25 years of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics

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Masuo Suzuki

This volume is the proceedings of the Ninth Taniguchi Symposium on the Theory of Condensed Matter. It presents the basic ideas of quantum statistical Monte Carlo methods, including generalizations of the standard methods, and discusses the important problem of convergence. In addition, some promising powerful new methods are proposed, for example, a transfer-matrix method. Further contributions describe specific applications to quantum spin and fermion systems at finite temperatures, such as the treatment of randomness and frustration in a triangular antiferromagnet, the investigation of critical properties of spin chains, the study of spin glasses and the simulation of polaron and bipolaron systems. In particular, some new information is given about frustrated quantum spin systems and the dense Kondo problem.

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Jürgen Hafner

This book presents a survey of all the theoretical techniques needed to calculate a pressure-temperature phase diagram of a pure metal, or a composition-temperature phase diagram of a binary alloy, from first principles, that is, starting with the Hamiltonian of the system and with no other input except the atomic mass and the atomic number. The text begins with the elementary approach to the effective ionic forces in metals and alloys based on the pseudopotential and linear-response theories. The greater part of the book is concerned with the s, p-bonded or simple metals to which these theories apply. Transition and rare-earth metals and the tight-binding or band-theory methods required to describe them are treated only briefly. The statistical-mechanical and lattice-dynamical methods used to describe the liquid state and a vibrating crystal at finite temperatures are developed in detail. All scientists concerned with the structural and thermal properties of metals and alloys should find this book of interest.

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Shigeji Fujita and Salvador Godoy

The book describes all basic experimental facts about high temperature superconductivity of materials, with a critical temperature of 30 Kelvin and higher, and explains them microscopically starting with a Hamiltonian followed by step-by-step statistical mechanical calculations. All important theoretical formulas are derived without omitting steps and all basic questions are answered in a manner which is easy to understand. The book is therefore suitable as a textbook for a second-year graduate physics course. Many fresh, and some challenging, ideas are presented and researches in the field are invited to examine the text.

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Abdul Sattar, ed

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI'97, held in Perth, Australia, in November/December 1997. The volume presents 48 revised full papers selected from a total of 143 submissions. Also included are three keynote talks and one invited paper. The book is divided into topical sections on constraint satisfaction and scheduling, computer vision, distributed AI, evolutionary computing, knowledge-based systems, knowledge representation and reasoning, learning and machine vision, machine learning, NLP and user modeling, neural networks, robotics and machine recognition, and temporal qualitative reasoning.