![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Science & Mathematics > Physics > Thermodynamics & statistical physics > Statistical physics
The paradigm of complexity is pervading both science and engineering, le- ing to the emergence of novel approaches oriented at the development of a systemic view of the phenomena under study; the de?nition of powerful tools for modelling, estimation, and control; and the cross-fertilization of di?erent disciplines and approaches. One of the most promising paradigms to cope with complexity is that of networked systems. Complex, dynamical networks are powerful tools to model, estimate, and control many interesting phenomena, like agent coordination, synch- nization, social and economics events, networks of critical infrastructures, resourcesallocation, informationprocessing, controlovercommunicationn- works, etc. Advances in this ?eld are highlighting approaches that are more and more oftenbasedondynamicalandtime-varyingnetworks, i.e.networksconsisting of dynamical nodes with links that can change over time. Moreover, recent technological advances in wireless communication and decreasing cost and size of electronic devices are promoting the appearance of large inexpensive interconnected systems, each with computational, sensing and mobile ca- bilities. This is fostering the development of many engineering applications, which exploit the availability of these systems of systems to monitor and control very large-scale phenomena with ?ne resoluti
This book offers a discussion of Niels Bohr's conception of "complementarity," arguably his greatest contribution to physics and philosophy. By tracing Bohr's work from his 1913 atomic theory to the introduction and then refinement of the idea of complementarity, and by explicating different meanings of "complementarity" in Bohr and the relationships between it and Bohr's other concepts, the book aims to offer a contained and accessible, and yet sufficiently comprehensive account of Bohr's work on complementarity and its significance.
Professor Sluzalec is a well-known and respected authority in the field of Computational Mechanics, and his personal experience forms the basis of the book. Introduction to Nonlinear Thermomechanics provides both an elementary and advanced exposition of nonlinear thermomechanics. The scope includes theoretical aspects and their rational application in thermal problems, thermo-elastoplasticity, finite strain thermoplasticity and coupled thermoplasticity. The use of numerical techniques for the solution of problems and implementation of basic theory is included. Engineers, technicians, researchers, and advanced students will find the book an extremely useful compendium of solutions to problems. The scope is such that it would also be an effective teaching aid.
Stochastic processes and diffusion theory are the mathematical underpinnings of many scientific disciplines, including statistical physics, physical chemistry, molecular biophysics, communications theory and many more. Many books, reviews and research articles have been published on this topic, from the purely mathematical to the most practical. This book offers an analytical approach to stochastic processes that are most common in the physical and life sciences, as well as in optimal control and in the theory of filltering of signals from noisy measurements. Its aim is to make probability theory in function space readily accessible to scientists trained in the traditional methods of applied mathematics, such as integral, ordinary, and partial differential equations and asymptotic methods, rather than in probability and measure theory.
Building on Wilson's renormalization group, the authors have developed a unified approach that not only reproduces known results but also yields new results. A systematic exposition of the contemporary theory of phase transitions, the book includes detailed discussions of phenomena in Heisenberg magnets, granular super-conducting alloys, anisotropic systems of dipoles, and liquid-vapor transitions. Suitable for advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students in physics, the text assumes some knowledge of statistical mechanics, but is otherwise self-contained.
One service mathematics has rendered the 'Et BIOi. .... si j'avait su comment en revenir. human race. It has put common sense back je n'y serais point aile.' Jules Verne where it belongs. on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labelled 'discarded non The series is divergent; therefore we may be sense'. able to do something with it. Eric T. Bell O. Heaviside Math@matics is a tool for thought. A highly necessary tool in a world where both feedback and non Iinearities abound. Similarly, all kinds of parts of mathematics serve as tools for other parts and for other sciences. Applying a simple rewriting rule to the quote on the right above one finds such statements as: 'One service topology has rendered mathematical physics .. .'; 'One service logic has rendered com puter science .. .'; 'One service category theory has rendered mathematics .. .'. All arguably true. And all statements obtainable this way form part of the raison d'etre of this series."
The aim of this book is to give a unified and critical account of the fundamental aspects of liquid crystals. Preference is given to discussing the assumptions made in developing theories and analyzing experimental data rather than to attempting to compile all the latest results. The book has four parts. Part I is quite descriptive in character and gives a general overview of the various liquid crystalline phases. Part II deals with the macroscopic continuum theory of liquid crystals and gives a systematic development of the theory from a tensorial point of view thus emphasizing the relevant symmetries. Part III concentrates on experiments that provide microscopic information on the orientational behaviour of the molecules. Finally Part IV discusses the theory of the various phases and their attendant phase transitions from both a Landau and a molecular-statistical point of view. Simplifying the various models as far as possible, it critically examines the merits of a molecular-statistical approach.
