High-Temperature Superconductivity

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Antonio Bianconi and Naurang L. Saini

This book is a collection of papers in the field of stripes and high Tc superconductivity. The most relevant theoretical and experimental contributions from experts in the field of stripes, presented at the Second International Conference on Stripes and High Tc Superconductivity, are selected for publication. The book includes contributions on other stripe phases observed in manganites, nikelates, spin ladders, and heterostructures. Since a large stream of research in a growing community is converging towards the stripe scenario, this book serves as an important reference in the field of striped phases and high Tc superconductivity. The problem of high Tc superconductors has been a central issue in solid-state physics since 1987. After the discovery of high Tc superconductivity (HTSC) in doped perovskites, it was realized that HTSC appears in an unknown complex electronic phase of condensed matter. In the early years, all theories of HTSC were focused on the physics of a homogeneous 2D metal with large electron-electron correlations or on a 2D polaron gas. Only after 1990 a novel paradigm started to emerge in which this 2D metallic phase is described as an inhomogeneous metal. This was the outcome of several experimental evidences of phase separation at low doping. Following the discovery by the Rome Group in 1992 that `the changes move freely mainly in one direction like the water running in the grooves in corrugated iron foil', a new scenario for understanding superconductivity in high Tc superconductors was opened. Since the charges move like rivers, the physics of these materials shifts towards the physics of novel mesoscopic heterostructures and complex electronic solids. Therefore, understanding the striped phases in the perovskites not only provides an opportunity to understand the anomalous metallic state of cuprate superconductors, but also suggests a way to design new materials of technological importance. The stripes are begetting a field of general scientific interest.

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Shigeji Fujita and Salvador Godoy

The book describes all basic experimental facts about high temperature superconductivity of materials, with a critical temperature of 30 Kelvin and higher, and explains them microscopically starting with a Hamiltonian followed by step-by-step statistical mechanical calculations. All important theoretical formulas are derived without omitting steps and all basic questions are answered in a manner which is easy to understand. The book is therefore suitable as a textbook for a second-year graduate physics course. Many fresh, and some challenging, ideas are presented and researches in the field are invited to examine the text.

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William E. Shotts, Jr

You've experienced the shiny, point-and-click surface of your Linux computer -- now dive below and explore its depths with the power of the command line. The Linux Command Line takes you from your very first terminal keystrokes to writing full programs in Bash, the most popular Linux shell. Along the way you'll learn the timeless skills handed down by generations of gray-bearded, mouse-shunning gurus: file navigation, environment configuration, command chaining, pattern matching with regular expressions, and more. In addition to that practical knowledge, author William Shotts reveals the philosophy behind these tools and the rich heritage that your desktop Linux machine has inherited from Unix supercomputers of yore. As you make your way through the book's short, easily-digestible chapters, you'll learn how to: Create and delete files, directories, and symlinks; Administer your system, including networking, package installation, and process management; Use standard input and output, redirection, and pipelines; Edit files with Vi, the world's most popular text editor; Write shell scripts to automate common or boring tasks; Slice and dice text files with cut, paste, grep, patch, and sed; Once you overcome your initial "shell shock," you'll find that the command line is a natural and expressive way to communicate with your computer. Just don't be surprised if your mouse starts to gather dust. - Publisher.

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Karel A. van der Hucht and Peredur M. Williams

In this IAU Symposium on Wolf--Rayet stars, binary aspects received ample attention, notably because of the recognition that many observations of spectral and photometric variability at all accessible wavelengths are related to colliding winds or other forms of wind interaction. The basic structure of the conference and its proceedings is basic parameters and general properties of WR stars; state of the art model atmospheres for WR stars, anisotropic mass loss and disk formation of WR stars, properties of WR binaries; influence of stellar winds on mass transfer in hot massive binary evolution; dust formation near WR stars and other circumstellar phenomena; and hydrodynamics and high-energy physics of colliding winds in WR+O binaries and of WR winds interacting with compact objects. Within this framework 20 invited reviews, 38 invited oral contributions, and 76 poster papers were presented at the Symposium, entertaining 111 astronomers from 24 countries. These proceedings provide up-to-date information on all aspects of Wolf--Rayet atmospheres, binaries, and colliding winds.