In the past three decades there has been enormous progress in identifying the essential role that nonlinearity plays in physical systems, including supporting soliton-like solutions and self-trapped sxcitations such as polarons. during the same period, similarly impressive progress has occurred in understanding the effects of disorder in linear quantum problems, especially regarding Anderson localization arising from impurities, random spatial structures, stochastic applied fields, and so forth. These striking consequences of disorder, noise and nonlinearity frequently occur together in...

"Evolution of Dynamical Structures in Complex Systems" is dedicated to the founder of synergetics, Hermann Haken, on the occasion of his 65th birthday. This volume is an attempt to gather together and review the new results and de velopments achieved by researchers from various fields during the last few years. The contents bear witness to the great success in the development of general approaches to synergetic systems as well as remarkable progress in the more tra ditional fields of synergetics such as lasers and nonlinear optics, hydrodynamics, condensed matter physics, biology, and...

Silicon carbide and other group IV-IV materials in their amorphous, microcrystalline, and crystalline forms have a wide variety of applications.The contributions to this volume report recent developments and trends in the field. The purpose is to make available the current state of understanding of the materials and their potential applications. Eachcontribution focuses on a particular topic, such as preparation methods, characterization, and models explaining experimental findings. The volume also contains the latest results in the exciting field of SiGe/Si heterojunction bipolar...

Interacting many-body systems are the main subjects of research in theoretical condensed matter physics, and they are the source of both the interest and the difficulty in this field. In order to understand the macroscopic properties of matter in terms of macroscopic knowledge, many analytic and approximate methods have been introduced. The contributions to this proceedings volume focus on the most recent developments of computational approaches in condensed matter physics. Monte Carlo methods and molecular dynamics simulations applied to strongly correlated classical and quantum systems such...

The contribution of computer simulation studies to our understanding of proper ties of a wide range of condensed-matter systems is now well established. The Center for Simulational Physics has been hosting annual workshops with the in tent of bringing together some of the experienced practitioners in the field, as well as relative newcomers in the field, to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and recent results. This year's workshop, the fourth in the series, was held at the University of Georgia, February 18-22, 1991. These proceedings are a record of the workshop and are published...

Surface science has existed as a recognized discipline for more than 20 years. During this period, the subject has expanded in two important ways. On the one hand, the techniques available for studying surfaces, both experimental and theoretical, have grown in number and in sophistication. On the other hand, surface science has been applied to an increasing number of areas of technology, such as catalysis, semicon ductor processing, new materials development, corrosion prevention, adhesion and tribology. . There is, however, no sharp division between fundamental and applied surface science....

Time-Resolved Vibrational Spectroscopy VI documents the most recent developments in the field of time-resolved spectroscopy. Emphasis is placed on new nonlinear-spectroscopic techniques, vibrational and excited-state dynamics, photophysical, chemical, and biological processes, surface dynamics, and their most important applications in science and technology.

It was almost four hundred years ago that Galileo wrote in Il Saggiatore that the "Book of Nature is written in mathema ti ca 1 characters." Thi s sentence, i nspi red at the dawn of physics has proved with the passage of time to contain a deep truth and also a warning: in order to understand Nature, first we must learn to read mathema tical characters. Indeed, writing physical law in such characters has proved not as hard as unraveling the content of the resulting equations. In particular, the lack of knowledge in the field of nonlinear mathematics has been a severe limita tion in the past....

The nine review articles and roughly 30 contributed papers contained in this volume survey the present understanding of the molecular motion of polymers in concentrated solutions, melts and the amorphous state. Although the main emphasis is on results from neutron scattering experiments, about half of the contributions relate to complementary techniques such as light scattering and NMR. The book highlights three areas of active reseach that have received increasing attention in recent years. First, work on polymer relaxation near the glass transition and in glassy systems has shown that the...

Computer simulation studies in condensed matter physics form a rapidly developing field making sigificant contributions to important physical problems. The papers in this volume present new physical results and report new simulation techniques and new ways of interpreting simulational data, which cover simulation of both classical and quantum systems. Topics treated include - Multigrid and nonlocal updating methods in Monte Carlo simulations - Simulations of magnetic excitations and phase transitions - Simulations of aggregate formation - Molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo studies of...