The new edition includes additional analytical methods in the classical theory of viscoelasticity. This leads to a new theory of finite linear viscoelasticity of incompressible isotropic materials. Anisotropic viscoplasticity is completely reformulated and extended to a general constitutive theory that covers crystal plasticity as a special case.

The 2007 Spring Meeting of the Arbeitskreis Festkorperphysik was held in Regensburg, Germany, March 2007, in conjunction with the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. It was one of the largest physics meetings in Europe. The present volume 47 of the Advances in Solid State Physics contains written versions of a large number of the invited talks and gives an overview of the present status of solid state physics where low-dimensional systems are dominating."

Plasticity and Geotechnics is the first attempt to summarize and present in a single volume the major achievements in the field of plasticity theory for geotechnical materials and its applications to geotechnical analysis and design. The book emerges from the author's belief that there is an urgent need for the geotechnical and solid mechanics community to have a unified presentation of plasticity theory and its application to geotechnical engineering.

This book gives a fascinating picture of the state of the art in silicon photonics and a perspective on what can be expected in the near future. It is composed of a selected number of reviews authored by world leaders in the field and is written from both academic and industrial viewpoints. An in-depth discussion of the route towards fully integrated silicon photonics is presented. This book will be useful not only to physicists, chemists, materials scientists, and engineers but also to graduate students who are interested in the fields of microphotonics and optoelectronics.

Gives a comprehensive and coherent account of the basic methods to characterize a solid through its interaction with an electromagnetic field.

A general and introductory survey of foams, emulsions and cellular materials. Foams and emulsions are illustrations of some fundamental concepts in statistical thermodynamics, rheology, elasticity and the physics and chemistry of divided media and interfaces. They also give rise to some of the most beautiful geometrical shapes and tilings, ordered or disordered. The chapters are grouped into sections having fairly loose boundaries. Each chapter is intelligible alone, but cross referencing means that the few concepts that may not be familiar to the reader can be found in other chapters in the book. Audience: Research students, researchers and teachers in physics, physical chemistry, materials science, mechanical engineering and geometry.

This book contains most of the contributions presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Nanowires, held at La Cristalera Residence Hall, Miraflores, Spain, from 23 through September 27, 1996. The workshop was co-directed by P. A. Serena and U. Landman. More than forty scientists from ten countries of Europe, the United States, and Japan attended this meeting and contributed with brilliant talks and stimulating discusions about their recent works. A total of thirty-three oral communications were given, covering the main part of topics related with the subject of the workshop. On one hand, a set of talks presented the theoretical basis of the conductance mechanisms in low dimensional systems, elaborated caIculations on the electronic structure and mechanical behavior of metallic nanowires, the role of defects and geometry in conductance, etc. On the other hand, from the experimental perspective, the contributions included the deeply study of the conductance quantization phenomenom, the analysis of conductance histograms, the study of the origin of the residual resistance, the presentation of different techniques of fabrication and manipulation of nanowires, the study of forces appearing in nanowires and their relation with the electronic conduction, etc. The motivation of the present workshop was to gather together scientists with differents ideas on these topics, to exchange points of view, establish the future lines in their research, and devise the role of nanowires in the future incoming nanoscale technologies. We hope that most of these points were successfully achieved.

The book consists of 5 parts: (1) ferroelectric thin films, (2) deposition and characterization methods, (3) fabrication process and circuit design, (4) advanced-type memories, and (5) applications and future prospects; each part is further divided into several chapters. Because of the wide range of topics discussed, each chapter in this book was written by one of the best authors knowing the specific topic very well.

Modern fracture mechanics considers phenomena at many levels, macro and micro; it is therefore inextricably linked to methods of theoretical and mathematical physics. This book introduces these sophisticated methods in a straightforward manner. The methods are applied to several important phenomena of solid state physics which impinge on fracture mechanics: adhesion, defect nucleation and growth, dislocation emission, sintering, the electron beam effect and fractal cracks. The book shows how the mathematical models for such processes may be set up, and how the equations so formulated may be solved and interpreted. The many open problems which are encountered will provide topics for MSc and PhD theses in fracture mechanics, and in theoretical and experimental physics. As a supplementary text, the book can be used in graduate level courses on fracture mechanics, solid matter physics, and mechanics of solids, or in a special course on the application of fracture mechanics methods in solid matter physics.

