The understanding of phase transitions has long been a fundamental problem of statistical mechanics. It has made spectac ular progress during the last few years, largely because of the ideas of K.G. Wilson, in applying to an apparently quite different domain the methods of the renormalization group, which had been developped in the framework of the quantum theory of fields. The ability of these theoretical methods to lead to very precise predictions has, n turn, stimulated in the last few years more refined experiments in different areas. We now have entered a period where the theoretical...
The understanding of phase transitions has long been a fundamental problem of statistical mechanics. It has made spectac ular progress during the last...
