Fluctuations and criticality (dedicated to Reinhard Folk on his 60th birthday)It is our pleasure and honour to present a collection of papers dedicated to Reinhard Folk on the occasion of his 60th birthday.With this Festschrift, colleagues and friends of the jubilee pay tribute to his long lasting and fruitful work in the field of condensed matter physics.His research includes ferroelectric and ferromagnetic phase transitions in regular and disordered systems, neural networks, superconductivity, critical dynamics -this list can be continued.Those, who work in the above mentioned fields certainly know and often use results obtained by R.F. which are currently turning into scientific Folk-lore.However, those who know him personally, recognizing his important contribution to physics, enjoy marvelous features of his extraordinary personality.Openness, readiness for discussion, erudition, interest in people and concern in their problems, sense of humour -that's what makes communication with him so desirable and pleasant.Moreover, his vivid interest in science on a larger scale and a deep concern in its future lead R.F. to activities in science organizations in Austria and the European Union, to his personal participation in different projects aiming at strengthening collaboration with Central and Eastern European countries.His work in this respect is widely recognized and acknowledged by the scientific community.Dear Reinhard, may your work in future lead you to new discoveries and solutions of puzzles put to us almost on every step of research, may it give you satisfaction of the achieved results, and may we, your friends, enjoy for many more years the wonderful intellectual atmosphere created by your work and your spirit.
Fluctuations and criticality (dedicated to Reinhard Folk on his 60th birthday)It is our pleasure and honour to present a collection of papers dedicated to Reinhard Folk on the occasion of his 60th birthday.With this Festschrift, colleagues and friends of the jubilee pay tribute to his long lasting and fruitful work in the field of condensed matter physics.His research includes ferroelectric and ferromagnetic phase transitions in regular and disordered systems, neural networks, superconductivity, critical dynamics -this list can be continued.Those, who work in the above mentioned fields certainly know and often use results obtained by R.F. which are currently turning into scientific Folk-lore.However, those who know him personally, recognizing his important contribution to physics, enjoy marvelous features of his extraordinary personality.Openness, readiness for discussion, erudition, interest in people and concern in their problems, sense of humour -that's what makes communication with him so desirable and pleasant.Moreover, his vivid interest in science on a larger scale and a deep concern in its future lead R.F. to activities in science organizations in Austria and the European Union, to his personal participation in different projects aiming at strengthening collaboration with Central and Eastern European countries.His work in this respect is widely recognized and acknowledged by the scientific community.Dear Reinhard, may your work in future lead you to new discoveries and solutions of puzzles put to us almost on every step of research, may it give you satisfaction of the achieved results, and may we, your friends, enjoy for many more years the wonderful intellectual atmosphere created by your work and your spirit.
This special issue of the CMP is devoted to phase transitions and critical phenomena. Several recent decades of intensive, sometimes even frantic, and fruitful activities might produce an impression that all principal work in this field has already been completed and nothing really new can be found. Of course, this is far from being true, and the aim of the present issue is to give an evidence that the field is still fertile and thankful to those who work hard on it. We hope that the readers will find this evidence in the presented papers for which we cordially thank their authors who share this aim of ours and our devotion to the subject. \n \nA specially pleasant mission of this issue is to pay tribute to our distinguished colleague and friend Mykhailo Kozlovskii, member of the CMP Editorial Board, who has been working in the theory of phase transitions for nearly 40 years. In August 2012, Mykhailo crossed a magic line of time, called a sixty years jubilee, and thus reached the age of maturity and wisdom. With this regard, we wish him good health and many years of fruitful and joyful life among his favorite collective variables, fishing, invariably beloved family, and faithful friends. We also wish him to open new horizons and to explore further bystreets in statistical physics, to meet new friends, colleagues and followers.
Martin C. Gutzwiller has made groundbreaking contributions in several fundamental areas of physics. These works range from the Gutzwiller wave function for strongly correlated electrons to the likewise eponymous trace formula, powerful for quantization of chaotic systems, and mathematical studies of the orbit of the moon. His interests also include the history of classical and quantum mechanics. In recognition of the high esteem that Martin enjoys among his peers, we tried to reach out to those who have been inspired by Martin's works and put forth a festschrift honoring our distinguished colleague on the occasion of his 75th birthday in October of 2000 in the following few special issues of Foundations of Physics. The first issue contains a collection of papers related to Solid State Physics, and the remaining issues will cover mostly other areas of physics. All the contributions appearing in the Gutzwiller special issues are invited papers dedicated to Martin Gutzwiller. We are delighted to be able to celebrate Martin's 75th birthday together in this festschrift. Martin, Happy Birthday and Many Happy Returns!
