The aim of this book is to provide the fundamentals of statistical physics and its application to condensed matter. The combination of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics has provided an understanding of properties of matter leading to spectacular technological innovations and discoveries in condensed matter which have radically changed our daily life.The book gives the steps to follow to understand fundamental theories and to apply these to real materials.

The aim of this book is to provide the fundamentals of statistical physics and its application to condensed matter. The combination of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics has provided an understanding of properties of matter leading to spectacular technological innovations and discoveries in condensed matter which have radically changed our daily life.The book gives the steps to follow to understand fundamental theories and to apply these to real materials.

The book is intended for graduate students and researchers who wish to master the main properties of magnetic materials in the bulk state and at the nanometric scale such as for thin films and multilayers. This textbook provides the theories and methods of simulation to study and to understand these properties in an explicit manner.In the first part of the book, the quantum theory of magnetism is presented while the second part of the book is devoted to the application of the theory of magnetism to surface physics. Numerous examples covering typical cases in ferromagnets, antiferromagnets, ferrimagnets, helimagnets, and frustrated spin systems are all illustrated. Fundamental surface effects are shown and discussed. Lastly, the spin transport is described - in which the basic formulation of the Boltzmann's equation is recalled - and the recent methods of Monte Carlo simulation to deal with the spin resistivity are explained.This book contains a large number of detailed solutions for the problems given in each chapter to help readers discover new related phenomena and applications, as well as an appendix on elements of statistical physics included at the end to make the book self-contained.

This book covers all principal aspects of currently investigated frustrated systems, from exactly solved frustrated models to real experimental frustrated systems, going through renormalization group treatment, Monte Carlo investigation of frustrated classical Ising and vector spin models, low-dimensional systems, spin ice and quantum spin glass. The reader can - within a single book - obtain a global view of the current research development in the field of frustrated systems.This new edition is updated with recent theoretical, numerical and experimental developments in the field of frustrated spin systems. The first edition of the book appeared in 2005. In this edition, more recent works until 2012 are reviewed. It contains nine chapters written by researchers who have actively contributed to the field. Many results are from recent works of the authors.The book is intended for postgraduate students as well as researchers in statistical physics, magnetism, materials science and various domains where real systems can be described with the spin language. Explicit demonstrations of formulas and full arguments leading to important results are given where it is possible to do so.

Frustrated spin systems have been first investigated five decades ago. Well-known examples include the Ising model on the antiferromagnetic triangular lattice studied by G H Wannier in 1950 and the Heisenberg helical structure discovered independently by A Yoshimori, J Villainn and T A Kaplan in 1959. However, extensive investigations on frustrated spin systems have really started with the concept of frustration introduced at the same time by G Toulouse and by J Villain in 1977 in the context of spin glasses. The frustration is generated by the competition of different kinds of interaction and/or by the lattice geometry. As a result, in the ground state all bonds are not fully satisfied. In frustrated Ising spin systems, a number of spins behave as free spins. In frustrated vector spin systems, the ground-state configuration is usually non-collinear. The ground state of frustrated spin systems is therefore highly degenerate and new induced symmetries give rise to unexpected behaviors at finite temperatures. Many properties of frustrated systems are still not well understood at present. Theoretically, recent studies shown in this book reveal that established theories, numerical simulations as well as experimental techniques have encountered many difficulties in dealing with frustrated systems. In some sense, frustrated systems provide an excellent testing ground for approximations and theories. Experimentally, more and more frustrated materials are discovered with interesting properties for applications.