"rare Earth"

Silica is an extraordinary material. It is strong, stable, abundant, easily processed, can be manufactured in extremely pure form and, above all, is remarkably transparent to light of visible, and particularly near infrared, wavelengths. Even more crucial for its application in optical fibre communications is the fact that its material dispersion parameter becomes negative at wavelengths greater than 1.3 |im and, in fibre form, can be compensated by simple, appropriate fibre design.

Lanthanides are of great importance for the electronic industries, this new book (from the EIBC Book Series) provides a comprehensive coverage of the basic chemistry, particularly inorganic chemistry, of the lanthanoid elements, those having a 4f shell of electrons.

This thesis demonstrates the value of theoretical approaches in the discovery of new superconducting materials. It reports a detailed study of the recently discovered nickel-oxide (nickelate) superconductors using multiple first-principles computational tools, from density functional theory to dynamical mean field theory. In the context of superconductivity, discoveries have generally been linked to serendipitous experimental discovery; this thesis reports some of the few examples of predictions of new superconductors that have later been realized in practice, a prime example of the significance of the methodology it expounds. Overall, it represents a seminal systematic work in the electronic structure theory of the emergent field of nickelate superconductivity.