detectors.