Aimed at graduate physics and chemistry students, this is the first comprehensive monograph covering the concept of the geometric phase in quantum physics from its mathematical foundations to its physical applications and experimental manifestations. It contains all the premises of the adiabatic Berry phase as well as the exact Anandan-Aharonov phase. It discusses quantum systems in a classical time-independent environment (time dependent Hamiltonians) and quantum systems in a changing environment (gauge theory of molecular physics). The mathematical methods used are a combination of...

The amazing growth of computational resources has made possible the modeling of complex chemical processes. To develop these models one needs to proceed from rigorous theoretical methods to approximate ones by exploiting the potential of innovative architectural features of modern concurrent processors. This book reviews some of the most advanced theoretical approaches in the field of molecular reaction dynamics in order to cope as rigorously as possible with the complexity of real systems.

This useful text provides a survey of the current state of research into the physics of neutrinos. It gives a global view of the areas of physics in which neutrinos play important roles, including astrophysics and cosmology.

As a graduate student working in quantum optics I encountered the question that might be taken as the theme of this book. The question definitely arose at that time though it was not yet very clearly defined; there was simply some deep irritation caused by the work I was doing, something quite fundamental I did not understand. Of course, so many things are not understood when one is a graduate student. However, my nagging question was not a technical issue, not merely a mathematical concept that was difficult to grasp. It was a sense that certain elementary notions that are accepted as...

Most of the interesting and difficult problems in statistical mechanics arise when the constituent particles of the system interact with each other with pair or multi particle energies. The types of behaviour which occur in systems because of these interactions are referred to as cooperative phenomena giving rise in many cases to phase transitions. This book and its companion volume (Lavis and Bell 1999, referred to in the text simply as Volume 2) are princi pally concerned with phase transitions in lattice systems. Due mainly to the insights gained from scaling theory and renormalization...

Why another book on the renormalization of field theory? This book aims to contribute to the bridging of the gap between the treatments of renor malization in physics courses and the mathematically rigorous approach. It provides a simple but rigorous introduction to perturbative renormalization, and, in doing so, also equips the reader with some basic techniques which are a prerequisite for studying renormalization nonperturbatively. Beside these technical issues, it also contains a proof of renormalizability of cents4 theory in d:5 4 dimensions and a discussion of renormalization for systems...

Critical phenomena arise in a wide variety of physical systems. Classi cal examples are the liquid-vapour critical point or the paramagnetic ferromagnetic transition. Further examples include multicomponent fluids and alloys, superfluids, superconductors, polymers and fully developed tur bulence and may even extend to the quark-gluon plasma and the early uni verse as a whole. Early theoretical investigators tried to reduce the problem to a very small number of degrees of freedom, such as the van der Waals equation and mean field approximations, culminating in Landau's general theory of...

Why is quantum field theory of condensed matter physics necessary? Condensed matter physics deals with a wide variety of topics, ranging from gas to liquids and solids, as well as plasma, where owing to the inter play between the motions of a tremendous number of electrons and nuclei, rich varieties of physical phenomena occur. Quantum field theory is the most appropriate "language," to describe systems with such a large number of de grees of freedom, and therefore its importance for condensed matter physics is obvious. Indeed, up to now, quantum field theory has been succesfully ap plied to...

In this highly readable book, H.S. Green, a former student of Max Born and well known as an author in physics and in the philosophy of science, presents a timely analysis of theoretical physics and related fundamental problems.

This is the first comprehensive presentation of the quantum non-linear sigma-models. The original papers consider in detail geometrical properties and renormalization of a generic non-linear sigma-model, illustrated by explicit multi-loop calculations in perturbation theory.