This book is an introductory text to the physics of Bose-Einstein condensation. This phenomenon, first predicted by Einstein in 1925 has been realized experimentally in 1995 in a remarkable series of experiments whose importance has been recognized by the award of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics. The condensate is actually a new state of matter, where quantum-mechanical wave functions of atoms behave as coherent matter waves in the same way as coherent light waves in the case of a laser. The authors provide a theoretical presentation of the main concepts underlying the physics of dilute...

Covers the theory of electromagnetic fields in matter, and the theory of macroscopic electric and magnetic properties of matter. There is a considerable amount of new material particularly on the theory of the magnetic properties of matter and the theory
of optical phenomena with new chapters on spatial dispersion and non-linear optics.

This volume is mainly concerned with a systematic development of the theory of plasmas, the authority being firmly rooted in the pioneering work of Landau. Corresponding results are also given for partially ionized plasmas, relativistic plasmas, degenerate or non-ideal plasmas and solid state plasmas.

Several significant additions have been made to the second edition, including the operator method of calculating the bremsstrahlung cross-section, the calcualtion of the probabilities of photon-induced pair production and photon decay in a magnetic
field, the asymptotic form of the scattering amplitudes at high energies, inelastic scattering of electrons by hadrons, and the transformation of electron-positron pairs into hadrons.