Interacting many-body systems are the main subjects of research in theoretical condensed matter physics, and they are the source of both the interest and the difficulty in this field. In order to understand the macroscopic properties of matter in terms of macroscopic knowledge, many analytic and approximate methods have been introduced. The contributions to this proceedings volume focus on the most recent developments of computational approaches in condensed matter physics. Monte Carlo methods and molecular dynamics simulations applied to strongly correlated classical and quantum systems such...

To understand phenomena in nature, it is important to focus not only on properties of stationary states, but also their changes in time, that is, the dynamics between bistable states. This book reviews the mechanics of first-order phase transitions and discusses relaxation and collapses of metastable states from various viewpoints, including Kramers' method for the lifetime of metastability, Langer’s analysis on the singularity, effects of thermal fluctuation studied by Néel and Brown, and eigenvalue structures of the transfer-matrix for the phase transitions. The book also goes into the...