A truck driver on a lonely stretch of road, a hitchiker, and an ancient curse—"The Burned Tower" is a brilliant and moving tale, steeped in folklore, by the masters of modern fantasy, Sergey and Marina Dyachenko. In 1999, "The Burned Tower" was awarded the "Interpresscon" as the best short story of the year on the international SF-convention in St-Petersburg. Includes a sample chapter of The Scar. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Reaching far beyond sword and sorcery, The Scar is a story of two people torn by disaster, their descent into despair, and their reemergence through love and courage. Sergey and Marina Dyachenko mix dramatic scenes with romance, action and wit, in a style both direct and lyrical. Written with a sure artistic hand, The Scar is the story of a man driven by his own feverish demons to find redemption and the woman who just might save him. Egert is a brash, confident member of the elite guards and an egotistical philanderer. But after he kills an innocent student in a duel, a mysterious man known as "The Wanderer" challenges Egert and slashes his face with his sword, leaving Egert with a scar that comes to symbolize his cowardice. Unable to end his suffering by his own hand, Egert embarks on an odyssey to undo the curse and the horrible damage he has caused, which can only be repaired by a painful journey down a long and harrowing path. Plotted with the sureness of Robin Hobb and colored with the haunting and ominous imagination of Michael Moorcock, The Scar tells a story that cannot be forgotten.
In this extraordinary stand-alone novel, the authors and translator of Vita Nostra—a "dark Harry Potter on steroids with a hefty dose of metaphysics" (award-winning author Aliette de Bodard)—return with a story about creation, music, and companionship filled with their hallmark elements of subtle magic and fantasy. Late one night, fate brings together DJ Aspirin and ten-year-old Alyona. After he tries to save her from imminent danger, she ends up at his apartment. But in the morning sinister doubts set in. Who is Alyona? A young con artist? A plant for a nefarious blackmailer? Or perhaps a long-lost daughter Aspirin never knew existed? Whoever this mysterious girl is, she now refuses to leave. A game of cat-and-mouse has begun. Claiming that she is a musical prodigy, Alyona insists she must play a complicated violin piece to find her brother. Confused and wary, Aspirin knows one thing: he wants her out of his apartment and his life. Yet every attempt to get rid of her is thwarted by an unusual protector: her plush teddy bear that may just transform into a fearsome monster. Alyona tells Aspirin that if he would just allow her do her work, she’ll leave him—and this world. He can then return to the shallow life he led before her. But as outside forces begin to coalesce, threatening to finally separate them, Aspirin makes a startling discovery about himself and this ethereal, eerie child.
Wave Turbulence refers to the statistical theory of weakly nonlinear dispersive waves. There is a wide and growing spectrum of physical applications, ranging from sea waves, to plasma waves, to superfluid turbulence, to nonlinear optics and Bose-Einstein condensates. Beyond the fundamentals the book thus also covers new developments such as the interaction of random waves with coherent structures (vortices, solitons, wave breaks), inverse cascades leading to condensation and the transitions between weak and strong turbulence, turbulence intermittency as well as finite system size effects, such as “frozen” turbulence, discrete wave resonances and avalanche-type energy cascades. This book is an outgrow of several lectures courses held by the author and, as a result, written and structured rather as a graduate text than a monograph, with many exercises and solutions offered along the way. The present compact description primarily addresses students and non-specialist researchers wishing to enter and work in this field.
This book is a translation from a Russian book. In 2007, the authors created a new generation of layered composite-based sensors, whose advantages are high technology and thermal stability. The use of gradient heat flux sensors in laboratory and industrial conditions confirmed their reliability, showed high information, and allowed a number of priority results to be obtained. All of this is summarized in this book.
Nanophotonics is where photonics merges with nanoscience and nanotechnology, and where spatial confinement considerably modifies light propagation and light-matter interaction. Describing the basic phenomena, principles, experimental advances and potential impact of nanophotonics, this graduate-level textbook is ideal for students in physics, optical and electronic engineering and materials science. The textbook highlights practical issues, material properties and device feasibility, and includes the basic optical properties of metals, semiconductors and dielectrics. Mathematics is kept to a minimum and theoretical issues are reduced to a conceptual level. Each chapter ends in problems so readers can monitor their understanding of the material presented. The introductory quantum theory of solids and size effects in semiconductors are considered to give a parallel discussion of wave optics and wave mechanics of nanostructures. The physical and historical interplay of wave optics and quantum mechanics is traced. Nanoplasmonics, an essential part of modern photonics, is also included.
This book explores non-standard processes in complex electrochemical systems, covering the structure and phase composition of modified alloys, saturation kinetics, and properties of surface layers. It also investigates the plasma electrolytic polishing of many alloys. The book presents the physicist with conditions of heating metals up to 1000 °C inside a solution, the chemist with reactions in vapour-gaseous media and on the surface of an electrode, and the metal scientist with the diffusion saturation of metals with nitrogen, carbon and boron. It will also appeal to engineers, university and college professors, and other researchers in related fields.
This is the second volume of Nonlinear Equations with Small Parameter containing new methods of construction of global asymptotics of solutions to nonlinear equations with small parameter. They allow one to match asymptotics of various properties with each other in transition regions and to get unified formulas for connection of characteristic parameters of approximate solutions. This approach underlies modern asymptotic methods and gives a deep insight into crucial nonlinear phenomena. These are beginnings of chaos in dynamical systems, incipient solitary and shock waves, oscillatory processes in crystals, engineering constructions and quantum systems. Apart from independent interest the approximate solutions serve as a foolproof basis for testing numerical algorithms. The second volume will be related to partial differential equations.
This book offers a comprehensive review of the known literature data devoted to the reactions of a,ß-unsaturated ketones, their synthetic equivalents and precursor.
Readers will learn in which ways light can be "confined" within a subwavelength region smaller than half a wavelength. Strictly within the focal spot, all degrees of freedom of light interact and manifest themselves in a dramatic way. The size and shape of the focal spot and the magnitude of side-lobes depend on the polarization state alongside phase and amplitude distributions of a light beam. Readers will learn techniques in which inhomogeneously (i.e., azimuthally and radially) polarized optical beams can be focused. In sharp focus, exotic phenomena can occur, including the negative propagation of light and a toroidal optical flow. Throughout the book, the numerical simulation is performed using the rigorous solution of Maxwell’s equations based on a Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) approach, which makes the results of modeling highly reliable. The photonic components, including optical metasurfaces, discussed in the book have been implemented using state-of-the-art techniques of electron beam writing and reactive ion-beam etching of microrelief. Two chapters are concerned with photonics hot spots, which deal with the control of light by means of optical metasurfaces and the generation of an energy backflow in the region of sharp focus of a laser beam. Another hot topic is diffractive polarization converters implemented as subwavelength diffraction gratings to convert polarization of light. By way of illustration, such converters are shown to perform linear-to-radial or linear-to-azimuthal polarization conversion. The book describes advanced photonic components fabricated by the authors to perform sharp focusing of light, including binary zone plates, binary axicons, a planar photonic crystal lens, diffraction polarization converters, and metalenses. This book is a must-have for individuals and institutions studying cutting edge optics.
A truck driver on a lonely stretch of road, a hitchiker, and an ancient curse—"The Burned Tower" is a brilliant and moving tale, steeped in folklore, by the masters of modern fantasy, Sergey and Marina Dyachenko. In 1999, "The Burned Tower" was awarded the "Interpresscon" as the best short story of the year on the international SF-convention in St-Petersburg. Includes a sample chapter of The Scar. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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