This book focuses on the assembly, organization and resultant collective dynamics of soft matter systems maintained away from equilibrium by an energy flux. Living matter is the ultimate example of such systems, which are comprised of different constituents on very different scales (ions, nucleic acids, proteins, cells). The result of their diverse interactions, maintained using the energy from physiological processes, is a fantastically well-organized and dynamic whole. This work describes results from minimal, biomimetic systems and primarily investigates membranes and active emulsions, as well as key aspects of both soft matter and non-equilibrium phenomena. It is shown that these minimal reconstitutions are already capable of a range of complex behaviour such as nonlinear electric responses, chemical communication and locomotion. These studies will bring us closer to a fundamental understanding of complex systems by reconstituting key aspects of their form and function in simple model systems. Further, they may also serve as the first technological steps towards artificial soft functional matter.

This study shows that the Caspian Sea level time series possess long range dependence even after removing linear trends, based on analyses of the Hurst statistic, the sample autocorrelation functions, and the periodogram of the series. Forecasting performance of ARMA, ARIMA, ARFIMA and Trend Line-ARFIMA (TL-ARFIMA) combination models are investigated. The forecast confidence bands and the forecast updating methodology, provided for ARIMA models in the literature, are modified for the ARFIMA models. Sample autocorrelation functions are utilized to estimate the differencing lengths of the ARFIMA models. The confidence bands of the forecasts are estimated using the probability densities of the residuals without assuming a known distribution. There are no long-term sea level records for the region of Peninsular Malaysia and Malaysia's Sabah-Sarawak northern region of Borneo Island. In such cases the Global Climate Model (GCM) projections for the 21st century can be downscaled to the Malaysia region by means of regression techniques, utilizing the short records of satellite altimeters in this region against the GCM projections during a mutual observation period. This book will be useful for engineers and researchers working in the areas of applied statistics, climate change, sea level change, time series analysis, applied earth sciences, and nonlinear dynamics.

This thesis presents a new method for following evolving interactions between coupled oscillatory systems of the kind that abound in nature. Examples range from the subcellular level, to ecosystems, through climate dynamics, to the movements of planets and stars. Such systems mutually interact, adjusting their internal clocks, and may correspondingly move between synchronized and non-synchronized states. The thesis describes a way of using Bayesian inference to exploit the presence of random fluctuations, thus analyzing these processes in unprecedented detail. It first develops the basic theory of interacting oscillators whose frequencies are non-constant, and then applies it to the human heart and lungs as an example. Their coupling function can be used to follow with great precision the transitions into and out of synchronization. The method described has the potential to illuminate the ageing process as well as to improve diagnostics in cardiology, anesthesiology and neuroscience, and yields insights into a wide diversity of natural processes.

Computational neuroscience is best defined by its focus on understanding the nervous systems as a computational device rather than by a particular experimental technique. Accordinlgy, while the majority of the papers in this book describe analysis and modeling efforts, other papers describe the results of new biological experiments explicitly placed in the context of computational issues. The distribution of subjects in Computation and Neural Systems reflects the current state of the field. In addition to the scientific results presented here, numerous papers also describe the ongoing technical developments that are critical for the continued growth of computational neuroscience. Computation and Neural Systems includes papers presented at the First Annual Computation and Neural Systems meeting held in San Francisco, CA, July 26--29, 1992.

This is a review written by leading specialists on the state of the art of computational methods in lattice field theory. They cover a wide range: computer-assisted proofs, algorithms for computer simulation of field theories, effective field theories, computer studies of finite size effects, simulation with fast algorithms, and computer applicationsin experimental particle physics. The book addresses researchers, engineers, and graduate students in particle physics.

Critical phenomena is one of the most exciting areas of modern physics. This 2007 book provides a thorough but economic introduction into the principles and techniques of the theory of critical phenomena and the renormalization group, from the perspective of modern condensed matter physics. Assuming basic knowledge of quantum and statistical mechanics, the book discusses phase transitions in magnets, superfluids, superconductors, and gauge field theories. Particular attention is given to topics such as gauge field fluctuations in superconductors, the Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, duality transformations, and quantum phase transitions - all of which are at the forefront of physics research. This book contains numerous problems of varying degrees of difficulty, with solutions. These problems provide readers with a wealth of material to test their understanding of the subject. It is ideal for graduate students and more experienced researchers in the fields of condensed matter physics, statistical physics, and many-body physics.