The idea of devoting a complete book to this topic was born at one of the Workshops on Nonlinear and Turbulent Processes in Physics taking place reg ularly in Kiev. With the exception of E. D. Siggia and N. Ercolani, all authors of this volume were participants at the third of these workshops. All of them were acquainted with each other and with each other's work. Yet it seemed to be somewhat of a discovery that all of them were and are trying to understand the same problem - the problem of integrability of dynamical systems, primarily Hamiltonian ones with an infinite number of degrees of freedom. No doubt that they (or to be more exact, we) were led to this by the logical process of scientific evolution which often leads to independent, almost simultaneous discoveries. Integrable, or, more accurately, exactly solvable equations are essential to theoretical and mathematical physics. One could say that they constitute the "mathematical nucleus" of theoretical physics whose goal is to describe real clas sical or quantum systems. For example, the kinetic gas theory may be considered to be a theory of a system which is trivially integrable: the system of classical noninteracting particles. One of the main tasks of quantum electrodynamics is the development of a theory of an integrable perturbed quantum system, namely, noninteracting electromagnetic and electron-positron fields."
This classic text provides an excellent introduction to a new and rapidly developing field of research. Now well established as a textbook in this rapidly developing field of research, the new edition is much enlarged and covers a host of new results.
The renormalization-group approach is largely responsible for the considerable success which has been achieved in the last ten years in developing a complete quantitative theory of phase transitions. Before, there was a useful physical picture of phase transitions, but a general method for making accurate quantitative predictions was lacking. Existent theories, such as the mean-field theory of Landau, sometimes reproduce phase diagrams reliably but were known to fail qualitatively near critical points, where the critical behavior is particularly interesting be cause of its universal character. In the mid 1960's Widom found that the singularities in thermodynamic quanti ties were well described by homogeneous functions. Kadanoff extended the homogeneity hypothesis to correlation functions and linked it to the idea of scale invariance. In the early 1970's Wilson showed how Kadanoff's rescaling could be explicitly carried out near the fixed point of a flow in Hamiltonian space. He made the first practical renormalization-group calculation of the flow induced by the elimination of short-wave-length Fourier components of the order-parameter field. The univer sality of the critical behavior emerges in a natural way in this approach, with a different fixed point for each universality class. The discovery by Wilson and Fisher of a systematic expansion procedure in E for a system in d = 4 - E dimen sions was followed by a cascade of calculations of critical quantities as a function of d and of the order-parameter dimensionality n."
Covers a wide spectrum of applications and contains a wide discussion of the foundations and the scope of the most current theories of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The new edition reflects new developments and contains a new chapter on the interplay between hydrodynamics and thermodynamics.
Many phenomena in physics, chemistry, and biology can be modelled by spatial random processes. One such process is continuum percolation, which is used when the phenomenon being modelled is made up of individual events that overlap, for example, the way individual raindrops eventually make the ground evenly wet. This is a systematic rigorous account of continuum percolation. Two models, the Boolean model and the random connection model, are treated in detail, and related continuum models are discussed. All important techniques and methods are explained and applied to obtain results on the existence of phase transitions, equality and continuity of critical densities, compressions, rarefaction, and other aspects of continuum models. This self-contained treatment, assuming only familiarity with measure theory and basic probability theory, will appeal to students and researchers in probability and stochastic geometry.
ill the past three decades there has been enonnous progress in identifying the es sential role that "nonlinearity" plays in physical systems. Classical nonlinear wave equations can support localized, stable "soliton" solutions, and nonlinearities in quantum systems can lead to self-trapped excitations, such as polarons. Since these nonlinear excitations often dominate the transport and response properties of the systems in which they exist, accurate modeling of their effects is essential to interpreting a wide range of physical phenomena. Further, the dramatic de velopments in "deterministic chaos", including the recognition that even simple nonlinear dynamical systems can produce seemingly random temporal evolution, have similarly demonstrated that an understanding of chaotic dynamics is vital to an accurate interpretation of the behavior of many physical systems. As a conse quence of these two developments, the study of nonlinear phenomena has emerged as a subject in its own right. During these same three decades, similar progress has occurred in understand ing the effects of "disorder". Stimulated by Anderson's pioneering work on "dis ordered" quantum solid state materials, this effort has also grown into a field that now includes a variety of classical and quantum systems and treats "disorder" arising from many sources, including impurities, random spatial structures, and stochastic applied fields. Significantly, these two developments have occurred rather independently, with relatively little overlapping research.
