This volume contains the Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) and Emil-Warburg-Symposium (EWS) "Nonlinear Coherent Structures in Phy sics and Biology" held at the University of Bayreuth from June 1 -4, 1993. Director of the ARW was K. H. Spatschek, while F.G. Mertens acted as the co-director, host, and organizer of the EWS. The other members of the scientific organizing committee were A.R. Bishop (Los Alamos), J.C. Eilbeck (Edinburgh), and M. Remoissenet (Dijon). This was the eighth meeting in a series of interdisciplinary workshops founded by our French colleagues who had organized all the previous workshops, e.g. 1989 in Montpel lier and 1991 in Dijon. We were asked to organize the meeting this time in Germany. Of course, we wanted to keep the character defined by the previous meetings, which were always characterized by an open and friendly atmosphere, being not too large in quantity, but high in quality. This time altogether 103 participants attended the workshop. During the past years most of the participants met several times and discussed problems connected with the generation of nonlinear coherent structures in physics and biology.

Nature provides many examples of coherent nonlinear structures and waves, and these have been observed and studied in various fields ranging from fluids and plasmas through solid-state physics to chemistry and biology. These proceedings reflect the remarkable process in understanding and modeling nonlinear phenomena in various systems that has recently been made.Experimental, numerical, and theoretical activities interact in various studies that are presented according to the following classification: magnetic and optical systems, biosystems and molecular systems, lattice excitations and localized modes, two-dimensional structures, theoretical physics, and mathematical methods. The book addresses researchers and graduate students from biology, engineering, mathematics, and physics.

This book is devoted to the applications of the mathematical theory of solitons to physics, statistical mechanics, and molecular biology. It contains contributions on the signature and spectrum of solitons, nonlinear excitations in prebiological systems, experimental and theoretical studies on chains of hydrogen-bonded molecules, nonlinear phenomena in solid-state physics, including charge density waves, nonlinear wave propagation, defects, gap solitons, and Josephson junctions. The content is interdisciplinary in nature and displays the new trends in nonlinear physics.

The Final Proceedings for Nonlinear Coherent Structures in Physics and Biology, 10 July 1995 - 14 July 1995. Some of the major topics include molecular structure, solitons, nonlinear equations, and solitary waves.

Problems and summaries after each chapter

Early in 1990 a scientific committee was formed for the purpose of organizing a high-level scientific meeting on Future Directions of Nonlinear Dynamics in Physical and Biological Systems, in honor of Alwyn Scott's 60th birthday (December 25, 1991). As preparations for the meeting proceeded, they were met with an unusually broad-scale and high level of enthusiasm on the part of the international nonlinear science community, resulting in a participation by 168 scientists from 23 different countries in the conference, which was held July 23 to August 11992 at the Laboratory of Applied Mathematical Physics and the Center for Modelling, Nonlinear Dynamics and Irreversible Thermodynamics (MIDIT) of the Technical University of Denmark. During the meeting about 50 lectures and 100 posters were presented in 9 working days. The contributions to this present volume have been grouped into the following chapters: 1. Integrability, Solitons, and Coherent Structures 2. Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Diffusive Systems 3. Chaotic and Stochastic Dynamics 4. Classical and Quantum Lattices and Fields 5. Superconductivity and Superconducting Devices 6. Nonlinear Optics 7. Davydov Solitons and Biomolecular Dynamics 8. Biological Systems and Neurophysics. AI Scott has made early and fundamental contributions to many of these different areas of nonlinear science. They form an important subset of the total number of the papers and posters presented at the meeting. Other papers from the meeting are being published in a special issue of Physica D Nonlinear Phenomena.

Written in Alwyn Scott’s inimitable style, one that readers will find both lucid and accessible, this masterwork elucidates the explosion of activity in nonlinear science in recent decades. The book explains the wide-ranging implications of nonlinear phenomena for future developments in many areas of modern science, including mathematics, physics, engineering, chemistry, biology, and neuroscience. Arguably as important as quantum theory, modern nonlinear science is essential for understanding the scientific developments of the twenty-first century.