Handsomely produced monograph provides graduate students and researchers with elegantly lucid accounts of some modern aspects of the topic to which the title refers. The five chapters bear these titles: Statistical mechanics of the Heisenberg ferromagnet; Statistical mechanics of electronic models o

This volume analyzes both the theoretical and experimental aspects of neutron spectroscopy of solids, whereby complex crystals may be analyzed in relation to the theories of symmetry and neutron scattering near a structural or magnetic transition.

About half a century ago Landau formulated the central principles of the phe nomenological second-order phase transition theory which is based on the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking at phase transition. By means of this ap proach it has been possible to treat phase transitions of different nature in altogether distinct systems from a unified viewpoint, to embrace the aforemen tioned transitions by a unified body of mathematics and to show that, in a certain sense, physical systems in the vicinity of second-order phase transitions exhibit universal behavior. For several decades the...