Remote Plasma

At this writing the Cassini spacecraft has fired its engine and successfully inserted itself and its precious cargo of scientific instruments into orbit, the first step of its exploration of the Saturnian system. The suspense is not over, however. While exciting images of the rings have been captured, an exotic composition of Phoebe sensed by the mapping spectrometer and unexpected panoply of magnetic waves and plasma dynamics encountered on the incoming trajectory and initial orbit, the HuygensprobeisstillonboardandthefirstcloseflybyofTitanhasnottakenplace.

This book examines the function of phosphate minerals in biology, human health and nutrition, food production, ecosystems, and environmental sustainability. It is a useful resource for readers from a range of backgrounds, including geologists and geochemists, lithologists, environmental scientists and engineers, chemists, and biochemists.

Intended for nonspecialists with some knowledge of physics or engineering, The Quantum Beat covers a wide range of salient topics relevant to atomic clocks, treated in a broad intuitive manner with a minimum of mathematical formalism. Detailed descriptions are given of the design principles of the rubidium, cesium, hydrogen maser, and mercury ion standards; the revolutionary changes that the advent of the laser has made possible, such as laser cooling, optical pumping, the formation of "optical molasses," and the cesium "fountain" standard; and the time-based global navigation systems, Loran-C and the Global Positioning System. Also included are topics that bear on the precision and absolute accuracy of standards, such as noise, resonance line shape, the relativistic Doppler effect as well as more general relativistic notions of time relevant to synchronization of remote clocks, and time reversal symmetry.