Various experimental techniques have been advanced in recent years to measure non-equilibrium energy transformations on themicroscopic scale of single molecules. In general, the systems studied inthe correspondingexperiments are exposed to strong thermal fluctuations and thus the relevant energetic variables such as work and heat become stochastic.

This thesis addresses challenging theoretical problems in this active field of current research: 1) Exact analytical solutions of work and heat distributions for isothermal non-equilibrium processes in suitable models are obtained; 2) Corresponding solutions for cyclic processes involving two different heat reservoirs are found; 3) Optimization of periodic driving protocols for such cyclic processes with respect to maximal output power, efficiency and minimal power fluctuations is studied.

The exact solutions for work and heat distributionsprovide areference for theoretical investigations of more complicated models, giving insight into the structure of the tail of work distributions andserving asvaluable test cases for simulations of the underlying stochastic processes."

This book discusses the thermal-elastic mechanics problems of concrete rectangular thin plate. Using theoretical derivation combined with numerical examples, it explains in detail the analytical solution of the deflection, bending moment, thermal vibration and thermal buckling of concrete rectangular thin plate. To facilitate application, the book also includes deflection and bending moment calculation tables of concrete rectangular thin plate with four edges supported and with free boundary conditions.

One of the open challenges in fundamental physics is to combine Einstein's theory of general relativity with the principles of quantum mechancis. In this thesis, the question is raised whether metric quantum gravity could be fundamental in the spirit of Steven Weinberg's seminal asymptotic safety conjecture, and if so, what are the consequences for the physics of small, possibly Planck-size black holes? To address the first question, new techniques are provided which allow, for the first time, a self-consistent study of high-order polynomial actions including up to 34 powers in the Ricci scalar. These novel insights are then exploited to explain quantum gravity effects in black holes, including their horizon and causal structure, conformal scaling, evaporation, and the thermodynamics of quantum space-time. Results indicate upper limits on black hole temperature, and the existence of small black holes based on asymptotic safety for gravity and thermodynamical arguments.

This new volume of the annual review "Advances in Transport Phenomena" series contains three in-depth review articles on the microfluidic fabrication of vesicles, the dielectrophoresis field-flow fractionation for continuous-flow separation of particles and cells in microfluidic devices, and the thermodynamic analysis and optimization of heat exchangers, respectively.

In this thesis, quantum estimation theory is applied to investigate uncertainty relations between error and disturbance in quantum measurement. The author argues that the best solution for clarifying the attainable bound of the error and disturbance is to invoke the estimation process from the measurement outcomes such as signals from a photodetector in a quantum optical system. The error and disturbance in terms of the Fisher information content have been successfully formulated and provide the upper bound of the accuracy of the estimation. Moreover, the attainable bound of the error and disturbance in quantum measurement has been derived. The obtained bound is determined for the first time by the quantum fluctuations and correlation functions of the observables, which characterize the non-classical fluctuation of the observables. The result provides the upper bound of our knowledge obtained by quantum measurements. The method developed in this thesis will be applied to a broad class of problems related to quantum measurement to build a next-generation clock standard and to successfully detect gravitational waves.

This book is the first major work covering applications in thermal engineering and offering a comprehensive introduction to optimal control theory, which has applications in mechanical engineering, particularly aircraft and missile trajectory optimization. The book is organized in three parts: The first part includes a brief presentation of function optimization and variational calculus, while the second part presents a summary of the optimal control theory. Lastly, the third part describes several applications of optimal control theory in solving various thermal engineering problems. These applications are grouped in four sections: heat transfer and thermal energy storage, solar thermal engineering, heat engines and lubrication.Clearly presented and easy-to-use, it is a valuable resource for thermal engineers and thermal-system designers as well as postgraduate students.

This textbook takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject of thermodynamics and is therefore suitable for undergraduates in chemistry, physics and engineering courses. The book is an introduction to phenomenological thermodynamics and its applications to phase transitions and chemical reactions, with some references to statistical mechanics. It strikes the balance between the rigorousness of the Callen text and phenomenological approach of the Atkins text. The book is divided in three parts. The first introduces the postulates and laws of thermodynamics and complements these initial explanations with practical examples. The second part is devoted to applications of thermodynamics to phase transitions in pure substances and mixtures. The third part covers thermodynamic systems in which chemical reactions take place. There are some sections on more advanced topics such as thermodynamic potentials, natural variables, non-ideal mixtures and electrochemical reactions, which make this book of suitable also to post-graduate students.

The book offers a snapshot of the theories and applications of soft computing in the area of complex systems modeling and control. It presents the most important findings discussed during the 5th International Conference on Modelling, Identification and Control, held in Cairo, from August 31-September 2, 2013. The book consists of twenty-nine selected contributions, which have been thoroughly reviewed and extended before their inclusion in the volume. The different chapters, written by active researchers in the field, report on both current theories and important applications of soft-computing. Besides providing the readers with soft-computing fundamentals, and soft-computing based inductive methodologies/algorithms, the book also discusses key industrial soft-computing applications, as well as multidisciplinary solutions developed for a variety of purposes, like windup control, waste management, security issues, biomedical applications and many others. It is a perfect reference guide for graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the area of soft computing, systems modeling and control.

