It has been thirty years since one of the authors (EJD) began a collaboration with Professor Milton Kerker at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York using light scattering methods to study aerosol processes. The development of a relatively short-lived commercial particle levitator based on a modification of the Millikan oil drop experiment attracted their attention and led the author to the study of single droplets and solid microparticles by levitation methods. The early work on measurements of droplet evaporation rates using light scattering techniques to determine the size slowly expanded and diversified as better instrumentation was developed, and faster computers made it possible to perform Mie theory light scattering calculations with ease. Several milestones can be identified in the progress of single microparticle studies. The first is the introduction of the electrodynamic balance, which provided more robust trapping of a particle. The electrodynamic levitator, which has played an important role in atomic and molecular ion spectroscopy, leading to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989 shared by Wolfgang Paul of Bonn University and Hans Dehmelt of the University of Washington, was easily adapted to trap microparticles. Simultaneously, improvements in detectors for acquiring and storing light scattering data and theoretical and experimental studies of the interesting optical properties of microspheres, especially the work on morphology­ dependent resonances by Arthur Ashkin at the Bell Laboratories, Richard Chang, from Yale University, and Tony Campillo from the Naval Research Laboratories in Washington D. C.

This book is the first in English being entirely dedicated to Miniature Joule-Thomson Cryocooling. The category of Joule-Thomson (JT) cryocoolers takes us back to the roots of cryogenics, in 1895, with figures like Linde and Hampson. The "cold finger" of these cryocoolers is compact, lacks moving parts, and sustains a large heat flux extraction at a steady temperature. Potentially, they cool down unbeatably fast. For example, cooling to below 100 K (minus 173 Celsius) might be accomplished within only a few seconds by liquefying argon. A level of about 120 K can be reached almost instantly with krypton. Indeed, the species of coolant plays a central role dictating the size, the intensity and the level of cryocooling. It is the JT effect that drives these cryocoolers and reflects the deviation of the "real" gas from the ideal gas properties. The nine chapters of the book are arranged in five parts.

This book presents information on the development of a non-equilibrium approach to the study of heat and mass transfer problems using vapor-liquid interfaces, and demonstrates its application to a broad range of problems. In the process, the following peculiarities become apparent: 1. At vapor condensation on the interface from gas-vapor mixture, non-condensable components can lock up the interface surface and condensation stops completely. 2. At the evolution of vapor film on the heater in superfluid helium (He-II), the boiling mass flux density from the vapor-liquid interface is effectively zero at the macroscopic scale. 3. In problems concerning the motion of He-II bridges inside capillaries filled by vapor, in the presence of axial heat flux the He-II bridge cannot move from the heater as would a traditional liquid, but in the opposite direction instead. Thus the heater attracts the superfluid helium bridge. 4. The shape of liquid-vapor interface at film boiling on the axis-symmetric heaters immersed in liquid greatly depends on heat flux in the interface. Thus a new type of hydrostatic problems appears when in contrast to traditional statements the shape of the liquid-vapor interface has a complex profile with a point of inflection and a smooth exit on a free liquid surface.