In our daily lives we conceive of our surroundings as an objectively given reality. The world is perceived through our senses, and ~hese provide us, so we believe, with a faithful image of the world. But occ~ipnally we are forced to realize that our senses deceive us, e. g. , by illusions. For a while it was believed that the sensation of color is directly r~lated to the frequency of light waves, until E. Land (the inventor of the polaroid camera) showed in detailed experiments that our perception of, say, a colored spot depends on the colors of its surrounding. On the other hand, we may experience hallucinations or dreams as real. Quite evidently, the relationship between the "world" and our "brain" is intricate. Another strange problem is the way in which we perceive time or the "Now". Psychophysical experiments tell us that the psychological "Now" is an extended period of time in the sense of physics. The situation was made still more puzzling when, in the nineteen-twenties, Heisenberg and others realized that, by observing processes in the microscopic world of electrons and other elementary particles, we strongly interfere with that world. The outcome of experiments - at least in general - can only be predicted statistically. What is the nature ofthis strange relationship between "object" and "observer"? This is another crucial problem of the inside-outside or endo-exo dichotomy.
Semiconductor technology has developed considerably during the past several decades. The exponential growth in microelectronic processing power has been achieved by a constant scaling down of integrated cir, cuits. Smaller fea ture sizes result in increased functional density, faster speed, and lower costs. One key ingredient of the LSI technology is the development of the lithog raphy and microfabrication. The current minimum feature size is already as small as 0.2 /tm, beyond the limit imposed by the wavelength of visible light and rapidly approaching fundamental limits. The next generation of devices is highly likely to show unexpected properties due to quantum effects and fluctuations. The device which plays an important role in LSIs is MOSFETs (metal oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors). In MOSFETs an inversion layer is formed at the interface of silicon and its insulating oxide. The inversion layer provides a unique two-dimensional (2D) system in which the electron concentration is controlled almost freely over a very wide range. Physics of such 2D systems was born in the mid-1960s together with the development of MOSFETs. The integer quantum Hall effect was first discovered in this system."
The development of the modern theory of metals and alloys has coincided with great advances in quantum-mechanical many-body theory, in electronic structure calculations, in theories of lattice dynamics and of the configura tional thermodynamics of crystals, in liquid-state theory, and in the theory of phase transformations. For a long time all these different fields expanded quite independently, but now their overlap has become sufficiently large that they are beginning to form the basis of a comprehensive first-principles the ory of the cohesive, structural, and thermodynamical properties of metals and alloys in the crystalline as well as in the liquid state. Today, we can set out from the quantum-mechanical many-body Hamiltonian of the system of electrons and ions, and, following the path laid out by generations of the oreticians, we can progress far enough to calculate a pressure-temperature phase diagram of a metal or a composition-temperature phase diagram of a binary alloy by methods which are essentially rigorous and from first prin ciples. This book was written with the intention of confronting the materials scientist, the metallurgist, the physical chemist, but also the experimen tal and theoretical condensed-matter physicist, with this new and exciting possibility. Of course there are limitations to such a vast undertaking as this. The selection of the theories and techniques to be discussed, as well as the way in which they are presented, are necessarily biased by personal inclination and personal expertise."
This short but complicated book is very demanding of any reader. The scope and style employed preserve the nature of its subject: the turbulence phe nomena in gas and liquid flows which are believed to occur at sufficiently high Reynolds numbers. Since at first glance the field of interest is chaotic, time-dependent and three-dimensional, spread over a wide range of scales, sta tistical treatment is convenient rather than a description of fine details which are not of importance in the first place. When coupled to the basic conserva tion laws of fluid flow, such treatment, however, leads to an unclosed system of equations: a consequence termed, in the scientific community, the closure problem. This is the central and still unresolved issue of turbulence which emphasizes its chief peculiarity: our inability to do reliable predictions even on the global flow behavior. The book attempts to cope with this difficult task by introducing promising mathematical tools which permit an insight into the basic mechanisms involved. The prime objective is to shed enough light, but not necessarily the entire truth, on the turbulence closure problem. For many applications it is sufficient to know the direction in which to go and what to do in order to arrive at a fast and practical solution at minimum cost. The book is not written for easy and attractive reading."
This text on the statistical theory of nonequilibrium phenomena grew out of lecture notes for courses on advanced statistical mechanics that were held more or less regularly at the Physics Department of the Technical University in Munich. My aim in these lectures was to incorporate various developments of many-body theory made during the last 20-30 years, in particular the correlation function approach, not just as an "extra" alongside the more "classical" results; I tried to use this approach as a unifying concept for the presentation of older as well as more recent results. I think that after so many excellent review articles and advanced treatments, correlation functions and memory kernels are as much a matter of course in nonequilibrium statistical physics as partition functions are in equilibrium theory, and should be used as such in regular courses and textbooks. The relations between correlation functions and earlier vehicles for the formulation of nonequilibrium theory such as kinetic equations, master equations, Onsager's theory, etc. , are discussed in detail in this volume. Since today there is growing interest in nonlinear phenomena I have included several chapters on related problems. There is some nonlinear response theory, some results on phenomenological nonlinear equations and some microscopic applications of the nonlinear response formalism. The main focus, however, is on the linear regime.
