This book is a treatise on the thermodynamic and dynamic properties of thin liquid films at solid surfaces and, in particular, their rupture instabilities. For the quantitative study of these phenomena, polymer thin films (sometimes referred to as "ultrathin") have proven to be an invaluable experimental model system.
What is it that makes thin film instabilities special and interesting? First, thin polymeric films have an important range of applications. An understanding of their instabilities is therefore of practical relevance for the design of such films. The first chapter of the book...

The purpose of this book is to thoroughly prepare the reader for research in string theory at an intermediate level. As such it is not a compendium of results but intended as textbook in the sense that most of the material is organized in a pedagogical and self-contained fashion.

Beyond the basics, a number of more advanced topics are introduced, such as conformal field theory, superstrings and string dualities - the text does not cover applications to black hole physics and cosmology, nor strings theory at finite temperatures.

End-of-chapter references have been added to guide the...

A first consequence of this difference in texture concerns the attitude we must take toward some (or perhaps most) investigations in "applied mathe- matics," at least when the mathematics is applied to physics. Namely, those investigations have to be regarded as pure mathematics and evaluated as such. For example, some of my mathematical colleagues have worked in recent years on the Hartree-Fock approximate method for determining the structures of many-electron atoms and ions. When the method was intro- duced, nearly fifty years ago, physicists did the best they could to justify it, using...

Since the discovery of the corpuscular nature of radiation by Planck more than fifty years ago the quantum theory of radiation has gone through many stages of development which seemed to alternate between spectacular success and hopeless frustration. The most recent phase started in 1947 with the discovery of the electromagnetic level shifts and the realization that the exist- ing theory, when properly interpreted, was perfectly adequate to explain these effects to an apparently unlimited degree of accuracy. This phase has now reached a certain conclusion: for the first time in the checkered...

Few-body systems are both technically relatively simple and physically non trivial enough to test theories quantitatively. For instance the He-atom played historically an important role in verifying predictions of QED. A similar role is contributed nowadays to the three-nucleon system as a testing ground far nuclear dynamics and maybe in the near future to few-quark systems. They are also often the basic building blocks for many-body systems like to some extent nuclei, where the real many-body aspect is not the dominant feature. The presentation of the subject given here is based on lectures...

The fundamental goal of physics is an understanding of the forces of nature in their simplest and most general terms. Yet there is much more involved than just a basic set of equations which eventually has to be solved when applied to specific problems. We have learned in recent years that the structure of the ground state of field theories (with which we are generally concerned) plays an equally funda mental role as the equations of motion themselves. Heisenberg was probably the first to recognize that the ground state, the vacuum, could acquire certain prop erties (quantum numbers) when he...

The first edition (in German) had the prevailing character of a textbook owing to the choice of material and the manner of its presentation. This second (translated, revised, and extended) edition, however, includes in its new parts considerably more recent and advanced results and thus goes partially beyond the textbook level. We should emphasize here that the primary intentions of this book are to provide (so far as possible given the restrictions of space) a selfcontained presentation of some modern developments in the direct methods of the cal culus of variations in applied mathematics...

The physical importance of inverse problems in quantum scattering theory is clear since all the information we can obtain on nuclear, particle, and subparticle physics is gathered from scattering experiments. Exact and approximate methods of investigating scattering theory, inverse radial problems at fixed energy, inverse one-dimensional problems, inverse three-dimensional problems, and construction of the scattering amplitude from the cross section are presented. The methods often apply to other fields, e.g. applied mathematics and geophysics. The book will therefore be of interest to...

This book specifically explores the inverse Schrodinger scattering problem in three dimensions with a potential that is without any assumed symmetry properties. It covers most of the known methods for the exact solution of this problem, including detailed proofs of most of the needed theorems. The solutions of the three-dimensional inverse-scattering problem found during the last twenty years are presented together for the first time in coherent, self-contained, and detailed manner. This book combines the known results published previously in research papers only, corrects some errors, closes...

This is a textbook on non-relativistic quantum mechanics that emphasizes clarification of the nature of the basic postulates and the interpretation of the theory. It contains special material, often only accessible in scientific journals, on bound states, scattering theory, and both analytical and approximation techniques. Applications to many branches of physics are given. Among the topics covered are one-dimensional problems, angular momentum, two-particle systems, symmetry transformations, collision theory, the WKB method, and stationary and time-dependent perturbation and variational...