This book introduces an analytic method to describe the shadow of black holes. As an introduction, it presents a survey of the attempts to observe the shadow of galactic black holes. Based on a detailed discussion of the Plebański-Demiański class of space-times, the book derives analytical formulas for the photon regions and for the boundary curve of the shadow as seen by an observer in the domain of outer communication. It also analyzes how the shadow depends on the motion of the observer. For all cases, the photon regions and shadows are visualized for various values of the...

This primer develops Conformal Field Theory (CFT) from scratch, whereby CFT is viewed as any conformally-invariant theory that describes a fixed point of a renormalization group flow in quantum field theory.

The book is divided into four lectures: Lecture 1 addresses the physical foundations of conformal invariance, while Lecture 2 examines the constraints imposed by conformal symmetry on the correlation functions of local operators, presented using the so-called projective null cone - a procedure also known as the embedding formalism. In turn, Lecture 3 focuses on the radial...

This book describes the physics behind the optical properties of plasmonic nanostructures focusing on chiral aspects. It explains in detail how the geometry determines chiral near-fields and how to tailor their shape and strength. Electromagnetic fields with strong optical chirality interact strongly with chiral molecules and, therefore, can be used for enhancing the sensitivity of chiroptical spectroscopy techniques. Besides a short review of the latest results in the field of plasmonically enhanced enantiomer discrimination, this book introduces the concept of chiral plasmonic near-field...

The aim of this primer is to cover the essential theoretical information, quickly and concisely, in order to enable senior undergraduate and beginning graduate students to tackle projects in topical research areas of quantum fluids, for example, solitons, vortices and collective modes.

The selection of the material, both regarding the content and level of presentation, draws on the authors analysis of the success of relevant research projects with newcomers to the field, as well as of the students feedback from many taught and self-study courses on the subject...

This book presents the Projective approach to de Sitter Relativity. It traces the development of renewed interest in models of the universe at constant positive curvature such as -vacuum- geometry. The De Sitter Theory of Relativity, formulated in 1917 with Willem De Sitter's solution of the Einstein equations, was used in different fields during the 1950s and 1960s, in the work of H. Bacry, J.M. LevyLeblond and F.Gursey, to name some important contributors. From the 1960s to 1980s, L. Fantappie and G. Arcidiacono provided an elegant group approach to the De Sitter universe putting the...

The Zamolodchikov c-theorem has led to important new insights in the understanding of the Renormalisation Group (RG) and the geometry of the space of QFTs. The present primer introduces and reviews the parallel developments of the search for a higher-dimensional generalisation of the c-theorem and of the Local RG (LRG).

The idea of renormalisation with position-dependent couplings, running under local Weyl scaling, is traced from its early realisations to the elegant modern formalism of the LRG. The key role of the associated Weyl consistency conditions in establishing RG flow...

The lectures in this book provide graduate students and non-specialist researchers with a concise introduction to the concepts and formalism required to reduce the ten-dimensional string theories to the observable four-dimensional space-time - a procedure called string compactification.

The text starts with a very brief introduction to string theory, first working out its massless spectrum and showing how the condition on the number of dimensions arises. It then dwells on the different possible internal manifolds, from the simplest to the most relevant phenomenologically, thereby...