This is a unique approach to noise theory and its application to physical measurements that will find its place among the graduate course books. In a very systematic way, the foundations are laid and applied in a way that the book will also be useful to those not focusing on optics. Exercises and solutions help students to deepen their knowledge.
The analysis of neurophysiological brain function is a highly interdisciplinary field of research. In addition to the traditional areas of psychology and neurobiology, various other scientific disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering, are involved. The book reviews a wide spectrum of model-based analyses of neurophysiological brain function. In the first part, physical and physiological models and synergetic concepts are presented. The second part focuses on analysis methods and their applications to EEG/MEG data sets. It reviews methods of source localization, the investigation of synchronization processes, and spatio-temporal modeling based on dynamical systems theory. The book includes contributions by well-known scientists such as Hermann Haken, Scott Kelso and Paul Nunez, among others. It is written for students and scientists from all the above-mentioned fields.
Nonlinear dynamics is now recognized as playing a crucial role in a wide variety of disciplines. But what is only just beginning is the important process of cross fertilization and transfer of knowledge and expertise from one area to another. This book is intended to promote this process which will undoubtedly contribute greatly to furthering our understanding of complex systems. Contributions are provided by leading experts from the areas of sociology, cognitive science, chemistry, physiology, ecology, economics, neural networks and physics.
In a certain sense this book has been twenty-five years in the writing, since I first struggled with the foundations of the subject as a graduate student. It has taken that long to develop a deep appreciation of what Gibbs was attempting to convey to us near the end of his life and to understand fully the same ideas as resurrected by E.T. Jaynes much later. Many classes of students were destined to help me sharpen these thoughts before I finally felt confident that, for me at least, the foundations of the subject had been clarified sufficiently. More than anything, this work strives to address the following questions: What is statistical mechanics? Why is this approach so extraordinarily effective in describing bulk matter in terms of its constituents? The response given here is in the form of a very definite point of view-the principle of maximum entropy (PME). There have been earlier attempts to approach the subject in this way, to be sure, reflected in the books by Tribus [Thermostat ics and Thermodynamics, Van Nostrand, 1961], Baierlein [Atoms and Information Theory, Freeman, 1971], and Hobson [Concepts in Statistical Mechanics, Gordon and Breach, 1971].
The study of permutation complexity can be envisioned as a new kind of symbolic dynamics whose basic blocks are ordinal patterns, that is, permutations defined by the order relations among points in the orbits of dynamical systems. Since its inception in 2002 the concept of permutation entropy has sparked a new branch of research in particular regarding the time series analysis of dynamical systems that capitalizes on the order structure of the state space. Indeed, on one hand ordinal patterns and periodic points are closely related, yet ordinal patterns are amenable to numerical methods, while periodicity is not. Another interesting feature is that since it can be shown that random (unconstrained) dynamics has no forbidden patterns with probability one, their existence can be used as a fingerprint to identify any deterministic origin of orbit generation. This book is primarily addressed to researchers working in the field of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems, yet will also be suitable for graduate students interested in these subjects. The presentation is a compromise between mathematical rigor and pedagogical approach. Accordingly, some of the more mathematical background needed for more in depth understanding has been shifted into the appendices.
A collection of articles on different approaches to the investigation of surface effects on nanosized magnetic materials, with special emphasis on magnetic nanoparticles. The book provides an overview of progress in the field through recent results.
A rich variety of real-life physical problems which are still poorly understood are of a nonlinear nature. Examples include turbulence, granular flows, detonations and flame propagation, fracture dynamics, and a wealth of new biological and chemical phenomena which are being discovered. Particularly interesting among the manifestations of nonlinearity are coherent structures. This book contains reviews and contributions reporting on the state of the art regarding the role of coherent structures and patterns in nonlinear science. |
You may like...
Active Particles, Volume 1 - Advances in…
Nicola Bellomo, Pierre Degond, …
Hardcover
R3,522
Discovery Miles 35 220
New Trends in the Physics and Mechanics…
Martine Ben Amar, Alain Goriely, …
Hardcover
R2,505
Discovery Miles 25 050
Measurements and their Uncertainties - A…
Ifan Hughes, Thomas Hase
Hardcover
R2,694
Discovery Miles 26 940
Nonlinear Time Series Analysis with R
Ray Huffaker, Marco Bittelli, …
Hardcover
R2,751
Discovery Miles 27 510
Integrability, Supersymmetry and…
Sengul Kuru, Javier Negro, …
Hardcover
R2,722
Discovery Miles 27 220
|