This book introduces recent theoretical developments concerning the dynamic behaviour of fracture. Readers learn how the recent development of molecular dynamics and other state-of-the-art methods can help to solve the important problem of fracture from the atomic level.

In this volume we aim to introduce recent progress in the study of aperiodic materials, which include icosahedral clusters, amorphous metals, quasicrys tals, glasses, and liquids. Quasicrystals, discovered in 1984, correspond to a kind of revolution in our understanding of crystallography, wherein the five-fold rotational symmetry was prohibited in long-range ordered systems. Various interesting physicochemical properties of these materials strongly depend on structural inhomogeneity at the microscopic level, and the small angle X-ray scattering method is widely used to analyze such...

The field of cluster science is currently attracting considerable interest, not only from a fundamental standpoint, but also through its future applications to electronic, optical, magnetic, and other devices. Synthesizing specific clus- ters as a unit of useful nanostructures or controlling them as an assembly of nanocomposites is one of the ultimate purposes in this field. In order to understand how to synthesize individual clusters and t_o investigate physical properties, chemical reactions, structural stability, response to external fields, aggregation, phase transition, and other aspects...