THE RANKINS OF PRATT COUNTY In 1982, teenager Russell Rankin is viewed as smart and mature beyond his years until an impulsive and faulty decision brought on by a family crisis lands him in police custody. While lodged in juvenile detention, Russell is impacted by unexpected personal loss. As part of the Juvenile Court's disposition, he agrees to temporarily relocate from the urban Midwest to a small town nestled in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains. A highly religious widowed grandmot...

In his extraordinary debut collection, Pure Slaughter Value, Robert Bingham tracks the conscience of a generation that grew up educated, privileged, and starved for meaning. Bingham's strange sense of morbid fancy collides with a gutsy realism; the result is splendid wreckage: a young man is seduced by his first cousin (or maybe it's the other way around) at her brother's wake ("The Other Family"); a bored couple plot to kill a man during their ski-resort honeymoon ("Marriage Is M...

From the highly acclaimed author of Pure Slaughter Value comes this latter-day literary noir about an ex-pat in Cambodia eager to get home but taking all the wrong turns.Asher went to Cambodia to get away from Julie, his Harvard grad ex-girlfriend currently tending bar in a topless joint in New York. But when his UNESCO work cleaning bat dung from Khmer statues is finished, and he decides on a dicey heroin scheme as his means to get home with plenty of money to spa...

In Back to the Dance Itself, Sondra Fraleigh edits essays that illuminate how scholars apply a range of phenomenologies to explore questions of dance and the world; performing life and language; body and place; and self-knowing in performance. Some authors delve into theoretical perspectives, while others relate personal experiences and reflections that reveal fascinating insights arising from practice. Collectively, authors give particular consideration to the interactive lif...

Laser-Plasma Interactions and Applications covers the fundamental and applied aspects of high power laser-plasma physics. With an internationally renowned team of authors, the book broadens the knowledge of young researchers working in high power laser-plasma science by providing them with a thorough pedagogical grounding in the interaction of laser radiation with matter, laser-plasma accelerators, and inertial confinement fusion.The text is organised such that the theoret...

This book provides fundamental knowledge in the fields of attosecond science and free electron lasers, based on the insight that the further development of both disciplines can greatly benefit from mutual exposure and interaction between the two communities.With respect to the interaction of high intensity lasers with matter, it covers ultrafast lasers, high-harmonic generation, attosecond pulse generation and characterization. Other chapters review strong-field physics, free electr...

This book attempts to give a discussion of the physics and current and potential applications of the self-focusing of an intense femtosecond laser pulse in a tra- parent medium. Although self-focusing is an old subject of nonlinear optics, the consequence of self-focusing of intense femtosecond laser pulses is totally new and unexpected. Thus, new phenomena are observed, such as long range lam- tation, intensity clamping, white light laser pulse, self-spatial ltering, self-group phase lock...

The book introduces ‘the state of the art' of pulsed laser ablation and its applications. It is based on recent theoretical and experimental studies. The book reaches from the basics to advanced topics of pulsed laser ablation. Theoretical and experimental fundamental phenomena involved in pulsed laser ablation are discussed with respect to material properties, laser wavelength, fluence and intensity regime of the light absorbed linearly or non-linearly in the target material. The energy a...

Colloids are submicron particles that are ubiquitous in nature (milk, clay, blood) and industrial products (paints, drilling fluids, food). In recent decades it has become clear that adding depletants such as polymers or small colloids to colloidal dispersions allows one to tune the interactions between the colloids and in this way control the stability, structure and rheological properties of colloidal dispersions. This book offers a concise introduction to the fundamentals of depletion e...

This text offers an open-learning approach to Raman spectroscopy providing detail on instrumentation, applications and discussions questions throughout the book.It provides a valuable guide to assist with teaching Raman spectroscopy which is gaining attention in (analytical) chemistry, and as a consequence, teaching programs have followed. Today, education in Raman spectroscopy is often limited to theoretical aspects (e.g. selection rules), but practical aspects are usually disrega...

The PUILS series delivers up-to-date reviews of progress in Ultrafast Intense Laser Science, a newly emerging interdisciplinary research field spanning atomic and molecular physics, molecular science, and optical science, which has been stimulated by the recent developments in ultrafast laser technologies. Each volume compiles peer-reviewed articles authored by researchers at the forefront of each their own subfields of UILS. Every chapter opens with an overview of the topics to be discuss...

This thesis addresses optical binding - a new area of interest within the field of optical micromanipulation. It presents, for the first time, a rigorous numerical simulation of some of the key results, along with new experimental findings and also physical interpretations of the results. In an optical trap particles are attracted close to areas of high optical intensities and intensity gradients. So, for example, if two lasers are pointed towards each other (a counter propagating trap) th...