Vincent Rivasseau

Costas Bachas

Bertrand Duplantier

This volume provides a detailed description of the seminal theoretical construction in 1964, independently by Robert Brout and Francois Englert, and by Peter W. Higgs, of a mechanism for short-range fundamental interactions, now called the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) mechanism. It accounts for the non-zero mass of elementary particles and predicts the existence of a new particle - an elementary massive scalar boson. In addition to this the book describes the experimental discovery of this fundamental missing element in the Standard Model of particle physics. The H Boson, also called the Higgs Boson, was produced and detected in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN near Geneva by two large experimental collaborations, ATLAS and CMS, which announced its discovery on the 4th of July 2012.This new volume of the Poincaré Seminar Series, The H Boson, corresponds to the nineteenth seminar, held on November 29, 2014, at Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris.

The H Boson

Jean-Michel Raimond

Olivier Darrigol

This fourteenth volume in the Poincaré Seminar Series is devoted to Niels Bohr, his foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory and their continuing importance today. This book contains the following chapters: - Tomas Bohr, Keeping Things Open; - Olivier Darrigol, Bohr's Trilogy of 1913; -John Heilbron, The Mind that Created the Bohr Atom; - Serge Haroche & Jean-Michel Raimond, Bohr's Legacy in Cavity QED; - Alain Aspect, From Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger to Bell and Feynman: a New Quantum Revolution?; - Antoine Browaeys, Interacting Cold Rydberg Atoms: A Toy Many-Body System; - Michel Bitbol & Stefano Osnaghi, Bohr ́s Complementarity and Kant ́s Epistemology. Dating from their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience these seven chapters are of high educational value. This volume is of general interest to physicists, mathematicians and historians.

Poincaré Seminar 2013

Niels Bohr, 1913-2013

This thirteenth volume of the Poincaré Seminar Series, Henri Poincaré, 1912-2012, is published on the occasion of the centennial of the death of Henri Poincaré in 1912. It presents a scholarly approach to Poincaré’s genius and creativity in mathematical physics and mathematics. Its five articles are also highly pedagogical, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience. Highlights include “Poincaré’s Light” by Olivier Darrigol, a leading historian of science, who uses light as a guiding thread through much of Poincaré ’s physics and philosophy, from the application of his superior mathematical skills and the theory of diffraction to his subsequent reflections on the foundations of electromagnetism and the electrodynamics of moving bodies; the authoritative “Poincaré and the Three-Body Problem” by Alain Chenciner, who offers an exquisitely detailed, hundred-page perspective, peppered with vivid excerpts from citations, on the monumental work of Poincaré on this subject, from the famous (King Oscar’s) 1889 memoir to the foundations of the modern theory of chaos in “Les méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste.” A profoundly original and scholarly presentation of the work by Poincaré on probability theory is given by Laurent Mazliak in “Poincaré’s Odds,” from the incidental first appearance of the word “probability” in Poincaré’s famous 1890 theorem of recurrence for dynamical systems, to his later acceptance of the unavoidability of probability calculus in Science, as developed to a great extent by Emile Borel, Poincaré’s main direct disciple; the article by Francois Béguin, “Henri Poincaré and the Uniformization of Riemann Surfaces,” takes us on a fascinating journey through the six successive versions in twenty-six years of the celebrated uniformization theorem, which exemplifies the Master’s distinctive signature in the foundational fusion of mathematics and physics, on which conformal field theory, string theory and quantum gravity so much depend nowadays; the final chapter, “Harmony and Chaos, On the Figure of Henri Poincaré” by the filmmaker Philippe Worms, describes the homonymous poetical film in which eminent scientists, through mathematical scenes and physical experiments, display their emotional relationship to the often elusive scientific truth and universal “harmony and chaos” in Poincaré’s legacy. This book will be of broad general interest to physicists, mathematicians, philosophers of science and historians.

Bertrand Duplantier

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