The International Symposium on the Immunoglobulin A System was organized in observance of the twenty-fifth anni versary of the School of Dentistry of the University of Ala bama in Birmingham. Immunoglobulin A was chosen as the sub ject of the Symposium because of its broad scope in relation to all biologic sciences, as well as for its particular rele vance to prevention of the most common human disease--dental caries. More than 500 scientists, from 13 countries, met in Birmingham, Alabama to review critically past and current research on IgA and to outline goals for integrating future...

The Cargese Workshop "Quantum Field Theory and String Theory" was held from May 10 to May 21, 1993. The broad spectrum of the work presented at the Workshop was the reflec- tion of a time of intensive search for new ways of solving some of the most fun- damental problems in string theory, quantum gravity and non-perturbative field theory. A number of talks indicated the emergence of new promising domains of investigation. It is this very diversity of topics which, in our opinion, represents one of the most attractive features of the present volume which we hope will provide a good orientation...

Topological defects have recently become of great interest in condensed matter physics, particle physics and cosmology. They are the unavoidable remnants of many symmetry breaking phase transitions. Topological defects can play an important role in describing the properties of many condensed matter systems (e.g. superfluids and superconduc- tors); they can catalyze many unusual effects in particle physics models and they may be responsible for seeding the density perturbations in the early Universe which de- velop into galaxies and the large-scale structure of the Universe. Topological...

The past decade has seen the development of the operational understanding of fun- damental interactions within the standard model. This has detoured our attention from the great enigmas posed by the dynamics and collective behavior of strongly interacting particles. Discovered more than 30 years ago, the thermal nature of the hadronic particle spectra has stimulated considerable theoretical effort, which so far has failed to 'confirm' on the basis of microscopic interactions the origins of this phenomenon. However, a highly successful Statistical Bootstrap Model was developed by Rolf Hagedorn...

The operation of semiconductor devices depends upon the use of electrical potential barriers (such as gate depletion) in controlling the carrier densities (electrons and holes) and their transport. Although a successful device design is quite complicated and involves many aspects, the device engineering is mostly to devise a "best" device design by defIning optimal device structures and manipulating impurity profIles to obtain optimal control of the carrier flow through the device. This becomes increasingly diffIcult as the device scale becomes smaller and smaller. Since the introduction of...

2 EnricoBeltrametti 1andJean-MarcLevy-Leblond 1Dipartimentodi Fisica, Universitadi Genova ViaDodecaneso33,1-16146 Genova, Italy 2physiqueTheorique, Universitede NiceSophia-Antipolis Pare Valrose, F-06108 Nice Cedex, France As customary, the idea of this meeting was born out during another one. The present authors were attending some colloquium among the numerous meetings devoted to the endless discussion of the foundational problems of quantum theory, when it struck their minds that physics, after all, was also an experimental science. Maybe, they thought to themselves, our very understanding...

The ASI 'Topics in Atomic and Nuclear Collisions' was organized in Predeal from August 31 to September 11. It brought together people with a broad interest in Atomic and Nuclear Physics from several research institutes and universities in Ro- mania and 16 other countries. The school continues a tradition that started on a small scale back in 1968, fo- cussing mainly on current problems in nuclear physics. Though the organizing of this edition started very late and in very uncertain economic and financial conditions, it turned out to be the largest meeting of this type ever organized in...

A humoristic view of the physics of soft matter, which nevertheless has a ring of truth to it, is that it is an ill-defined subject which deals with ill-condensed matter by ill-defined methods. Although, since the Nobel prize was awarded to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, this subject can be no longer shrugged-away as "sludge physics" by the physics community, it is still not viewed universally as "main- stream" physics. While, at first glance, this may be considered as another example of inertia, a case of the "establishment" against the "newcomer," the roots of this prejudice are much deeper and...

This volume contains the proceedings of a five-day NATO Advanced Research Workshop "On Three Levels, the mathematical physics of micro-, meso-, and macro- phenomena," conducted from July 19 to 23 in Leuven, Belgium. The main purpose of the workshop was to bring together and to confront where relevant, classical and quantum approaches in the rigorous study of the relation between the various levels of physical description. The reader will find here discussions on a variety of topics involving a broad range of scales. For the micro-level, contributions are presented on models of...

The subject, of "Singular Limits of Dispersive vVaves" had its modern origins in the 1960's when Whitham introduced the first systematic approach to the asymptotic analysis of nonlinear wavepackds. Initially developed through a variational principle applied to the modulation of families of traveling wave solutions, he soon realized that an efficient derivation of modulation eq'uations could b(' accomplished by av- eraging local conservation laws. He carried out this analysis for a wide variety of dispersive nonlinear wave equations including the nonlinear Klein Gordon, KdV, and NLS equations....