This work addresses time-delay in complex nonlinear systems and, in particular, its applications in complex networks; its role in control theory and nonlinear optics are also investigated. Delays arise naturally in networks of coupled systems due to finite signal propagation speeds and are thus a key issue in many areas of physics, biology, medicine, and technology. Synchronization phenomena in these networks play an important role, e.g., in the context of learning, cognitive and pathological states in the brain, for secure communication with chaotic lasers or for gene regulation. The thesis includes both novel results on the control of complex dynamics by time-delayed feedback and fundamental new insights into the interplay of delay and synchronization. One of the most interesting results here is a solution to the problem of complete synchronization in general networks with large coupling delay, i.e., large distances between the nodes, by giving a universal classification of networks that has a wide range of interdisciplinary applications.

"MEMS Linear and Nonlinear Statics and Dynamics" presents the necessary analytical and computational tools for MEMS designers to model and simulate most known MEMS devices, structures, and phenomena. This book also provides an in-depth analysis and treatment of the most common static and dynamic phenomena in MEMS that are encountered by engineers. Coverage alsoincludes nonlinear modeling approaches to modeling various MEMS phenomena of a nonlinear nature, such as those due to electrostatic forces, squeeze-film damping, and large deflection of structures. The book also: Includes examples of numerous MEMS devices and structures that require static or dynamic modelingProvides code for programs in Matlab, Mathematica, and ANSYS for simulating the behavior of MEMS structuresProvides real world problems related to the dynamics of MEMS such as dynamics of electrostatically actuated devices, stiction and adhesion of microbeams due to electrostatic and capillary forces

"MEMS Linear and Nonlinear Statics and Dynamics "is an ideal volume for researchers and engineers working in MEMS design and fabrication.

The articles in this book reflect the omnipresence of diffusion processes in the natural sciences. They describe experimental results as well as theoretical models and computer simulations, and address a wide readership including graduate students. The problems treated stem from physics, astronomy, physical chemistry, biology, and medicine. The papers are presented in a tutorial style and reflect the present-day trends in the field.

This tenth volume in the Poincare Seminar Series describes recent developments at one of the most challenging frontiers in statistical physics - the deeply related fields of glassy dynamics, especially near the glass transition, and of the statics and dynamics of granular systems. These fields are marked by a vigorous interchange between experiment, theory, and numerical studies, all of which are well represented by the leading experts who have contributed articles to this volume. These articles are also highly pedagogical, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience. Highlights include a Galilean dialogue on the mean field and competing theories of the glass transition, a wide-ranging survey of colloidal glasses, and experimental as well as theoretical treatments of the relatively new field of dense granular flows. This book should be of broad general interest to both physicists and mathematicians.

Quantum effects may be modelled by means of stochastic perturbation of non-linear partial differential (field) equations. Contributions to this field of research are collected in this volume. Finite dimensional stochastically perturbed Hamiltonian systems and infinite dimensional white noise analysis are treated. The main part concerns problems encountered in deterministic equations. Papers treat the existence of solutions for given initial data, the existence of non-linear bound states or solitary waves including a thorough discussion of various approaches to stability, and global properties (e.g. time decay properties) for non-linear wave equations. This volume provides a good survey of present-day research in non-linear problems of quantum theory for researchers and graduate students.

In the last few years we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in exactly solvable quantum field theoretical models in many branches of theoretical physics ranging from mathematical physics through high-energy physics to solid states. This book contains six pedagogically written articles meant as an introduction for graduate students to this fascinating area of mathematical physics. It leads them to the front line of present-day research. The topics include conformal field theory and W algebras, the special features of 2d scattering theory as embodied in the exact S matrices and the form factor studies built on them, the Yang--Baxter equations, and the various aspects of the Bethe Ansatz systems.

