Our department nominated this thesis for a Springer award because we regard it as an outstanding piece of work, carried out with a remarkable level of independence. Andreas Rost joined us in 2005, as one of the inaugural Prize Students of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance. Our research group has been working on Sr Ru O, in collaboration with our colleagues in the group of Professor Y. Maeno 3 2 7 at Kyoto, since 1998. By early 2005 we had...