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This book introduces the physics and chemistry of plastic scintillators (fluorescent polymers) that are able to emit light when exposed to ionizing radiation, discussing their chemical modification in the early 1950s and 1960s, as well as the renewed upsurge in interest in the 21st century. The book presents contributions from various researchers on broad aspects of plastic scintillators, from physics, chemistry, materials science and applications, covering topics such as the chemical nature of the polymer and/or the fluorophores, modification of the photophysical properties (decay time, emission wavelength) and loading of additives to make the material more sensitive to, e.g., fast neutrons, thermal neutrons or gamma rays. It also describes the benefits of recent technological advances for plastic scintillators, such as nanomaterials and quantum dots, which allow features that were previously not achievable with regular organic molecules or organometallics.

This book presents the current advances in understanding of the fast excitation transfer processes in inorganic scintillation materials, the discovery of new materials exhibiting excellent time resolution, and the results on the evaluation of timing limits for scintillation detectors. The book considers in-depth basic principles of primary processes in energy relaxation, which play a key role in creating scintillating centers to meet a growing demand for knowledge to develop new materials combining high energy and time resolutions. The rate of relaxation varies. However, the goal is to make it extremely fast, occurring within the ps domain or even shorter. The book focuses on fast processes in scintillation materials. This approach enables in-depth understanding of fundamental processes in scintillation and supports the efforts to push the time resolution of scintillation detectors towards 10 ps target. Sophisticated theoretical and advanced experimental research conducted in the last decade is reviewed. Engineering and control of the energy transfer processes in the scintillation materials are addressed. The new era in development of instrumentation for detection of ionizing radiation in high- energy physics experiments, medical imaging and industrial applications is introduced. This book reviews modern trends in the description of the scintillation build up processes in inorganic materials, transient phenomena, and engineering of the scintillation properties. It also provides reliable background of scientific and educational information to stimulate new ideas for readers to implement in their research and engineering. The book is aimed at providing a coherent updated background of scientific and instructive information to stimulate new ideas for readers in their research and engineering.

This two-volume-set (LNCS 8384 and 8385) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference of Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2013, held in Warsaw, Poland, in September 2013. The 143 revised full papers presented in both volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover important fields of parallel/distributed/cloud computing and applied mathematics, such as numerical algorithms and parallel scientific computing; parallel non-numerical algorithms; tools and environments for parallel/distributed/cloud computing; applications of parallel computing; applied mathematics, evolutionary computing and metaheuristics.

The evolution of the physical/ chemical sciences towards understanding the behavior of matter at the molecular level has been accompanied by a rapid increase in studies of the properties and functioning of confined water; that is, water in small clusters and nanoparticles or confined to solid/liquid thin films, surfaces and interfaces. These studies represent a convergence of interests and methodologies. That is, much emerging science, both basic and applied, depends on an understanding of confined water for significant advances; and the technical ability to gain that understanding has evolved only during the past decade or two. Firm concepts of the behavior of water in a variety of confining geometries are basic to advances in molecular biology, weather phenomena, atmospheric chemistry, interstellar and interplanetary physics and chemistry; as weIl as to the complete understanding of properties of macroscopic amounts of water and water-solute systems. In recognition of the growing importance of studies of confined water, a Telluride (Colorado) workshop was convened in August of 2000. This was an exceptionally strong 5-day conference with numerous informative talks by leading scientists on both basic and applied aspects of the subject. Lively discussions left the participants spent.

Following the pioneering discovery of alpha clustering and of molecular resonances, the field of nuclear clustering is today one of those domains of heavy-ion nuclear physics that faces the greatest challenges, yet also contains the greatest opportunities. After many summer schools and workshops, in particular over the last decade, the community of nuclear molecular physicists has decided to collaborate in producing a comprehensive collection of lectures and tutorial reviews covering the field. This third volume follows the successful Lect. Notes Phys. 818 (Vol. 1) and 848 (Vol. 2), and comprises six extensive lectures covering the following topics: - Gamma Rays and Molecular Structure- Faddeev Equation Approach for Three Cluster Nuclear Reactions- Tomography of the Cluster Structure of Light Nuclei Via Relativistic Dissociation- Clustering Effects Within the Dinuclear Model : From Light to Hyper-heavy Molecules in Dynamical Mean-field Approach- Clusterization in Ternary Fission- Clusters in Light Neutron-rich Isotopes By promoting new ideas and developments while retaining a pedagogical style of presentation throughout, these lectures will serve as both a reference and an advanced teaching manual for future courses and schools in the fields of nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics.

I feel very honored that I have been asked to write a Foreword to this book. The subject of the book – “Coupled cluster theory” – has been around for about half a century. The basic theory and explicit equations for closed-shell ground states were formulated before 1970. At the beginning of the seventies the rst ab initio calcu- tion were carried out. At that time speed and memory of computers were very limited compared to today's standards. Moreover, the size of one-electron bases employed was small, so that it was only possible to achieve an orientation in methodical aspects rather than to generate new signi cant results. Extensive use of the coupled-cluster method started at the beginning of the eighties. With the help of more powerful computers the results of coupled-cluster approaches started to yield more and more interesting results of relevance to the interpretation of experimental data. New ideas in methodology kept appearing and computer codes became more and more ef cient. This exciting situation continues to this very day. Remarkably enough, even the - quired equations can now be generated by a computer with the help of symbolic languages. The size of this monograph and the rich variety of articles it contains attests to the usefulness and viability of the couple-cluster formalism for the h- dling of many-electron correlation effects. This represents a vivid testimony of a tremendous work that has been accomplished in coupled-cluster methodology and its exploitation.