This book, in essence the proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study Institute with the same title, is designed to provide in-depth coverage of many, but not all, of the major current applications of superconductivity, and of many that still are being developed. It will be of value to scientists and engineers who have interests in the research and production aspects of the technology, as well as in the applications themselves. The ftrst three chapters (by Clarke, Vrba and Wikswo) are devoted to an understanding of the principles, fabrication and uses of SQUID magnetometers and gradiometers, with...

High mountains can be considered as particularly appropriate environments to detect effects ofclimate change on natural biocoenoses in a global scale for the following reasons: Firstly, ecosystems at the l- temperature limits of plant life are generally thought to be especially sensitive to climate change 1] 2] 3]. An already ongoing upward shift of vascular plants at high summits in the Alps, determined by the Austrian IGBP-research 4] 5] 6] 7] 8], is most likely a response to the atmospheric warming since the 19th century. Secondly, high mountains still comprise the most natural...

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence in the kinetic approach to dynamic many-body problems. Modern kinetic theory offers a unifying theoretical framework within which a great variety of seemingly unrelated systems can be explored in a coherent way. Kinetic methods are currently being applied in such areas as the dynamics of colloidal suspensions, granular material flow, electron transport in mesoscopic systems, the calculation of Lyapunov exponents and other properties of classical many-body systems characterised by chaotic behaviour. The present work focuses on Brownian motion, dynamical...

30 years ago, polymer processing was considered to be a set of operations aiming at imparting a desired shape to the material, while its final properties were defined exclu- sively by the molecular structure and architecture resulted from the respective synthetic approaches. These two fields of knowledge - polymer processing and polymer structure - grew closer as several scientific and technological works disclosed the microstructure and other morphological features developed by polymeric systems upon different process- ing conditions. Even before the real understanding of the polymer...

Progress in the development of oxygen ion and mixed conductors is responsible for innovations in the fields of gas sensors, fuel cells, oxygen permeation membranes, oxygen pumps and electrolyzers. Commercialization has been impeded by materials stability and compatibility issues, high costs of fabrication and inadequate understanding of the interfacial phenomena controlling the operation of these devices. In this text we assemble a unique group of experts whose articles straddle, for the first time, all the key topical areas ranging from fundamentals relating to (a) defects, electrochemical,...