Materials / States of matter

This book collects lecture courses and seminars given at the Les Houches Summer School 2010 on "e;Quantum Theory: From Small to Large Scales"e;.

The field of ferroelectricity has greatly expanded and changed in recent times.

Most of the solid materials we use in everyday life, from plastics to cosmetic gels exist under a non-crystalline, amorphous form: they are glasses.

In July 2009, many experts in the mathematical modelling of biological sciences gathered in Les Houches for a 4-week summer school on the mechanics and physics of biological systems.

In recent years, there has been much synergy between the exciting areas of quantum information science and ultracold atoms.

The enormous size of polymer molecules causes their molecular motions to span a broad range of length scales and give rise to viscoelastic behaviour.

Bio-nanocomposites combine the enhanced properties of commercial polymer nanocomposites with the low environmental impact of biodegradable material, making them a topic of great current interest.

Taking the reader through the underlying principles of molecular translational dynamics, this book outlines the ways in which magnetic resonance, through the use of magnetic field gradients, can reveal those dynamics.

Most of the solid materials we use in everyday life, from plastics to cosmetic gels exist under a non-crystalline, amorphous form: they are glasses.

In July 2009, many experts in the mathematical modelling of biological sciences gathered in Les Houches for a 4-week summer school on the mechanics and physics of biological systems.

In recent years, there has been much synergy between the exciting areas of quantum information science and ultracold atoms.

The enormous size of polymer molecules causes their molecular motions to span a broad range of length scales and give rise to viscoelastic behaviour.

Bio-nanocomposites combine the enhanced properties of commercial polymer nanocomposites with the low environmental impact of biodegradable material, making them a topic of great current interest.

Taking the reader through the underlying principles of molecular translational dynamics, this book outlines the ways in which magnetic resonance, through the use of magnetic field gradients, can reveal those dynamics.

The field of ferroelectricity has greatly expanded and changed in recent times.

Nanomagnetism is a rapidly expanding area of research which appears to be able to provide novel applications.

Rapid development of microfabrication and assembly of nanostructures has opened up many opportunities to miniaturize structures that confine light, producing unusual and extremely interesting optical properties.

Nanoscience is not physics, chemistry, engineering or biology.

Apart from an introductory chapter giving a brief summary of Newtonian and Lagrangian mechanics, this book consists entirely of questions and solutions on topics in classical mechanics that will be encountered in undergraduate and graduate courses.

This is an agenda-setting and high-profile book that presents an authoritative and cutting-edge analysis of nanoscience and technology.

The main goal of this work is to familiarize the reader with a tool, the path integral, that offers an alternative point of view on quantum mechanics, but more important, under a generalized form, has become the key to a deeper understanding of quantum field theory and its applications, which extend from particle physics to phase transitions or properties of quantum gases.

Hydrogen bond (H-bond) effects are known: it makes sea water liquid, joins cellulose microfibrils in trees, shapes DNA into genes and polypeptide chains into wool, hair, muscles or enzymes.

Physics was the leading science of the twentieth century and the book retraces important discoveries, made between 1895 and 2001, in 100 self-contained episodes.

The subject of this book is the Casimir effect, a manifestation of zero-point oscillations of the quantum vacuum resulting in forces acting between closely spaced bodies.

Acoustic microscopy enables the elastic properties of materials to be imaged and measured with the resolution of a good microscope.

This is an agenda-setting and high-profile book that presents an authoritative and cutting-edge analysis of nanoscience and technology.

Superconductivity is one of the most exciting areas of research in physics today.

Over the last thirty years, the study of liquids containing polymers, surfactants, or colloidal particles has developed from a loose assembly of facts into a coherent discipline with substantial predictive power.

This book gives the complete theory of the irreducible representations of the crystallographic point groups and space groups.

The second edition of this successful textbook provides an up-to-date account of the optical physics of solid state materials.

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an amazing technique that allies a versatile methodology (that allows measurement of samples in liquid, vacuum or air) to imaging with unprecedented resolution.

This book is addressed to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students involved in research in atomic, molecular, and optical physics.

Recent years have shown important and spectacular convergences between techniques traditionally used in theoretical physics and methods emerging from modern mathematics (combinatorics, probability theory, topology, algebraic geometry, etc).

While systems at equilibrium are treated in a unified manner through the partition function formalism, the statistical physics of out-of-equilibrium systems covers a large variety of situations that are often without apparent connection.

Statistical Mechanics is the study of systems where the number of interacting particles becomes infinite.

This book provides a thorough introduction to the fascinating world of phase transitions as well as many related topics, including random walks, combinatorial problems, quantum field theory and S-matrix.

This textbook describes the physics of semiconductor nanostructures with emphasis on their electronic transport properties.

This text focuses on the practical aspects of crystal structure analysis, and provides the necessary conceptual framework for understanding and applying the technique.

Superconductivity is one of the most exciting areas of research in physics today.

Hydrogen bond (H-bond) effects are known: it makes sea water liquid, joins cellulose microfibrils in trees, shapes DNA into genes and polypeptide chains into wool, hair, muscles or enzymes.

This book is unique in occupying a gap between standard undergraduate texts and more advanced texts on quantum field theory.

In each generation, scientists must redefine their fields: abstracting, simplifying and distilling the previous standard topics to make room for new advances and methods.

The book provides an overview of the fascinating spectrum of semiconductor physics, devices and applications, presented from a historical perspective.

This book, in the broadest sense, is an application of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics to the field of magnetism.

Physics was the leading science of the twentieth century and the book retraces important discoveries, made between 1895 and 2001, in 100 self-contained episodes.

Nanoscience is not physics, chemistry, engineering or biology.

This book is a systematic introduction to a new and exciting field of patterns in granular matter.

Modelling of heterogeneous processes, such as electrochemical reactions, extraction or ion-exchange, usually requires solving the transport problem associated to the process.

The name "e;random walk"e; for a problem of a displacement of a point in a sequence of independent random steps was coined by Karl Pearson in 1905 in a question posed to readers of "e;Nature"e;.

Computational complexity is one of the most beautiful fields of modern mathematics, and it is increasingly relevant to other sciences ranging from physics to biology.