This invaluable book provides a comprehensive treatment of the design and applications of the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). SOAs are important components for optical communication systems with applications as in-line amplifiers and as functional devices in evolving optical networks. The functional applications of SOAs were first...

This self-contained book provides three fundamental and generic approaches (logical, probabilistic, and modal) to representing and reasoning with agent epistemic states, specifically in the context of decision making. Each of these approaches can be applied to the construction of intelligent software agents for making decisions, thereby...

This book, like its first edition, addresses the fundamental principles of interaction between radiation and matter and the principle of particle detectors in a wide scope of fields, from low to high energy, including space physics and the medical environment. It provides abundant information about the processes of electromagnetic and...

The introduction of quantum field theory methods has led to a kind of “revolution” in condensed matter theory. This resulted in the increased importance of Feynman diagrams or diagram technique. It has now become imperative for professionals in condensed matter theory to have a thorough knowledge of this method. There are many...

Ionizing Radiation Detectors for Medical Imaging contains ten technical chapters, half of which are devoted to radiology and the other half to nuclear medicine. The last chapter describes the detectors for radiotherapy and portal imaging. Each chapter addresses completely a specific application. The emphasis is always on detector fundamentals...

In this book, we aim to collect the most recent advances in artificial intelligence techniques (i.e. neural networks, fuzzy systems, multi-agent systems, genetic algorithms, image analysis, clustering, etc), which are applied to the protection of privacy and security. The symbiosis between these fields leads to a pool of invigorating ideas,...

This volume presents recent advances in computational fluid dynamics. The topics range from fundamentals and computational techniques to a wide variety of applications in astronomy, applied mathematics and meteorology. They describe recent calculations in direct numerical simulation of turbulence, applications of turbulence modelling of...

By the end of the 1970s, it was clear that all the known forces of nature (including, in a sense, gravity) were examples of gauge theories, characterized by invariance under symmetry transformations chosen independently at each position and each time. These ideas culminated with the finding of the W and Z gauge bosons (and perhaps also the...

Albert Einstein was one of the principal founders of the quantum and relativity theories. Until 1925, when the Bose-Einstein statistics was discovered, he made great contributions to the foundations of quantum theory. However, after the discovery of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg and wave mechanics by Schrodinger, with the consequent...

Computational optimization methods have matured over the last few years due to extensive research by applied mathematicians and engineers. These methods have been applied to many practical applications. Several general-purpose optimization programs and programs for specific engineering applications have become available to solve particular...

This interesting book reviews WMAP s main results (2003) and discusses in detail how the accurate qualitative results for the age of the universe and the Hubble constant were anticipated in an article published five years before in Acta Cosmologica, Krakow. In the final chapter on Cosmic Numbers , it is shown that, as a result of the...

This invaluable book provides an introduction to space science. It brings together the various space science disciplines in one volume, and will benefit a wide audience, particularly students starting their graduate studies. The text presents a unique outlook, which will encourage students to think in broad terms across the whole range of...