This special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General is a collection of articles dealing with the application of renormalization group methods to a wide range of problems in physics. Most articles are based on contributions presented at the 6th International Conference, Renormalization Group 2005 (RG 2005), held at the University of Helsinki from 30 August to 3--September 2005. This was the sixth of a series of conferences on this topic, the first three of which took place in 1986, 1991 and 1996 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. The fourth (RG99) was held in 1999 in Taxco, Mexico, and the fifth (RG02) in 2002 in Tatranska Strba, Slovakia. During the second half of the 20th century a number of important and very successful new paradigms such as scale-dependent (`running') coupling constants, scaling, and universality became firmly established in physics. To a large extent, these advances were due to the development of renormalization group ideas and their successful implementation as powerful calculational schemes to tackle problems with many length scales. While the concept of the renormalization group had originally been introduced in elementary particle physics, its modern form eventually emerged from the study of problems in condensed matter physics, such as critical phenomena and the Kondo effect. This in turn has significantly reshaped our understanding of field theories in high energy physics, and produced powerful computational tools for dealing with difficult many-length-scale problems in distinct fields of physics, ranging from elementary particle and condensed matter physics to hydrodynamic turbulence and growth phenomena in nonequilibrium physics. The history of the renormalization group, characterized by frequent exchanges of ideas between elementary particle and condensed matter physics, bears testimony to the enormous benefits to which such exchanges can lead. The main aim of the series of renormalization group conferences has been to bring together scientists with backgrounds and expertise in the application of the renormalization group to problems in broadly different areas of physics, offering regular events for continuing such fruiful exchanges of ideas. We hope that the present collection of contributions to quantum field theory, mathematical and methodological aspects of the renormalization group, statistical mechanics, condensed matter physics, and stochastic dynamics conveys this spirit. We feel it amply demonstrates the breadth of activity of research based on the renormalization group and its potential for future work. On behalf of the organizers of the conference, we would like to thank the sixty participants of the conference and the members of the Advisory Board for their contributions. Financial and organizational support of the University of Helsinki, the Academy of Finland, the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters and the Naval Academy is gratefully acknowledged. We are very grateful to all authors who contributed to this special issue. Finally, we owe special thanks to all who assisted in the preparation of it, in particular to the staff of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General .
About the book: This volume consists of a collection of recent research articles dedicated to Vladimir Rittenberg on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Various aspects of solvable models in different areas of theoretical and mathematical physics are covered. Particular topics include diffusion, self-organized criticality, classical and quantum spin chains, two-dimensional lattice models, quantum algebras, and conformal field theory. The list of contributing authors contains altogether 34 names, including among others, Baxter, Cardy, Itzykson, Martin, McCoy, Nahm, Pearce and de Vega.
About the book: This volume consists of a collection of recent research articles dedicated to Vladimir Rittenberg on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Various aspects of solvable models in different areas of theoretical and mathematical physics are covered. Particular topics include diffusion, self-organized criticality, classical and quantum spin chains, two-dimensional lattice models, quantum algebras, and conformal field theory. The list of contributing authors contains altogether 34 names, including among others, Baxter, Cardy, Itzykson, Martin, McCoy, Nahm, Pearce and de Vega.
Abstract Nonlinear physics has grown from a collection of exotic examples of nonstandard behavior to an all-embracing scientific methodology. Many examples come from condensed matter physics. This book presents a unified view of many-body condensed matter systems as essentially nonlinear structures capable of exhibiting such features as chaos, coherence, solution formation and phase transitions. The book provides an overview of nonlinear phenomena in science, introduces phase transitions and criticality, and includes a comprehensive exposition of methods and results in the analysis of nonlinear differential equations. To equip the reader with concrete skills in tackling nonlinear problems in physics, the authors also analyze important applications such as metamagnetism, superconductivity, the Hubbard Hamiltonian and the multielectron atom. The book can serve as both a compendium of facts and references related to nonlinear condensed matter physics and a practical introduction to current research methods and the field in general.