Many mesoscopic systems display adaptive' behaviour - changes in some physical property that results from a small change in an internal or external driving force. There is a kind of progression in adaptive phenomena, from quantum mesoscopics to complex, evolved cooperative systems and large scale events like turbulence. The field of mesoscopic magnetism, especially quantum coherence and quantum tunnelling in spin systems, and the coupling between mesoscopic magnetism and mesoscopic transport is currently a very active area of solid state physics. Dephasing' is an important concept in...

The investigation of phenomena involving fractals has gone through a spectacular development in the last decade. Many physical, technological and biological processes have been shown to be related to and described by objects with non-integer dimensions. The physics of far-from-equilibrium growth phenomena represents one of the most important fields in which fractal geometry is widely applied. During the past couple of years considerable experimental, numerical and theoretical information has accumulated concerning such processes. This book, written by a well known expert in the field,...

Fractals have been shown to represent the common aspects of many complex processes occurring in an unusually diverse range of fields, including physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, earth sciences and technology. Among other things, a better understanding of growth phenomena, turbulence, iterative functions, colloidal aggregation, biological pattern formation and inhomogeneous materials has emerged through the application of such concepts as scale invariance, self-affinity and multifractality. This volume presents results of the application of fractals to natural science.