Systems driven far from thermodynamic equilibrium can create dissipative structures through the spontaneous breaking of symmetries. A particularly fascinating feature of these pattern-forming systems is their tendency to produce spatially confined states. These localized wave packets can exist as propagating entities through space and/or time.

Various examples of such systems will be dealt with in this book, including localized states in fluids, chemical reactions on surfaces, neural networks, optical systems, granular systems, population models, and Bose-Einstein...