This is a collection of reasonably self-contained review articles on various features of wetting phenomena from both experimental and theoretical points of view. The experimental papers are concerned with wetting at nanoscopic scales, magnetic wetting transitions, convection at interfaces, and adsorption on a surface. The theoretical part is constituted by recent exact results at d=3, some reviews on wetting and disorder, a mathematical description of wetting, front propagation, random surfaces, and wetting within Potts models. The book addresses researchers, engineers, and graduate students in chemistry, physics, and applied mathematics.

This volume presents the proceedings of the Workshop on Momentum Distributions held on October 24 to 26, 1988 at Argonne National Laboratory. This workshop was motivated by the enormous progress within the past few years in both experimental and theoretical studies of momentum distributions, by the growing recognition of the importance of momentum distributions to the characterization of quantum many-body systems, and especially by the realization that momentum distribution studies have much in common across the entire range of modern physics. Accordingly, the workshop was unique in that it brought together researchers in nuclear physics, electronic systems, quantum fluids and solids, and particle physics to address the common elements of momentum distribution studies. The topics dis cussed in the workshop spanned more than ten orders of magnitude range in charac teristic energy scales. The workshop included an extraordinary variety of interactions from Coulombic to hard core repulsive, from non-relativistic to extreme relativistic."

The study of chaotic behaviour of dynamical systems has triggered new efforts to reconcile deterministic and stochastic processes as well as classical and quantum physics. New efforts are made to understand complex and unpredictable behaviour. The papers collected in this volume give a broad overview of these activities. Readers will get a glimpse of the growing importance of Levy processes for physics. They will find new views on fundamental concepts of quantum physics and will see many applications of chaotic and essentially random phenomena to a number of physical problems."

Addressing graduate students and researchers in physics and mathematics, this book fills a gap in the literature. It is an introduction into modern constructive physics, field theory and statistical mechanics and a survey on the most recent research in this field. It presents the main technical tools such as cluster expansion and their implementation in the rigorous renormalization group, and studies physical models in some detail. The reader will find a study of the ultraviolet limit of the Gross-Neveu model, of continuous symmetry breaking and of self-avoiding random walks in statistical mechanics, as well as applications to solid-state physics. Mathematicians will find constructive methods useful for studies in partial differential equations.

Statistical mechanics attempts to explain the behaviour of macroscopic physical systems in terms of the mechanical properties of their constituents. Although it is one of the fundamental theories of physics, it has received little attention from philosophers of science. Nevertheless, it raises philosophical questions of fundamental importance on the nature of time, chance and reduction. Most philosophical issues in this domain relate to the question of the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics. This book addresses issues inherent in this reduction: the time-asymmetry of thermodynamics and its absence in statistical mechanics; the role and essential nature of chance and probability in this reduction when thermodynamics is non-probabilistic; and how, if at all, the reduction is possible. Compiling contributions on current research by experts in the field, this is an invaluable survey of the philosophy of statistical mechanics for academic researchers and graduate students interested in the foundations of physics.

Foundations of Information Technology in the Era of Network and Mobile Computing is presented in two distinct but interrelated tracks: -Algorithms, Complexity and Models of Computation; -Logic, Semantics, Specification and Verification. This volume contains 45 original and significant contributions addressing these foundational questions, as well as 4 papers by outstanding invited speakers. These papers were presented at the 2nd IFIP International Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (TCS 2002), which was held in conjunction with the 17th World Computer Congress, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and which convened in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in August 2002.

Broadband communications is widely recognized as one of the key technologies for building the next generation global network infrastructure to support ever-increasing multimedia applications. This book contains a collection of timely leading-edge research papers that address some of the important issues of providing such a broadband network infrastructure. Broadband Communications represents the selected proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Broadband Communications, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Hong Kong in November 1999. The book is organized according to the eighteen technical sessions of the conference. The topics covered include internet services, traffic modeling, internet traffic control, performance evaluation, billing, pricing, admission policy, mobile network protocols, TCP/IP performance, mobile network performance, bandwidth allocation, switching systems, traffic flow control, routing, congestion and admission control, multicast protocols, network management, and quality of service. It will serve as an essential reference for computer scientists and practitioners.

