October 2008, New York City: A dead man, sprawled in a pool of blood, is found in the penthouse suite of an opulent midtown Manhattan hotel. Who is he? Was he murdered or was it suicide, and would it make yet another headline about the financial meltdown rocking Wall Street? Chip Smith, veteran investment banker at Smyth Johnston, was looking forward to a comfortable retirement until he found himself an unwilling player in a changing Wall Street scene. When the grisly hotel death investigation lands on Smyth Johnston's trading floor, insights into this new culture-behavior, business practices, shadow banking, lifestyle-all come into play.

Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins. Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.

Time decays form the basis of a multitude of important and interesting phenomena in quantum physics that range from spectral properties, resonances, return and approach to equilibrium, to quantum mixing, dynamical stability properties and irreversibility and the “arrow of time”. This monograph is devoted to a clear and precise, yet pedagogical account of the associated concepts and methods. Contents:Introduction: A Summary of Mathematical and Physical Background for One-Particle Quantum MechanicsSpreading and Asymptotic Decay of Free Wave Packets: The Method of Stationary Phase and van der Corput's ApproachThe Relation Between Time-Like Decay and Spectral PropertiesTime Decay for a Class of Models with Sparse PotentialsResonances and Quasi-exponential DecayAspects of the Connection Between Quantum Mechanics and Classical Mechanics: Quantum Systems with Infinite Number of Degrees of Freedom Readership: Students and researchers in mathematical physics or quantum theory. Keywords:Quantum Physics;Dynamics;Decay and Exponential Decay;Return Probability;Correlation Functions;Mixing;Stability;Irreversibility;Arrow of TimeKey Features:The book concentrates on exotic spectra which have not been treated in the classic referencesSystems with infinite number of degrees of freedom are analyzed with existing soluble models for the approach to equilibrium, and elaborated on the important property of mixing, as well as on the problem of irreversibility and the “arrow of time”This book is the first treatment of the mentioned topics in comprehensive (textbook) form

During recent years our enthusiasm for this field has continually increased. This book presents expert contributions describing the fundamental principles for the widespread use of radiative decay engineering in the biological sciences and nanotechnology.

Nuclear double beta decay is one of the most promising tools for probing beyond-the-standard-model physics on beyond-accelerator energy scales. It is already now probing the TeV scale, on which new physics should manifest itself according to theoretical expectations. Only in the early 1980s was it known that double beta decay yields information on the Majorana mass of the exchanged neutrino. At present, the sharpest bound for the electron neutrino mass arises from this process. It is only in the last 10 years that the much more far-reaching potential of double beta decay has been discovered. Today, the potential of double beta decay includes a broad range of topics that are equally relevant to particle physics and astrophysics, such as masses of heavy neutrinos, of sneutrinos, as SUSY models, compositeness, leptoquarks, left-right symmetric models, and tests of Lorentz symmetry and equivalence principle in the neutrino sector. Double beta decay has become indispensable nowadays for solving the problem of the neutrino mass spectrum and the structure of the neutrino mass matrix OCo together with present and future solar and atmospheric neutrino oscillation experiments. Some future double beta experiments (like GENIUS) will be capable to be simultaneously neutrino observatories for double beta decay and low-energy solar neutrinos, and observatories for cold dark matter of ultimate sensitivity. This invaluable book outlines the development of double beta research from its beginnings until its most recent achievements, and also presents the outlook for its highly exciting future. Contents: Double Beta Decay OCo Historical Retrospective and Perspectives; Original Articles: From the Early Days until the Gauge Theory Era; The Nuclear Physics Side OCo Nuclear Matrix Elements; The Nuclear Physics Side OCo Nuclear Matrix Elements; Effective Neutrino Masses from Double Beta Decay, Neutrino Mass Models and Cosmological Parameters OCo Present Status and Prospects; Other Beyond Standard Model Physics: From SUSY and Leptoquarks to Compositeness and Quantum Foam; The Experimental Race: From the Late Eighties to the Future; The Future of Double Beta Decay; Appendices: Ten Years of HeidelbergOCoMoscow Experiment; The Potential Future OCo GENIUS. Readership: Particle physicists, nuclear physicists and astrophysicists."