Malte Henkel

eBook, PDF

Conformal Invariance and Critical Phenomena (eBook, PDF)

Beschreibung

Critical phenomena arise in a wide variety of physical systems. Classi cal examples are the liquid-vapour critical point or the paramagnetic ferromagnetic transition. Further examples include multicomponent fluids and alloys, superfluids, superconductors, polymers and fully developed tur bulence and may even extend to the quark-gluon plasma and the early uni verse as a whole. Early theoretical investigators tried to reduce the problem to a very small number of degrees of freedom, such as the van der Waals equation and mean field approximations, culminating in Landau's general theory of critical phenomena. Nowadays, it is understood that the common ground for all these phenomena lies in the presence of strong fluctuations of infinitely many coupled variables. This was made explicit first through the exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model by Onsager. Systematic subsequent developments have been leading to the scaling theories of critical phenomena and the renormalization group which allow a precise description of the close neighborhood of the critical point, often in good agreement with experiments. In contrast to the general understanding a century ago, the presence of fluctuations on all length scales at a critical point is emphasized today. This can be briefly summarized by saying that at a critical point a system is scale invariant. In addition, conformal invaTiance permits also a non-uniform, local rescal ing, provided only that angles remain unchanged.

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Autor

Malte Henkel, born in 1960, received his Master's degree from the University of Bonn in 1984, and his PhD in 1987, when he also won the annual prize of the Minerva Foundation. From that year onward he has been a long-term visitor in many institutes, including the ITP at Santa Barbara, USA, the SPhT at Saclay, France, and the universities of Oxford, UK, Vienna, Austria, Padova, Italy, and Lisbon, Portugal. In 1995 he was appointed a professor at the University of Nancy I. His current research encompasses equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase transitions, using field-theoretical and numerical methods in general. In particular, his current focus is on dynamical scaling behaviour realised in ageing phenomena far from equilibrium. He has published well over a hundred articles and three monographs, one of which is Volume I of this set.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
• Seitenzahl: 418
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. März 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9783662039373
• Artikelnr.: 53333931