As Emile Jouguet remarked, "the shock wave flew off the tip of the pen of a theoretician for the first time" about a hundred years ago. The physics of shock waves has since grown into an independent branch of science closely linked with a wide range of research areas, from astrophysics and plasma physics to solid-state physics. Since the beginning, theoretical investiga tion has kept its leading role. The present book is devoted to actual problems of the theory of shock waves in gases and plasmas, that are of general interest to physicists. It con tains the results of studies on shock structure, stability, evolutionarity and dynamics. Of special interest is the theory of shock phenomena in mag netic fields, which is important for applied research on controlled nuclear fusion. A substantial contribution to this theory has been made by these authors. This monograph is the first attempt in the literature to make a systematic presentation of the shock-structure theory.The theory is consistently sub stantiated by relevant experimental results obtained recently with the use of high-power electromagnetic shock tubes. The material contained here is applicable to the solution of a wide variety of problems arising in plasma physics, nuclear fusion and cosmic gasdynamics. I believe that this book will be of help and interest for a broad circle of research workers (physi cists, astrophysicists and engineers concerned with energy accumulation, shock phenomena and other related problems of plasma hydrodynamics) as well as for university staff, post- and undergraduates."

This book can be looked upon in more ways than one. On the one hand, it describes strikingly interesting and lucid hydrodynamic experiments done in the style of the "good old days" when the physicist needed little more than a piece of string and some sealing wax. On the other hand, it demonstrates how a profound physical analogy can help to get a synoptic view on a broad range of nonlinear phenomena involving self-organization of vortical structures in planetary atmo spheres and oceans, in galaxies and in plasmas. In particular, this approach has elucidated the nature and the mechanism of such grand phenomena as the Great of galaxies. A number of our Red Spot vortex on Jupiter and the spiral arms predictions concerning the dynamics of spiral galaxies are now being confirmed by astronomical observations stimulated by our experiments. This book is based on the material most of which was accumulated during 1981-88 in close cooperation with our colleagues, experimenters from the Plasma Physics Department of the Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute (S. V. Antipov, A. S. Trubnikov, AYu. Rylov, AV. Khutoretsky) and astrophysics theoreticians from the Astronomical Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences (AM. Frid man) and from the Volgograd State University (AG. Morozov). To all of them we wish to express our gratitude. Whenever we speak of "our experiments," the participation of the entire team is implied."

The best developed of today's kinetic theories are those for gases and completely ionized plasmas. In recent years, however, kinetic theories of more complicated systems - consisting of free particles as well as those bound in atoms, and an electromagnetic field - have played an increasingly important role. An example of such a system is a partially ionized plasma of gas discharges or in semicon ductors. The main purpose of this book is the further development of the kinetic theory of systems of this kind. Naturally, it would be impossible to encompass at once all the problems con cerning the kinetic theory of these extremely complicated systems. This book is mainly concerned with processes dominated by weak but collective interactions of charged particles and atoms, as well as processes determined by the interaction with an electromagnetic field. These topics determined the method adopted here for constructing the kinetic equations of the distribution functions for free and bound charged particles. The results of contemporary scattering theory make it possible to take strong interactions, which are interpreted as collisions, into account without any basic difficulties. More complicated, however, is the task of taking both strong interactions at small distances and weak but collective interac tions into account simultaneously. The solution of this problem would open an approach to a number of fundamental questions, one of which is the construc tion of a kinetic theory of nonideal chemically reacting systems of charged particles."