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This NATO Advanced Study Institute held at Gei10, Norway, April
16th-27th 1979, was the fifth in a series devoted to the subject of
phase transitions and instabilities. The application to NATO for
the funding of this ASI contained the following para graphs:
"Traditionally one has made a clear distinction between solids and
liquids in terms of positional order, one being long-ranged and the
other at most short-ranged. In recent years experiments have
revealed a much more faceted picture and a less sharp distinction
between solids and liquids. As an example one now has 3-dimensiona1
(3-D) liquids with 1-D density waves and 3-D solids with 1-D-1iquid
molecular chains. The subsystems have the common feature of 10w
dimensional systems: a strong tendency for fluctuations to appear.
Although the connection between fluctuations and dimensionality,
and the suppression of long-range order by fluctuations, was
pointed out as early as 1935 by Peier1s and by Landau, it is in the
last five years or so that theoretical work has gained momentum.
This development of understanding started ten years ago, however,
much inspired by the experimental work on 2-D spin systems."
This NATO Advanced Study Institute, held in Geilo between March
29th and April 9th 1981, was the sixth in a series devoted to the
subject of phase transitions and instabilities. The present
institute was intended to provide a forum for discussion of the
importance of nonlinear phenomena associated with instabilities in
systems as seemingly disparate as ferroelectrics and rotating
buckets of oil. Ten years ago, at the first Geilo school, the
report of a central peak in the fluctuation spectrum of SrTi0 close
to its 3 106 K structural phase transition demonstrated that the
simple soft-mode theory of such transitions was incomplete. The
missing ingredient was the essential nonlinearity of the system.
Parti cipants at this year's Geilo school heard assessments of a
decade of experimental and theoretical effort which has been
expended to elucidate the nature of this nonlinearity. The
importance of order ed clusters and the walls which bound them was
stressed in this con text. A specific type of wall, the soliton,
was discussed by a number of speakers. New experimental results
which purport to demonstrate the existence of solitons in a
one-dimensional ferromagnet were presented. A detailed discussion
was given of the role of solitons in transport phenomena in driven
multistable systems, typified by a sine-Gordon chain."
This volume comprises the proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study
Institute held in Geilo, Norway, between 4 - 14 April 1989. This
Institute was the tenth in a series held at Geilo on the subject of
phase transitions. It was the first to be concerned with the
growing area of soft condensed matter, which is neither ordinary
solids nor ordinary liquids, but somewhere in between. The
Institute brought together many lecturers, students and active
researchers in the field from a wide range of NATO and some
non-NATO countries, with financial support principally from the
NATO Scientific Affairs Division but also from Institutt for
energiteknikk, the Nor wegian Research Council for Science and the
Humanities (NAVF), The Nordic Institute for Theoretical Atomic
Physics (NORDITA), the Norwegian Physical Society and VISTA, a
reserach cooperation between the Norwegian Academy of Science and
Letters and Den norske stats oljeselskap a.s (STATOIL). The
organizing committee would like to thank all these contributors for
their help in promoting an exciting and rewarding meeting, and in
doing so are confident that they echo the appreciation also of all
the participants. 50ft condensed matter is characterized by weak
interactions between polyatomic constituents, by important*thermal
fluctuations effects, by mechanical softness and by a rich range of
behaviours. The main emphasis at this Institute was on the
fundamental collective physics, but prepar ation techniques and
industrial applications were also considered.
Systems with competing energy scales are widespread and exhibit
rich and subtle behaviour, although their systematic study is a
relatively recent activity. This text presents lectures given at a
NATO Advanced Study Institute reviewing the current knowledge and
understanding of the subject, particularly with regard to phase
transitions and dynamics, at an advanced tutorial level. Both
general and specific aspects are considered, with competitions
having several origins; differences in intrinsic interactions,
interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic effects, such as geometry
and disorder; irreversibility and non-equilibration. Among the
specific physical application areas are supercooled liquids and
glasses, high-temperature superconductors, flux or vortex pinning
and motion, charge density waves, domain growth and coarsening, and
electron solidification.
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