This book focuses mainly on fractional Brownian fields and their extensions. It has been used to teach graduate students at Grenoble and Toulouse's Universities. It is as self-contained as possible and contains numerous exercises, with solutions in an appendix. After a foreword by Stephane Jaffard, a long first chapter is devoted to classical results from stochastic fields and fractal analysis. A central notion throughout this book is self-similarity, which is dealt with in a second chapter with a particular emphasis on the celebrated Gaussian self-similar fields, called fractional Brownian fields after Mandelbrot and Van Ness's seminal paper. Fundamental properties of fractional Brownian fields are then stated and proved. The second central notion of this book is the so-called local asymptotic self-similarity (in short lass), which is a local version of self-similarity, defined in the third chapter. A lengthy study is devoted to lass fields with finite variance. Among these lass fields, we find both Gaussian fields and non-Gaussian fields, called Levy fields. The Levy fields can be viewed as bridges between fractional Brownian fields and stable self-similar fields. A further key issue concerns the identification of fractional parameters. This is the raison d'etre of the statistics chapter, where generalized quadratic variations methods are mainly used for estimating fractional parameters. Last but not least, the simulation is addressed in the last chapter. Unlike the previous issues, the simulation of fractional fields is still an area of ongoing research. The algorithms presented in this chapter are efficient but do not claim to close the debate.

The state-of-the-art in the theoretical statistical physics treatment of the Janus fluid is reported with a bridge between new research results published in journal articles and a contextual literature review. Recent Monte Carlo simulations on the Kern and Frenkel model of the Janus fluid have revealed that in the vapor phase, below the critical point, there is the formation of preferred inert clusters made up of a well-defined number of particles: the micelles and the vesicles. This is responsible for a re-entrant gas branch of the gas-liquid binodal. Detailed account of this findings are given in the first chapter where the Janus fluid is introduced as a product of new sophisticated synthesis laboratory techniques. In the second chapter a cluster theory is developed to approximate the exact clustering properties stemming from the simulations. It is shown that the theory is able to reproduce semi-quantitatively the micellization phenomenon.

Neuromorphic Systems Engineering: Neural Networks in Silicon emphasizes three important aspects of this exciting new research field. The term neuromorphic expresses relations to computational models found in biological neural systems, which are used as inspiration for building large electronic systems in silicon. By adequate engineering, these silicon systems are made useful to mankind. Neuromorphic Systems Engineering: Neural Networks in Silicon provides the reader with a snapshot of neuromorphic engineering today. It is organized into five parts viewing state-of-the-art developments within neuromorphic engineering from different perspectives. Neuromorphic Systems Engineering: Neural Networks in Silicon provides the first collection of neuromorphic systems descriptions with firm foundations in silicon.Topics presented include: * large scale analog systems in silicon * neuromorphic silicon * auditory (ear) and vision (eye) systems in silicon * learning and adaptation in silicon * merging biology and technology * micropower analog circuit design * analog memory * analog interchipcommunication on digital buses GBP/LISTGBP Neuromorphic Systems Engineering: Neural Networks in Silicon serves as an excellent resource for scientists, researchers and engineers in this emerging field, and may also be used as a text for advanced courses on the subject.

"Stochastic Tools in Mathematics and Science" covers basic stochastic tools used in physics, chemistry, engineering and the life sciences. The topics covered include conditional expectations, stochastic processes, Brownian motion and its relation to partial differential equations, Langevin equations, the Liouville and Fokker-Planck equations, as well as Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms, renormalization, basic statistical mechanics, and generalized Langevin equations and the Mori-Zwanzig formalism. The applications include sampling algorithms, data assimilation, prediction from partial data, spectral analysis, and turbulence. The book is based on lecture notes from a class that has attracted graduate and advanced undergraduate students from mathematics and from many other science departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Each chapter is followed by exercises. The book will be useful for scientists and engineers working in a wide range of fields and applications. For this new edition the material has been thoroughly reorganized and updated, and new sections on scaling, sampling, filtering and data assimilation, based on recent research, have been added. There are additional figures and exercises. Review of earlier edition: "This is an excellent concise textbook which can be used for self-study by graduate and advanced undergraduate students and as a recommended textbook for an introductory course on probabilistic tools in science." Mathematical Reviews, 2006