This book contains written versions of the presentations made at the 4th International Workshop on the Identification of Dark Matter (IDM 2002), held in York, UK, in September 2002. The objective of this workshop series is to assess the status of work attempting to identify what constitutes dark matter OCo in particular, to consider the techniques being used, how successful they are, and what new techniques are likely to improve prospects for identifying likely dark matter candidates in the future. At IDM 2002 special emphasis was placed on recent results obtained in searches for baryonic and non-baryonic dark matter. The proceedings include reviews of major topics on dark matter, as well as short contributed talks."

Annotation. Contents: Status and Future Prospects of Reactor Neutrinos, Solar Neutrinos, and Supernova Neutrinos; Status and Future Prospects of Long Baseline Neutrino Experiments, Atmospheric Neutrinos; Dark Matter Searches and Double Beta Decays; Lepton Number Violated Muon Decays; Proton Decay Searches; Neutrino Phenomenology and Model Building.

The discovery of neutrino oscillations in 1998 initiated efforts to form a group to work on the detailed study of the phenomenon; this study is now supported by a grant-in-aid in the specific field of neutrinos from the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports. The aim of this working group is to put together the efforts from various fields necessary for understanding neutrino oscillations in detail from both the experimental and the theoretical point of view. The 4th International Workshop on Neutrino Oscillations and Their Origin was held to discuss recent progress in both experimental and theoretical study.

Dark matter research is one of the most fascinating and active fields among current high-profile scientific endeavours. It holds the key to all major breakthroughs to come in the fields of cosmology and astroparticle physics. The present volume is particularly concerned with the sources and the detection of dark matter and dark energy in the universe and will prove to be an invaluable research tool for all scientists who work in this field.

This book reviews the interconnection of cosmology and particle physics over the last decade. It provides introductory courses in supersymmetry, superstring and M-theory, responding to an increasing interest to evaluate the cosmological consequences of these theories. Based on a series of extended courses providing an introduction to the physics of the very early universe, in the light of the most recent advances in our understanding of the fundamental interactions, it reviews all the classical issues (inflation, primordial fluctuations, dark matter, baryogenesis), but also introduces the most recent ideas about what happened at the Big Bang, and before.

The three neutrinos are ghostly elementary particles that exist all across the Universe. Though every second billions of them fly through us, they are extremely hard to detect. We used to think they had no mass, but recently discovered that in fact they have a tiny mass. The quest for the neutrino mass scale and mass ordering (specifying how the three masses are distributed) is an extremely exciting one, and will open the door towards new physics operating at energy scales we can only ever dream of reaching on Earth. This thesis explores the use of measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (the oldest light reaching us, a snapshot of the infant Universe) and maps of millions of galaxies to go after the neutrino mass scale and mass ordering. Neutrinos might teach us something about the mysterious dark energy powering the accelerated expansion of the Universe, or about cosmic inflation, which seeded the initial conditions for the Universe. Though extremely baffling, neutrinos are also an exceptionally exciting area of research, and cosmological observations promise to reveal a great deal about these elusive particles in the coming years.

Electronic Excitations in Liquefied Rare Gases is a unique and only reference source that reviews the research and development of liquefied rare gases, which took place over a period of last 50 years. Liquefied rare gases are the simplest dielectric liquids, which are insulators from a physical point of view. While the gaseous and solid state of matter have received intensive attention from the begining of modern science, the knowledge about liquids remained undocumented so far. Liquids exhibit local order as solids and long-range disorder as gases. Fundamental problems related to the generation, transport and recombination of charge carriers in liquefied rare gases could be studied under controlled conditions since liquid samples of extremely high purity can be prepared. Liquefied rare gases have found applications in physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and materials science. In this volume, world-leading scientists have summarized the knowledge gained about electronic processes in these liquids. The topics are interesting for scientists working in fundamental research as well for those applying liquefied rare gases in experimental or technical devices. The book contains 15 review chapters on different aspects of liquefied rare gases. Such an in depth compilations of knowledge in this field has not been published as of today. The topics of this book concentrate on the processes of electronic excitation, which are of general fundamental interest and have found applications in detectors for high energy physics, light sources for the extreme ultraviolet, etc. just to name a few.