In this book, the authors bring together basic ideas from fracture mechanics and statistical physics, classical theories, simulation and experimental results to make the statistical physics aspects of fracture more accessible. They explain fracture-like phenomena, highlighting the role of disorder and heterogeneity from a statistical physical viewpoint. The role of defects is discussed in brittle and ductile fracture, ductile to brittle transition, fracture dynamics, failure processes with tension as well as compression: experiments, failure of electrical networks, self-organized critical models of earthquake and their extensions to capture the physics of earthquake dynamics. The text also includes a discussion of dynamical transitions in fracture propagation in theory and experiments, as well as an outline of analytical results in fiber bundle model dynamics With its wide scope, in addition to the statistical physics community, the material here is equally accessible to engineers, earth scientists, mechanical engineers, and material scientists. It also serves as a textbook for graduate students and researchers in physics.

Under extreme conditions the mechanical or electrical properties of solids tend to destabilize, leading to failure or breakdown. These instabilities often nucleate or spread from disorders in the structure of the solid. This book by two experts in the field investigates current techniques for modeling these failure and breakdown processes. It illustrates the basic modeling principles through a series of computer and laboratory simulations and `table top' experiments. The book centers on three important case studies: electrical failures like fuse and dielectric breakdown; mechanical fractures; and earthquakes, which exhibit dynamic failure. The material will interest all graduate students and researchers studying disordered systems, whether their focus is the mechanical failure of solids, the electrical breakdown of conductors, or earthquake mechanics.

This book is the first comprehensive and methodologically rigorous analysis of earthquake occurrence. Models based on the theory of the stochastic multidimensional point processes are employed to approximate the earthquake occurrence pattern and evaluate its parameters. The Author shows that most of these parameters have universal values. These results help explain the classical earthquake distributions: Omori's law and the Gutenberg-Richter relation. The Author derives a new negative-binomial distribution for earthquake numbers, instead of the Poisson distribution, and then determines a fractal correlation dimension for spatial distributions of earthquake hypocenters. The book also investigates the disorientation of earthquake focal mechanisms and shows that it follows the rotational Cauchy distribution. These statistical and mathematical advances make it possible to produce quantitative forecasts of earthquake occurrence. In these forecasts earthquake rate in time, space, and focal mechanism orientation is evaluated.

This book provides an integrated approach to the assessment of seismic hazards. The reduction of losses expected by future earthquakes is probably the most important contribution of seismology to society. Large earthquakes occurred in densely populated areas highlight the dramatic inadequacy of a massive portion of the buildings demonstrating the high risks of modern industrial societies. Building earthquake-resistant structures and retrofitting old buildings on a national scale can be extremely expensive and can represent an economic challenge even for developed western countries. Earthquakes can cause also several psychological problems due to the fact that such kind of disasters will result in casualties, collapsing of houses, strategic buildings and facilities and deeply affect a community. Moreover in our society it is necessary to properly plan emergency responses and rescues taking into account any possible secondary effect in order to avoid more casualties.

Gathering research from physics, mechanical engineering, and statistics in a single resource for the first time, this text presents the background to the model, its theoretical basis, and applications ranging from materials science to earth science. The authors start by explaining why disorder is important for fracture and then go on to introduce the fiber bundle model, backed by various different applications. Appendices present the necessary mathematical, computational and statistical background required. The structure of the book allows the reader to skip some material that is too specialized, making this topic accessible to the engineering, mechanics and materials science communities, in addition to providing further reading for graduate students in statistical physics.

What is Econophysics The discipline of econophysics is an unconventional interdisciplinary research field that applies ideas and methods that were initially established by physicists in order to tackle difficulties in economics. These challenges typically involve uncertainty or stochastic processes and nonlinear dynamics. It has also been referred to as statistical finance, which is a phrase that refers to its roots in statistical physics. Some of its applications to the study of financial markets involve statistical finance. There is a strong connection between econophysics and social physics. How you will benefit (I) Insights, and validations about the following topics: Chapter 1: Econophysics Chapter 2: Complex system Chapter 3: Fischer Black Chapter 4: El Farol Bar problem Chapter 5: Joseph L. McCauley Chapter 6: Thermoeconomics Chapter 7: Statistical finance Chapter 8: Complexity economics Chapter 9: J. Barkley Rosser Jr. Chapter 10: Institutionalist political economy Chapter 11: Didier Sornette Chapter 12: Jean-Philippe Bouchaud Chapter 13: Bikas Chakrabarti Chapter 14: Kinetic exchange models of markets Chapter 15: Quantitative analysis (finance) Chapter 16: Quantum finance Chapter 17: Mathematical finance Chapter 18: Dragon king theory Chapter 19: Physics of financial markets Chapter 20: Quantum economics Chapter 21: Tiziana Di Matteo (II) Answering the public top questions about econophysics. (III) Real world examples for the usage of econophysics in many fields. (IV) Rich glossary featuring over 1200 terms to unlock a comprehensive understanding of econophysics. (eBook only). Who will benefit Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of econophysics.

This book presents a broad survey of models for critical and catastrophic phenomena in the geosciences, with strong emphasis on earthquakes. It assumes the perspective of statistical physics, which provides the theoretical frame for dealing with complex systems in general. This volume addresses graduate students wishing to specialize in the field and researchers working or interested in the field having a background in the physics, geosciences or applied mathematics.

This volume attempts to present the current state of seismic research by focusing not only on the modeling of earthquakes and earthquake generated tsunamis, but also on practical comparisons of the resulting phenomenology. In the 1990s, major advancements in seismic research greatly added to the understanding of earthquake fault systems as complex dynamical systems. Large quantities of new and extensive remote sensing data sets provided information on the solid earth.