Many-Body Boson Systems

Many-Body Boson Systems

Many-body Boson Systems: Half a Century Later offers a modern way of dealing with the problems of equilibrium states of Bose systems. Starting with the variation principle of statistical mechanics and the energy-entropy balance principle as equilibrium criteria, results for general boson systems and models are explicitly derived using simple functional analytic calculus. Bridging the gap between ideas of general theoretical physics and the phenomenological research in the field of Bose systems, this book provides an insight into the fascinating quantum world of bosons. Key topics include the occurrence of BEC and its intimate structural relation with the phenomena of spontaneous symmetry breaking and off-diagonal long range order; the condensate equation; the issue concerning the choice of boundary conditions; solvable versus non-solvable boson models; the set of quasi-free boson states; the role of dissipative perturbations; and the surprising but general relation between general quantum fluctuations and boson systems. Only some knowledge of quantum mechanics and undergraduate algebra and analysis is assumed. This textbook brings students and researchers smoothly from general concepts to vivid applications.

Many-Body Boson Systems

Chaos

Chaos

This eleventh volume in the Poincar Seminar Series presents an interdisciplinary perspective on the concept of Time, which poses some of the most challenging questions in science. Five articles, written by the Fields medalist C. Villani, the two outstanding theoretical physicists T. Damour and C. Jarzynski, the leading experimentalist C. Salomon, and the famous philosopher of science H. Price, describe recent developments related to the mathematical, physical, experimental, and philosophical facets of this fascinating concept. These articles are also highly pedagogical, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience. Highlights include a description of the manifold fundamental physical issues in play with time, in particular with the changes of perspective implied by Special and General Relativity; a mathematically precise discussion of irreversibility and entropy in the context of Boltzmann’s and Vlasov’s equations; a thorough survey of the recently developed thermodynamics at the nanoscale, the scale most relevant to biological physics; a description of the new cold atom space clock PHARAO to be installed in 2015 onboard the International Space Station, which will allow a test of Einstein’s gravitational shift with a record precision of 2 10-6, and enable a test of the stability over time of the fundamental constants of physics, an issue first raised by Dirac in 1937; and last, but not least, a logical and clarifying philosophical discussion of Time’s arrow, a phrase first coined by Eddington in 1928 in a challenge to physics to resolve the puzzle of the time-asymmetry of our universe, and echoed here in a short pome en prose by C. de Mitry. This book should be of broad general interest to physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers.

Chaos

The Fuzzy Systems Handbook

The Fuzzy Systems Handbook

‘The Fuzzy Systems Handbook’ provides an introduction to fuzzy logic, the fast-growing alternative to binary logic that has wide applications from computer science to process control. This handbook leads the reader through the complete process of designing, constructing, implementing, verifying and maintaining a platform-independent fuzzy-system model. It is written in a tutorial style that assumes no background in fuzzy logic on the reader’s part. This pack: includes an IBM DOS diskette, with all the book’s examples implemented in C++ code; provides mathematically straightforward exposition, with emphasis on practical applications; presents case studies on fraud detection, entropy, managed health care and metallurgical analysis. It features a foreword by Lotfi Zadeh, who developed fuzzy logic in the 1960s.

The Fuzzy Systems Handbook