Focused on recent advances, this book covers theoretical foundations as well as various applications. It presents modern mathematical modeling approaches to the qualitative and numerical analysis of solutions for complex engineering problems in physics, mechanics, biochemistry, geophysics, biology and climatology. Contributions by an international team of respected authors bridge the gap between abstract mathematical approaches, such as applied methods of modern analysis, algebra, fundamental and computational mechanics, nonautonomous and stochastic dynamical systems on the one hand, and practical applications in nonlinear mechanics, optimization, decision making theory and control theory on the other. As such, the book will be of interest to mathematicians and engineers working at the interface of these fields.

This monograph, suitable for use as an advanced text, presents the statistical mechanics of solids from the perspective of the material properties of the solid state.

These proceedings comprise invited and contributed papers presented at PLMMP-2014, addressing modern problems in the fields of liquids, solutions and confined systems, critical phenomena, as well as colloidal and biological systems. The book focuses on state-of-the-art developments in contemporary physics of liquid matter. The papers presented here are organized into four parts: (i) structure of liquids in confined systems, (ii) phase transitions, supercritical liquids and glasses, (iii) colloids, and (iv) medical and biological aspects and cover the most recent developments in the broader field of liquid state including interdisciplinary problems.

This book mainly investigates the precision predictions on the signal of new physics at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) scheme. The potential of the LHC to discover the signal of dark matter associated production with a photon is studied after including next-to-leading order QCD corrections. The factorization and resummation of t-channel top quark transverse momentum distribution in the standard model at both the Tevatron and the LHC with soft-collinear effective theory are presented. The potential of the early LHC to discover the signal of monotops is discussed. These examples illustrate the method of searching for new physics beyond what is known today with high precision.

The author develops a new perturbative formalism of non-equilibrium thermal quantum field theory for non-homogeneous backgrounds. As a result of this formulation, the author is able to show how so-called pinch singularities can be removed, without resorting to ad hoc prescriptions, or effective resummations of absorptive effects. Thus, the author arrives at a diagrammatic approach to non-equilibrium field theory, built from modified Feynman rules that are manifestly time-dependent from tree level. This new formulation provides an alternative framework in which to derive master time evolution equations for physically meaningful particle number densities, which are valid to all orders in perturbation theory and to all orders in gradient expansion. Once truncated in a loop-wise sense, these evolution equations capture non-equilibrium dynamics on all time-scales, systematically describing energy-violating processes and the non-Markovian evolution of memory effects

This book presents mathematical models of mob control with threshold (conformity) collective decision-making of the agents. Based on the results of analysis of the interconnection between the micro- and macromodels of active network structures, it considers the static (deterministic, stochastic and game-theoretic) and dynamic (discrete- and continuous-time) models of mob control, and highlights models of informational confrontation. Many of the results are applicable not only to mob control problems, but also to control problems arising in social groups, online social networks, etc. Aimed at researchers and practitioners, it is also a valuable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as doctoral candidates specializing in the field of collective behavior modeling.

Since 1950, the "Highway Capacity Manual" has been a standard used in the planning, design, analysis and operation of virtually any highway traffic facility in the United States. It has also been widely used abroad and has spurred the development of similar manuals in other countries.

The twin concepts of capacity and level of service have been developed in the manual and methodologies have been presented that allow highway traffic facilities to be designed on a common basis and allow for the analysis of operational quality under various traffic demand scenarios. The manual also addresses related pedestrian, bicycle and transit issues. There have been five full editions of the "Highway Capacity Manual" 1950, 1975, 1985, 2000 and 2010, with interim updates in 1994 and 1997.

The manual has a rich conceptual and research history that should be understood both by users of the manual and by those who contribute to it through basic research and development of methodologies.I has become increasingly complex, as our understanding of complex interactions among drivers, vehicles and roadways improves. Through it all, there are common threads of understanding that have not changed a great deal since 1950.

This book details the fundamental development of the concepts of capacity and level of service and of the specific methodologies developed to describe them over a wide range of facility types.The book is comprised of two volumes.Volume 1 (this book) focuses on the development of basic principles and their application to uninterrupted flow facilities: freeways, multilane highways and two-lane highways. Weaving, merging and diverging segments on freeways and multilane highways are also discussed in detail. Volume 2 (expected to be completed in late 2014) focuses on interrupted flow facilities: signalized and unsignalized intersections, urban streets and arterials. It is intended to help users of the manual understand how concepts, approaches and specific methodologies were developed and to understand the underlying principles that each embodies.It is also intended to act as a basic reference for current and future researchers who will continue to develop new and improved capacity analysis methodologies for many years to come."

