Advanced Summer School in Physics 2005 : Frontiers in Contemporary Physics

These proceedings include lecture notes from eleven courses in modern physics, including astrophysics and mathematical, statistical, medical, and solid state physics. The coherent states of Glauber (Nobel Prize 2005), for instance, are shown to have a clear physical meaning by themselves (with applications in quantum optics, optoelectronics, and communication devices), while they can also be used as an excellent tool to solve many problems in theoretical physics. Lectures on astroparticle physics include descriptions of the construction and implementation of detectors, telescopes, and instruments designed to help explain the origin of the Universe. Cosmic rays and neutrinos are discussed as a motivation for searching for dark matter and for learning about the nature of dark energy. The reader will also find lecture notes on the use of semiconductor solid-state detectors in medical imaging. A lecture on the fundamentals of spintronics in semiconductors discusses the design of semiconductor devices for the investigation of quantum logic gates, which are the building blocks of quantum computation.