The aim of this NATO ASI has been to present an up-to-date overview of current areas of interest in amorphous materials. In order to limit the material to a manageable amount, the meeting was concerned exclusively with insulating and semiconducting materials. The lectures and seminars fill the gap between graduate courses and research seminars. The lecturers and seminar speakers were chosen as experts in their respective areas and the lectures and seminars that were given are presented in this volume. During the first week of the meeting. an emphasis was placed on introductory lectures, mainly associated with questions relating to the glass-formation and the structure of glasses. The second week focused more on research seminars. Each day of the meeting. about four posters were presented during the coffee breaks, and these formed an important focus for discussions. The posters are not reproduced in this volume as the editors wanted to have only larger contributions to make this volume more coherent. This volume is organized into four sections, starting with general considerations of the glass forming ability and techniques for the preparation of different kinds of glasses.

Selected modern aspects of artificially layered structures and bulk materials involving antiferromagnetic long-range order are the main themes of this book. Special emphasis is laid on the prototypical behavior of Ising-type model systems. They play a crucial role in the field of statistical physics and, in addition, contribute to the basic understanding of the exchange bias phenomenon in MBE-grown magnetic heterosystems. Throughout the book, particular attention is given to the interplay between experimental results and their theoretical description, ranging from the famous Lee-Yang theory of phase transitions to novel mechanisms of exchange bias.

The state-of-the-art of quantum transport and quantum kinetics in semiconductors, plus the latest applications, are covered in this monograph. Since the publishing of the first edition in 1996, the nonequilibrium Green function technique has been applied to a large number of new research topics, and the revised edition introduces the reader to many of these areas. This book is both a reference work for researchers and a self-tutorial for graduate students.

During thelastthreedecadesmanynewaswellasextendedclassesoforganic andinorganicmaterials, someofwhichbeingofhybridtype, havebeensynthe sized. Amongthemarethosethecontributorsofthisbookaredealingwith. In parallel to this, new technologies have been developed such as active matrix addressed liquid crystal displays (TFT-LCD), new types of sensors like ther mographic sheets employed in science, industry and medicine, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), SQUIDs etc. At the same time the techniques for characterizing both the materials and technological products have become very fast and highly precise. For example, today measuring a dielectric spec trum over a broadfrequency rangewith a high density of experimentalpoints per decade requires a few minutes time, sometimes just a few seconds, but before it would have taken weeks or even months. Nowadays one is able to create an enormous amount of data points but there is a real problem how to reach the real message, the truth? Toanswersuchquestions, aftersomeyearsofaverye?cientandsuccessful bilateral co-operation between our two research groups in Darmstadt and in Cracow, in the early 1990s an idea appeared to discuss all such intriguing problems with our colleagues and friends from many countries in the friendly atmosphere of the nice vacation resort of Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. Therefore our ?rst workshop was organized there in 1993 and repeated at the same place in 1995 and 2000, interchanged with Darmstadt in 1998 and ?nally again in 2002. These kinds of meetings were well received as shown by the participation of the leading scientists in the ?eld of materials science and by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from all over the world."

New manufacturing technologies have made possible the integration of entire systems on a single chip. This new design paradigm, termed system-on-chip (SOC), together with its associated manufacturing problems, represents a real challenge for designers.

SOC is also reshaping approaches to test and validation activities. These are beginning to migrate from the traditional register-transfer or gate levels of abstraction to the system level. Until now, test and validation have not been supported by system-level design tools so designers have lacked the infrastructure to exploit all the benefits stemming from the adoption of the system level of abstraction. Research efforts are already addressing this issue.

This monograph provides a state-of-the-art overview of the current validation and test techniques by covering all aspects of the subject including:

• modeling of bugs and defects;
• stimulus generation for validation and test purposes (including timing errors;
• design for testability.

This book addresses Lab-on-a-Chip devices. It focuses on microfluidic technologies that have emerged in the past decade. Coverage presents a comprehensive listing of the most promising microfluidic technologies in the Lab-on-a-Chip field. It also details technologies that can be viewed as toolboxes needed to set up complex Lab-on-a-Chip systems.

This volume offers an overview of the growth of shaped crystals (oxides, fluorides, etc.) by the micro-pulling-down technique. Both melt and solution (flux) growth are considered. The advantages and disadvantages of the method are discussed in detail and compared with related crystal-growth processes. The authors attempt to give a practical introduction to this technique, thereby also explaining how its application can help to solve problems commonly encountered in other melt-growth methods.

The IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC) is one of the most important conferences in the area of computer science and a number of related Human and Social Science disciplines at the worldwide level and it has a federated structure, which takes into account the rapidly growing and expanding interests in this area. Human-Computer Interaction is now a mature and still dynamically evolving part of this area, which is represented in IFIP by the Technical Committee 13 on HCI. We are convinced that in this edition of WCC, which takes place for the first time in Italy, it will be interesting and useful to have a Symposium on Human- Computer Interaction in order to present and discuss a number of contributions in this field. There has been increasing awareness among designers of interactive systems of the importance of designing for usability, but we are still far from having products that are really usable, and usability can mean different things depending on the application domain. We are all aware that too many users of current technology feel often frustrated because computer systems are not compatible with their abilities and needs with existing work practices. As designers of tomorrow technology, we have the responsibility of creating computer artefacts that would permit better user experience with the various computing devices, so that users may enjoy more satisfying experiences with information and communications technologies.

This book presents written versions of selected invited lectures from the spring meeting of the Arbeitskreis Festkorperphysik of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft which was held from 27 to 31 March 2006 in Dresden, Germany. Many topical talks given at the numerous symposia are included. Most of these were organized collaboratively by several of the divisions of the Arbeitskreis. The book presents, to some extent, the status of the field of solid-state physics in 2006 not only in Germany but also internationally."

The NMR probe has yielded a panorama of data on the static and dynamic magnetic properties of high-Tc materials. This volume aims to provide a comprehensive exposition of the various facets of the technique itself and to apply those results to the task of creating straightforward physical meaning for the elements of the available data. While some aspects of the underlying theory remain mysterious, this book renders nearly every available measurement understandable.

This book compares and offers a comprehensive overview of nine analytical techniques important in material science and many other branches of science. All these methods are already well adapted to applications in diverse fields such as medical, environmental studies, archaeology, and materials science. This clearly presented reference describes and compares the principles of the methods and the various source and detector types.

In this special volume on polymer particles, recent trends and developments in the synthesis of nano- to micron-sized polymer particles by radical polymerization (Emulsion, Miniemulsion, Microemulsion, and Dispersion Polymerizations) of vinyl monomers in environmentally friendly heterogeneous aqueous and supercritical carbon dioxide fluid media are reviewed by prominent worldwide researchers. In addition to the important challenges and possibilities with regards to design and preparation of functionalized polymer particles of controlled size, the topics described are of great current interest due to the increased awareness of environmental issues.

One of the key problems of failure-free operation of machinery is prevention of corrosion. The global scale of modern production makes this problem even more critical. At the beginning of the 21st century industrial contami- tion and the corrosion-active nature of the environment reached a level such that corrosive damage of materials became commensurate with their prod- tion volume and expenditure on anticorrosion protection of machines became comparable with investments in basic production. Anticorrosion techniques changed from being an auxiliary service to industrial enterprises into a dev- oping, scienti?cally intensive and generously ?nanced branch of production. Polymers occupy a very speci?c place amongst anticorrosion techniques. Polymers combine good chemical resistance with impermeability to di?- ent media and unusual deformation characteristics. The main principle of their application as anticorrosion means is the creation of a tight barrier that insulates metal machine parts or constructions from corrosion agents. The advantages of polymers allow the creation of such a barrier at minimal cost, providingprotectionoftheworkingmachinesfromcorrosion, combining their manufacture with preservation and decreasing the cost of anticorrosion. This is one of the main reasons why world production of polymer materials increased by almost 50% in the past decad

Research in the field of shock physics and ballistic impact has always been intimately tied to progress in development of facilities for accelerating projectiles to high velocity and instrumentation for recording impact phenomena. The chapters of this book, written by leading US and European experts, cover a broad range of topics and address researchers concerned with questions of material behaviour under impulsive loading and the equations of state of matter, as well as the design of suitable instrumentation such as gas guns and high-speed diagnostics. Applications include high-speed impact dynamics, the inner composition of planets, syntheses of new materials and materials processing. Among the more technologically oriented applications treated is the testing of the flight characteristics of aeroballistic models and the assessment of impacts in the aerospace industry.

This graduate-level textbook covers the major developments in surface sciences of recent decades, from experimental tricks and basic techniques to the latest experimental methods and theoretical understanding. It is unique in its attempt to treat the physics of surfaces, thin films and interfaces, surface chemistry, thermodynamics, statistical physics and the physics of the solid/electrolyte interface in an integral manner, rather than in separate compartments. It is designed as a handbook for the researcher as well as a study-text for graduate students. Written explanations are supported by 350 graphs and illustrations.

Time-Resolved Spectroscopy in Complex Liquids is intended to introduce the experimental researchers to state-of-the-art techniques in the study of the dynamics of complex liquids. The contributors concentrate on time-resolved optical spectroscopy, which recently produced many relevant results and new information about complex liquids. This is an emerging topic of soft-matter science and this book provides the most up-to-date account of new development.