Scale Invariance and Beyond: Les Houches Workshop, March 10-14, 1997

ISBN-13: 9783540640004 / Angielski / Miękka / 1998 / 287 str.

B. Dubrulle; F. Graner; D. Sornette

Opis

Scale Invariance and Beyond B. Dubrulle, F. Graner* and D. Somette**.*** CNRS, CEAIDSMIDAPNWservice d'Astrophysique, L 'Orme des Merisiers, 709, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France * Laboratoire de Spectrometrie Physique, B.P. 87, 38402 Saint-Martin-d'Heres cedex, France ** Laboratoire de Physique de Ia Matiere Condensee, CNRS and Universite de Nice -Sophia Antipolis, Pare Valrose, 06108 Nice, France ***Department of Earth and Space Sciences and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1567, U.S.A. 1. INTRODUCTION In physics, any symmetry is a bargain. It provides tools to analyze the solutions of a problem without need to explicitly solve the problem, or it can also suggest methods to simplify the problem. In real life, boundary conditions or even physical processes themselves break the initial beautiful symmetry. One has to deal with "approximate symmetry" and means to obtain useful informations from this broken symmetry have to be built. The topic of the school held in Les Houches in March 1997 is the illustration of these general ideas in the case of scale symmetry. Part of the school involved descriptions of tools or concepts used in scale invariant systems, and examples pertaining to them ("Scale Invariance ... "); the second half was devoted to recent attempts to go beyond the invariance or symmetry breaking, discuss causes and consequences, and extract useful informations about the system (" ... and beyond").

Spis treści

Lecture 1 Scale Invariance Without Mechanism?.- Lecture 2 Scale Invariance and Beyond: What Can We Learn from Wavelet Analysis?.- Lecture 3 Fractional Derivatives in Static and Dynamic Scaling.- Lecture 4 Multi-Dimensional Self-Similarity, and Self-Gravitating N-Body Systems.- Lecture 5 Scaling in Stock Market Data: Stable Laws and Beyond.- Lecture 6 Hysteresis, Avalanches, and Barkhausen Noise.- Lecture 7 Burgers Turbulence and the Energy Landscape of Randomly Pinned Objects.- Lecture 8 Power Laws and Scale Invariance in Physical Metallurgy.- Lecture 9 Scale Invariance in Fluids with Anticorrelated Entropy-Specific Volume Fluctuations.- Lecture 10 Scale Invariance(s) in the Cosmic Matter Distribution?.- Lecture 11 Scale Invariance of the Avalanche Effect in Phase Transition Modulated Mantle Mixing.- Lecture 12 Scale Invariance of Earthquakes.- Lecture 13 Models for Evolution and Extinction.- Lecture 14 Scale Invariance in Economics and in Finance.- Lecture 15 Models of Artificial Foreign Exchange Markets.- Lecture 16 From Scale-Invariance to Scale-Covariance in Out-of-Equilibrium Systems.- Lecture 17 Turbulence: Statistical Approach.- Lecture 18 Discrete Scale Invariance.- Lecture 19 Scale Relativity.- Lecture 20 Scaling in Turbulent Flows.- Lecture 21 Statistical Scale Symmetry Breaking.

Blurb

This book is an excellent introduction to the concept of scale invariance, which is a growing field of research with wide applications. It describes where and how symmetry under scale transformation (and its various forms of partial breakdown) can be used to analyze solutions of a problem without the need to explicitly solve it. The first part gives descriptions of tools and concepts; the second is devoted to recent attempts to go beyond the invariance or symmetry breaking, to discuss causes and consequences, and to extract useful information about the system. Examples are carefully worked out in fields as diverse as condensed matter physics, population dynamics, earthquake physics, turbulence, cosmology and finance.