The contributions in the book are devoted to the memory of Michael E Fisher, and hence include many personal memories from people whose work was influenced by him. Also, the book is a collection of articles from leaders in the field of phase transitions and critical phenomena, to celebrate 50 years of the renormalization group and the 1972 paper by Wilson and Fisher. Many of the articles review, in tutorial form, the progress in the fields of phase transitions and the renormalization group.

The contributions in the book are devoted to the memory of Michael E Fisher, and hence include many personal memories from people whose work was influenced by him. Also, the book is a collection of articles from leaders in the field of phase transitions and critical phenomena, to celebrate 50 years of the renormalization group and the 1972 paper by Wilson and Fisher. Many of the articles review, in tutorial form, the progress in the fields of phase transitions and the renormalization group.

Provides comprehensive coverage of the fundamentals of mesoscopic thermodynamics Mesoscopic Thermodynamics for Scientists and Engineers presents a unified conceptual approach to the core principles of equilibrium and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Emphasizing the concept of universality at the mesoscale, this authoritative textbook provides the knowledge required for understanding and utilizing mesoscopic phenomena in a wide range of new and emerging technologies. Divided into two parts, Mesoscopic Thermodynamics for Scientists and Engineers opens with a concise summary of classical thermodynamics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, followed by a detailed description of fluctuations and local (spatially-dependent) properties. Part II presents a universal approach to specific meso-heterogeneous systems, illustrated by numerous examples from experimental and computational studies that align with contemporary research and engineering practice. Bridges the gap between conventional courses in thermodynamics and real-world practice Provides in-depth instruction on applying thermodynamics to current problems involving meso- and nano-heterogeneous systems Contains a wealth of examples of simple and complex fluids, polymers, liquid crystals, and supramolecular equilibrium and dissipative structures Includes practical exercises and references to textbooks, monographs, and journal articles in each chapter Mesoscopic Thermodynamics for Scientists and Engineers is an excellent textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in physics, chemistry, and chemical, mechanical, and materials science engineering, as well as an invaluable reference for engineers and researchers engaged in soft-condensed matter physics and chemistry, nanoscience and nanotechnology, and mechanical, chemical, and biomolecular engineering.

'Written by two professors emeriti with a long and distinguished career both in research and teaching, the book clearly shows the wide experience of its authors … This is a good book, carefully prepared, full of details and appropriate for its scope. Those who will profit the most from it are the students who are obliged (or prefer) to study independently. They will appreciate the clarity of exposition and will find the numerous problems both stimulating and rewarding. What sets the book apart are undoubtedly the detailed solutions to all of the problems.'Contemporary PhysicsThis is an introductory book on solid state physics. It is a translation of a Hebrew version, written for the Open University in Israel. Aimed mainly for self-study, the book contains appendices with the necessary background, explains each calculation in detail and contains many solved problems. The bulk of the book discusses the basic concepts of periodic crystals, including lattice structures, radiation scattering off crystals, crystal bonding, vibrations of crystals, and electronic properties. On the other hand, the book also presents brief reviews of advanced topics, e.g. quasicrystals, soft condensed matter, mesoscopic physics and the quantum Hall effect. There are also many specific examples drawn from modern research topics, e.g. perovskite oxides relevant for high temperature superconductivity, graphene, electrons in low dimensions and more.

Describing the physical properties of quantum materials near critical points with long-range many-body quantum entanglement, this book introduces readers to the basic theory of quantum phases, their phase transitions and their observable properties. This second edition begins with a new section suitable for an introductory course on quantum phase transitions, assuming no prior knowledge of quantum field theory. It also contains several new chapters to cover important recent advances, such as the Fermi gas near unitarity, Dirac fermions, Fermi liquids and their phase transitions, quantum magnetism, and solvable models obtained from string theory. After introducing the basic theory, it moves on to a detailed description of the canonical quantum-critical phase diagram at non-zero temperatures. Finally, a variety of more complex models are explored. This book is ideal for graduate students and researchers in condensed matter physics and particle and string theory.

During a century, from the Van der Waals mean field description (1874) of gases to the introduction of renormalization group (RG techniques 1970), thermodynamics and statistical physics were just unable to account for the incredible universality which was observed in numerous critical phenomena. The great success of RG techniques is not only to solve perfectly this challenge of critical behaviour in thermal transitions but to introduce extremely useful tools in a wide field of daily situations where a system exhibits scale invariance. The introduction of scaling, scale invariance and universality concepts has been a significant turn in modern physics and more generally in natural sciences. Since then, a new "physics of scaling laws and critical exponents", rooted in scaling approaches, allows quantitative descriptions of numerous phenomena, ranging from phase transitions to earthquakes, polymer conformations, heartbeat rhythm, diffusion, interface growth and roughening, DNA sequence, dynamical systems, chaos and turbulence. The chapters are jointly written by an experimentalist and a theorist. This book aims at a pedagogical overview, offering to the students and researchers a thorough conceptual background and a simple account of a wide range of applications. It presents a complete tour of both the formal advances and experimental results associated with the notion of scaling, in physics, chemistry and biology.

The subject of the exact renormalization group started from pioneering work by Wegner and Houghton in the early seventies and, a decade later, by Polchinski, who formulated the Wilson renormalization group for field theory. In the past decade considerable progress has been made in this field, which includes the development of alternative formulations of the approach and of powerful techniques for solving the exact renormalization group equations, as well as widening of the scope of the exact renormalization group method to include fermions and gauge fields. In particular, two very recent results, namely the manifestly gauge-invariant formulation of the exact renormalization group equation and the proof of the c-theorem in four dimensions, are presented in this volume.

In each generation, scientists must redefine their fields: abstracting, simplifying and distilling the previous standard topics to make room for new advances and methods. Sethna's book takes this step for statistical mechanics - a field rooted in physics and chemistry whose ideas and methods are now central to information theory, complexity, and modern biology. Aimed at advanced undergraduates and early graduate students in all of these fields, Sethna limits his main presentation to the topics that future mathematicians and biologists, as well as physicists and chemists, will find fascinating and central to their work. The amazing breadth of the field is reflected in the author's large supply of carefully crafted exercises, each an introduction to a whole field of study: everything from chaos through information theory to life at the end of the universe.