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PHASE TRANSITIONS
A Brief Account with Modern Applications
by Moshe Gitterman & Vivian (Haim) Halpern (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
This book presents a short, fairly simple course on the basic theory of phase transitions and its modern applications. In physics, these applications include such modern developments as Bose– Einstein condensation of atoms, high temperature superconductivity, and vortices in superconductors, while in other fields they include small world phenomena and scale-free systems (such as stock markets and the Internet). The advantage of treating all these topics together lies in showing their connection with one another and with the general theory of phase transitions.
Contents:
- Phases and Phase Transitions
- The Ising Model
- Mean Field Theory
-
Scaling
- The Renormalization Group
- Phase Transitions in Quantum Systems
- Universality
- Random and Small World Systems
- Self-Organized Criticality
Readership: Graduates and upper-level undergraduates in statistical,
condensed-matter and theoretical physics.
“The Gittermans in their short book achieve the goals of simplicity, brevity, and the treatment of a wide variety of modern systems surprisingly well. Based on lectures given for an advanced graduate course, this book would be a good supplementary resource in a graduate statistical mechanics class, or it could be used as a text and reference in a seminar course.”
“Despite the brevity of the chapters, many topics are discussed in them … The authors have tried to avoid formalism as much as possible but have succeeded in presenting the basic ideas in an illuminating way. In many cases, the developments produce important insights into the approaches given in the literature and into the underlying physics behind these approaches … it will be useful for graduate students and researchers in the field of phase transitions.”
| Journal of Statistical Physics |
“This book is interesting, but it presupposes a good scientific 'culture', otherwise you will need a mentor to clarify the framework.”
| 144pp |
Pub. date: Aug 2004 |
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