In this book, the equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of continuous phase transitions are studied in various systems, with a special emphasis on understanding how well-established universal traits at equilibrium may be extended into the dynamic realm, going beyond the paradigmatic Kibble-Zurek mechanism of defect formation. This book reports on the existence of a quantum phase transition in a system comprising just a single spin and a bosonic mode (the quantum Rabi model). Though critical phenomena are inherent to many-body physics, the author demonstrates that this small and ostensibly simple system allows us to explore the rich phenomenology of phase transitions, both in- and out-of-equilibrium. Moreover, the universal traits of this quantum phase transition may be realized in a single trapped-ion experiment, thus avoiding the need to scale up the number of constituents. In this system, the phase transition takes place in a suitable limit of system parameters rather than in the conventional thermodynamic limit - a novel notion that the author and his collaborators have dubbed the finite-component system phase transition. As such, the results gathered in this book will open promising new avenues in our understanding and exploration of quantum critical phenomena.

The purpose of this book is to thoroughly prepare the reader for research in string theory at an intermediate level. As such it is not a compendium of results but intended as textbook in the sense that most of the material is organized in a pedagogical and self-contained fashion.
Beyond the basics, a number of more advanced topics are introduced, such as conformal field theory, superstrings and string dualities - the text does not cover applications to black hole physics and cosmology, nor strings theory at finite temperatures.
End-of-chapter references have been added to guide the reader wishing to pursue further studies or to start research in well-defined topics covered by this book."

The celebrated Parisi solution of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model for spin glasses is one of the most important achievements in the field of disordered systems. Over the last three decades, through the efforts of theoretical physicists and mathematicians, the essential aspects of the Parisi solution were clarified and proved mathematically. The core ideas of the theory that emerged are the subject of this book, including the recent solution of the Parisi ultrametricity conjecture and a conceptually simple proof of the Parisi formula for the free energy. The treatment is self-contained and should be accessible to graduate students with a background in probability theory, with no prior knowledge of spin glasses. The methods involved in the analysis of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model also serve as a good illustration of such classical topics in probability as the Gaussian interpolation and concentration of measure, Poisson processes, and representation results for exchangeable arrays.

In recent years, scientists and researchers have been continually searching for efficient and effective ways to harness solar energy for heat and power production. The development of solar technologies and thermal systems are a prevalent area of study, as they represent a vital step in fully optimizing the potential of solar energy. Unfortunately, research is still lacking on the development and application of these solar thermal systems. Modeling and Optimization of Solar Thermal Systems: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of optimizing the performance of solar thermal technologies using multicriteria decision-making techniques. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as parabolic trough collectors, hybrid solar energy, and thermal technology, this book is ideally designed for practitioners, engineers, academicians, researchers, students, industry professionals, and educators seeking current research on modern modeling methods of solar thermal systems.

This volume is the third edition of the first-ever elementary book on the Langevin equation method for the solution of problems involving the translational and rotational Brownian motion of particles and spins in a potential highlighting modern applications in physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and so on. In order to improve the presentation, to accommodate all the new developments, and to appeal to the specialized interests of the various communities involved, the book has been extensively rewritten and a very large amount of new material has been added. This has been done in order to present a comprehensive overview of the subject emphasizing via a synergetic approach that seemingly unrelated physical problems involving random noise may be described using virtually identical mathematical methods in the spirit of the founders of the subject, viz., Einstein, Langevin, Smoluchowski, Kramers, etc. The book has been written in such a way that all the material should be accessible both to an advanced researcher and a beginning graduate student. It draws together, in a coherent fashion, a variety of results which have hitherto been available only in the form of scattered research papers and review articles.

The main body of this book is devoted to statistical physics, whereas much less emphasis is given to thermodynamics. In particular, the idea is to present the most important outcomes of thermodynamics - most notably, the laws of thermodynamics - as conclusions from derivations in statistical physics. Special emphasis is on subjects that are vital to engineering education. These include, first of all, quantum statistics, like the Fermi-Dirac distribution, as well as diffusion processes, both of which are fundamental to a sound understanding of semiconductor devices. Another important issue for electrical engineering students is understanding of the mechanisms of noise generation and stochastic dynamics in physical systems, most notably in electric circuitry. Accordingly, the fluctuation-dissipation theorem of statistical mechanics, which is the theoretical basis for understanding thermal noise processes in systems, is presented from a signals-and-systems point of view, in a way that is readily accessible for engineering students and in relation with other courses in the electrical engineering curriculum, like courses on random processes.

Many fundamental issues in classical condensed matter physics can be addressed experimentally using systems of individually visible mesoscopic particles playing the role of "proxy atoms". The interaction between such "atoms" is determined by the properties of the surrounding medium and/or by external tuning. The best-known examples of such experimental model systems are two different domains of soft matter - complex plasmas and colloidal dispersions.The major goal of this book - written by scientists representing both complex plasmas and colloidal dispersions - is to bring the two fields together. In the first part of the book the basic properties of the two systems are summarized, demonstrating huge conceptual and methodological overlap of the fields and emphasizing numerous cross-connections between them and their essential complementarity. This "introductory part" should serve to help each community in understanding the other field better. Simultaneously, this provides the necessary basis for the second part focused on particle-resolved studies of diverse generic phenomena in liquids and solids - all performed with complex plasmas and/or colloidal dispersions. The book is concluded with the discussion of critical open issues and fascinating perspectives of such interdisciplinary research.