Plasma physics is the fascinating science behind lightning bolts, fluorescent lights, solar flares, ultra-bright TV screens, fusion reactors, cosmic jets and black hole radiation, to name but a few examples. Yet plasmas obey their own, often very surprising, rules, and repeatedly defy our best efforts to anticipate and control them. This richly illustrated book reveals for the first time the exciting world of plasma physics to a non-technical audience. It describes the phenomena, and follows the worldwide research effort to comprehend them, taking the reader on a journey from neighborhood neon lights to the remotest galaxies and beyond. The lively text is interspersed with fascinating photographs and explanatory diagrams, giving the readers a deeper understanding of the world around them.

This book studies the fundamental aspects of many-body physics in quantum systems open to an external world. Recent remarkable developments in the observation and manipulation of quantum matter at the single-quantum level point to a new research area of open many-body systems, where interactions with an external observer and the environment play a major role. The first part of the book elucidates the influence of measurement backaction from an external observer, revealing new types of quantum critical phenomena and out-of-equilibrium dynamics beyond the conventional paradigm of closed systems. In turn, the second part develops a powerful theoretical approach to study the in- and out-of-equilibrium physics of an open quantum system strongly correlated with an external environment, where the entanglement between the system and the environment plays an essential role. The results obtained here offer essential theoretical results for understanding the many-body physics of quantum systems open to an external world, and can be applied to experimental systems in atomic, molecular and optical physics, quantum information science and condensed matter physics.

Semiannual cumulative subject and author index of Physical review A, B, C, D, and of Physical review letters, v. 24- , 1970-

A detailed overview of the physics of high-energy colliders emphasising the role of QCD.