Low-dimensional statistical models are instrumental in improving our understanding of emerging fields, such as quantum computing and cryptography, complex systems, and quantum fluids. This book of lectures by international leaders in the field sets these issues into a larger and more coherent theoretical perspective than is currently available.
This book is a collection of contributions to the Symposium on Interface between Quantum Information and Statistical Physics held at Kinki University in November 2011. Subjects of the symposium include quantum adiabatic computing, quantum simulator using bosons, classical statistical physics, among others. Contributions to this book are prepared in a self-contained manner so that a reader with a modest background may understand the subjects.
From molecular motors to bacteria, from crawling cells to large animals, active entities are found at all scales in the biological world. Active matter encompasses systems whose individual constituents irreversibly dissipate energy to exert self-propelling forces on their environment. Over the past twenty years, scientists have managed to engineer synthetic active particles in the lab, paving the way towards smart active materials. This book gathers a pedagogical set of lecture notes that cover topics in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and active matter. These lecture notes stem from the first summer school on Active Matter delivered at the Les Houches school of Physics. The lectures covered four main research directions: collective behaviours in active-matter systems, passive and active colloidal systems, biophysics and active matter, and nonequilibrium statistical physics—from passive to active.
This book is a self-contained advanced textbook on the mathematical-physical aspects of quantum many-body systems, which begins with a pedagogical presentation of the necessary background information before moving on to subjects of active research, including topological phases of matter. The book explores in detail selected topics in quantum spin systems and lattice electron systems, namely, long-range order and spontaneous symmetry breaking in the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model in two or higher dimensions (Part I), Haldane phenomena in antiferromagnetic quantum spin chains and related topics in topological phases of quantum matter (Part II), and the origin of magnetism in various versions of the Hubbard model (Part III). Each of these topics represents certain nontrivial phenomena or features that are invariably encountered in a variety of quantum many-body systems, including quantum field theory, condensed matter systems, cold atoms, and artificial quantum systems designed for future quantum computers. The book’s main focus is on universal properties of quantum many-body systems. The book includes roughly 50 problems with detailed solutions. The reader only requires elementary linear algebra and calculus to comprehend the material and work through the problems. Given its scope and format, the book is suitable both for self-study and as a textbook for graduate or advanced undergraduate classes.
The book is based on the lectures delivered at the XCIII Session of the École de Physique des Houches, held in August, 2009. The aim of the event was to familiarize the new generation of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows with the principles and methods of modern lattice field theory, which aims to resolve fundamental, non-perturbative questions about QCD without uncontrolled approximations. The emphasis of the book is on the theoretical developments that have shaped the field in the last two decades and that have turned lattice gauge theory into a robust approach to the determination of low energy hadronic quantities and of fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. By way of introduction, the lectures begin by covering lattice theory basics, lattice renormalization and improvement, and the many faces of chirality. A later course introduces QCD at finite temperature and density. A broad view of lattice computation from the basics to recent developments was offered in a corresponding course. Extrapolations to physical quark masses and a framework for the parameterization of the low-energy physics by means of effective coupling constants is covered in a lecture on chiral perturbation theory. Heavy-quark effective theories, an essential tool for performing the relevant lattice calculations, is covered from its basics to recent advances. A number of shorter courses round out the book and broaden its purview. These included recent applications to the nucleon--nucleon interation and a course on physics beyond the Standard Model.
This volume contains lectures delivered at the Les Houches Summer School 'Integrability: from statistical systems to gauge theory' held in June 2016. The School was focussed on applications of integrability to supersymmetric gauge and string theory, a subject of high and increasing interest in the mathematical and theoretical physics communities over the past decade. Relevant background material was also covered, with lecture series introducing the main concepts and techniques relevant to modern approaches to integrability, conformal field theory, scattering amplitudes, and gauge/string duality. The book will be useful not only to those working directly on integrablility in string and guage theories, but also to researchers in related areas of condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics.
The book introduces tools with which models of quantum matter are built. The most important technique, the Bethe ansatz, is developed in detail to perform exact calculations of the physical properties of quantum matter.
Rare events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods fortunately do not occur every day, but when they do, their effects are devastating. Such rare events are particularly important in understanding and characterizing global warming and climate changes. In addition to natural catastrophes, rare events such as big financial crashes also play a significant role in the economy. In the absence of predictive models, the best way forward is to analyse the statistics of these extreme events and draw conclusions about the probability of their occurrences.Extreme value statistics (EVS) and the statistics of records in a random sequence are examples of a truly interdisciplinary topic, spanning from statistics and mathematics on one side to physics of disordered systems on the other. They have tremendous importance and practical applications in a wide variety of fields, such as climate science, finance, spin-glasses, and random matrices.Statistics and mathematical literature have explored the subject of the classical theory of EVS. However, more recently, EVS started to play a very important role in statistical physics, in particular in disordered systems. This has led to a plethora of activities, both in the statistical physics and in the mathematics communities over the last few decades. This book develops the theory of rare events, both for the classical uncorrelated as well as for correlated sequences, in terms of simple models and examples. Statistics of Extremes and Records in Random Sequences is a pedagogical book with examples illustrating the basic tools and techniques that are essential to a student starting to work in this interesting and rapidly developing field.
This book fully covers all aspects -- historical, theoretical, and experimental -- of the fields of quantum optomechanics and nanomechanics. These are essential parts of modern physics research, and relate to gravitational-wave detection (the subject of the Physics Nobel Prize 2017), and quantum information.
The topic of the CVIII session of the Ecole de Physique des Houches, held in July 2017, was Effective Field Theory in Particle Physics and Cosmology. Effective Field Theory (EFT) is a general method for describing quantum systems with multiple length scales in a tractable fashion. It allows to perform precise calculations in established models (such as the Standard Models of particle physics and cosmology), as well as to concisely parametrise possible effects from physics beyond the Standard Models. The goal of this school was to offer a broad introduction to the foundations and modern applications of Effective Field Theory in many of its incarnations. This is all the more important as there are preciously few textbooks covering the subject, none of them in a complete way. In this book, the lecturers present the concepts in a pedagogical way so that readers can adapt some of the latest developments to their own problems. The chapters cover almost all the lectures given at the school and will serve as an introduction to the topic and as a reference manual to students and researchers.
