Starting with a historical introduction to the study of magnetism - one of the oldest sciences known to man - before considering the most modern theories and observations (magnetic bubbles and soap films, effects of magnetic impurities in metals and spin glasses), this book develops the concepts and the mathematical expertise necessary to understand contemporary research in this field. Magnetic systems are important in technology and applied science, but they are also prototypes of more complex mathematical structures of great importance to theoretical physics. These connections are made...

The Luttinger Model is the only model of many-fermion physics with legitimate claims to be both exactly and completely solvable. In several respects it plays the same role in many-body theory as does the 2D Ising model in statistical physics. Interest in the Luttinger model has increased steadily ever since its introduction half a century ago. The present volume starts with reprints of the seminal papers in which it was originally introduced and solved, and continues with several contributions setting out the landscape of the principal advances of the last fifty years and of prominent new...

What is thermodynamics? What does statistical physics teach us? In the pages of this slim book, we confront the answers. The reader will discover that where thermodynami cs provi des a 1 arge scal e, macroscopi c theory of the ef fects of temperature on physical systems, statistical mechanics provides the microscopic analysis of these effects which, invariably, are the results of thermal disorder. A number of systems in nature undergo dramatic changes in aspect and in their properties when subjected to changes in ambient temperature or pres sure, or when electric or magnetic fields are...