Thermodynamics and fluctuations far from equilibrium

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Walter G. Rothschild

Fractals in Chemistry provides chemists with a concise, practical introduction to fractal theory and its applications to a wide range of "bread and butter" issues in chemistry. Drawing upon his considerable experience as a researcher who helped pioneer some of the methods he describes, Walter Rothschild critically appraises the power and limitations of the fractal approach and shows how it can provide more predictive classification schemes and explain phenomena difficult to handle by classical means. Then, with the help of nearly 100 illustrations, he demonstrates how to apply fractals to model chemical phenomena such as adsorption, aggregation, catalysis, chemical reactivity, degradation, and turbulent flames, and how to understand dynamics on fractals in terms of fractons in diffusion-limited reactions, dispersive spectroscopies, and energy transfer. Fractals in Chemistry is both a valuable working resource for professionals in physical chemistry, chemical physics, and computer modeling and an excellent graduate-level text for courses covering the use of fractals in chemistry.

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Yan Zeng

<p>This dissertation contributes to the understanding of fundamental issues in the highly interdisciplinary field of colloidal science. Beyond colloid science, the system also serves as a model for studying interactions in biological matter. This work quantitatively investigated the scaling laws of the characteristic lengths of the structuring of colloidal dispersions and tested the generality of these laws, thereby explaining and resolving some long-standing contradictions in the literature. <br><br>It revealed the effect of confinement on the structuring, independently of specific properties of the confining interfaces. In addition, it resolved the influence of roughness and charge of the confining interfaces on the structuring, as well as providing a method to measure the effect of surface deformability on colloidal structuring.</p><p></p>

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Norman H. March, Joseph F. Mucci

In this introductory chemical physics textbook, the authors discuss the interactions, bonding, electron density, and experimental techniques of free molecules, and apply spectroscopic methods to determine molecular parameters, dynamics, and chemical reactions.

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Antonio Bianconi and Naurang L. Saini

This book is a collection of papers in the field of stripes and high Tc superconductivity. The most relevant theoretical and experimental contributions from experts in the field of stripes, presented at the Second International Conference on Stripes and High Tc Superconductivity, are selected for publication. The book includes contributions on other stripe phases observed in manganites, nikelates, spin ladders, and heterostructures. Since a large stream of research in a growing community is converging towards the stripe scenario, this book serves as an important reference in the field of striped phases and high Tc superconductivity. The problem of high Tc superconductors has been a central issue in solid-state physics since 1987. After the discovery of high Tc superconductivity (HTSC) in doped perovskites, it was realized that HTSC appears in an unknown complex electronic phase of condensed matter. In the early years, all theories of HTSC were focused on the physics of a homogeneous 2D metal with large electron-electron correlations or on a 2D polaron gas. Only after 1990 a novel paradigm started to emerge in which this 2D metallic phase is described as an inhomogeneous metal. This was the outcome of several experimental evidences of phase separation at low doping. Following the discovery by the Rome Group in 1992 that `the changes move freely mainly in one direction like the water running in the grooves in corrugated iron foil', a new scenario for understanding superconductivity in high Tc superconductors was opened. Since the charges move like rivers, the physics of these materials shifts towards the physics of novel mesoscopic heterostructures and complex electronic solids. Therefore, understanding the striped phases in the perovskites not only provides an opportunity to understand the anomalous metallic state of cuprate superconductors, but also suggests a way to design new materials of technological importance. The stripes are begetting a field of general scientific interest.