“In the honorable vein of elegant, gentleman thieves, comes Allmen, the colorful protagonist of Suter’s beautifully observed, deliciously fun novel” (Noah Charney, author of The Museum of Lost Art). Johann Friedrich von Allmen, a bon vivant of dandified refinement, has exhausted his family fortune. Forced to downscale, Allmen inhabits the garden house of his former Zurich estate, attended by his Guatemalan butler, Carlos. When not reading novels by Balzac and Somerset Maugham, he plays jazz on a Bechstein baby grand. Allmen’s fortunes take a sharp turn when he meets Jojo, a stunning blonde whose lakeside villa contains five Art Nouveau bowls created by renowned French artist Émile Gallé and decorated with a dragonfly motif. Allmen, seeking to pay off mounting debts, absconds with the priceless bowls and embarks on a high-risk, potentially violent bid to cash them in. This is the first of a series of humorous, fast-paced detective novels devoted to a memorable gentleman thief who, with his trusted sidekick, Carlos, creates an investigative firm to recover missing precious objects. “A rollicking good time . . . Bestselling Swiss author Martin Suter may have a classic on his hands in this contemporary crime novel, the first of a series featuring the memorable character of Johann Friedrich von Allmen, gentleman thief.” —The Winnipeg Free Press “Suter combines sleight-of-hand suspense with stunning art and slightly worn Old World elegance to create a smartly entertaining read . . . A classy puzzler.” —Library Journal “The dark charms of Suter’s novel are irresistible from the first pages.” —Joshua Max Feldman, author of Start WithoutMe
Lasers, having proven useful in such diverse areas as high resolution spectroscopy and the guiding of ferryboats, are cur rently enjoying great popularity among materials scientists and engineers. As versatile sources of "pure" energy in a highly concentrated form, lasers have become attractive tools and re search instruments in metallurgy, semiconductor technology and engineering. This text treats, from a physicist's point of view, some of the processes that lasers can induce in materials. The field of laser-material interactions is inherently mul tidisciplinary. Upon impact of a laser beam on a material, electromagnetic energy is converted first into electronic exci tation and then into thermal, chemical and mechanical energy. In the whole process the molecular structure as well as the shape of the material are changed in various ways. Understand ing this sequence of events requires knowledge from several branches of physics. A unified presentation of the subject, for the benefit of the materials researcher as well as the advanced student, is attempted here. In order to keep the book reason ably trim, I have focused on laser effects in solids such as thin films and technological materials. Related topiCS not cov ered are laser-induced chemical reactions in gases and liquids and laser effects in organic or biological materials.
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