The motion of electrons in superconductors seems to exceed our imagination based on daily experience with Newtonian mechanics. This book shows that the classical concepts, such as the balance of forces acting on electrons, are useful for understanding superconductivity. The electrostatic field plays a natural part in this balance as it mediates forces between electrons at long distances.

This introductory level text addresses the broad range of nonequilibrium phenomena observed at short time scales. It focuses on the important questions of correlations and memory effects in dense interacting systems. Experiments on very short time scales are characterized, in particular, by strong correlations far from equilibrium, by nonlinear dynamics, and by the related phenomena of turbulence and chaos. The impressive successes of experiments using pulsed lasers to study the properties of matter and of the new methods of analysis of the early phases of heavy ion reactions have necessitated a review of the available many-body theoretical methods. The aim of this book is thus to provide an introduction to the experimental and theoretical methods that help us to understand the behaviour of such systems when disturbed on very short time scales.

This book presents an up-to-date formalism of non-equilibrium Green's functions covering different applications ranging from solid state physics, plasma physics, cold atoms in optical lattices up to relativistic transport and heavy ion collisions. Within the Green's function formalism, the basic sets of equations for these diverse systems are similar, and approximations developed in one field can be adapted to another field. The central object is the self-energy which includes all non-trivial aspects of the system dynamics. The focus is therefore on microscopic processes starting from elementary principles for classical gases and the complementary picture of a single quantum particle in a random potential. This provides an intuitive picture of the interaction of a particle with the medium formed by other particles, on which the Green's function is built on.

This introductory level text addresses the broad range of nonequilibrium phenomena observed at short time scales. It focuses on the important questions of correlations and memory effects in dense interacting systems. Experiments on very short time scales are characterized, in particular, by strong correlations far from equilibrium, by nonlinear dynamics, and by the related phenomena of turbulence and chaos. The impressive successes of experiments using pulsed lasers to study the properties of matter and of the new methods of analysis of the early phases of heavy ion reactions have necessitated a review of the available many-body theoretical methods. The aim of this book is thus to provide an introduction to the experimental and theoretical methods that help us to understand the behaviour of such systems when disturbed on very short time scales.

The motion of electrons in superconductors seems to exceed our imagination based on daily experience with Newtonian mechanics. This book shows that the classical concepts, such as the balance of forces acting on electrons, are useful for understanding superconductivity. The electrostatic field plays a natural part in this balance as it mediates forces between electrons at long distances.