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.
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.
Growth and Fonn is the title of a famous book written by D' Arcy Thomson at the beginning of the century. It relates a large number of problems of shapes of bodies either in the physical world or the biological realm. Keywords in this field are shapes, spirals, growth law, gravity field, surface tension, scaling laws, diffusion and mechanical efficiency. This field is the source of a considerable amount of work, even today, and this conference was a place where some of this work was discussed. Except for a few contributions with biophysical inspiration, the main part of the conference was devoted to physical problems related to growth and fonn and especially to the problem of the motion of interfaces under various nonequilibrium conditions. Even with this restriction, this field is huge, from the more applied area (combustion, metallurgy) to the more fundamental (singularities in the complex plane, solvability conditions). One day, at dinner time, in a restaurant with a good view of the corsica sea, W. Kurz from Lausanne told us about teleferique cables and the kind of material which was necessary to build them. Considering the important abyss between this kind of concept and for instance, the huge fonnalism involving Green functions used to find operating points for dendritic growth, we immediatelty had the giggles for five minutes. This large domain was the occasion to confront many scientists from different areas (physicists, applied mathematicians, specialists of combustion, metallurgists and geologists).
In the past three decades there has been enormous progress in identifying the essential role that nonlinearity plays in physical systems, including supporting soliton-like solutions and self-trapped sxcitations such as polarons. during the same period, similarly impressive progress has occurred in understanding the effects of disorder in linear quantum problems, especially regarding Anderson localization arising from impurities, random spatial structures, stochastic applied fields, and so forth. These striking consequences of disorder, noise and nonlinearity frequently occur together in physical systems. Yet there have been only limited attempts to develop systematic techniques which can include all of these ingredients, which may reinforce, complement or frustrate each other. This book contains a range of articles which provide important steps toward the goal of systematic understanding and classification of phenomenology. Experts from Australia, Europe, Japan, USA, and the USSR describe both mathematical and numerical techniques - especially from soliton and statistical physics disciplines - and applicaations to a number of important physical systems and devices, including optical and electronic transmission lines, liquid crystals, biophysics and magnetism.
A humoristic view of the physics of soft matter, which nevertheless has a ring of truth to it, is that it is an ill-defined subject which deals with ill-condensed matter by ill-defined methods. Although, since the Nobel prize was awarded to Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, this subject can be no longer shrugged-away as "sludge physics" by the physics community, it is still not viewed universally as "main stream" physics. While, at first glance, this may be considered as another example of inertia, a case of the "establishment" against the "newcomer", the roots of this prejudice are much deeper and can be traced back to Roger Bacon's conception about the objectivity of science. All of us would agree with the weaker form of this idea which simply says that the final results of our work should be phrased in an observer-independent way and be communicable to anybody who made the effort to learn this language. There exists, however, a stronger form of this idea according to which the above criteria of "objectivity" and "communicability" apply also to the process of scientific inquiry. The fact that major progress in the physics of soft matter was made in apparent violation of this approach, by applying intuition to problems which appeared to defy rigorous analysis, may explain why many physicists feel somewhat ill-at-ease with this subject.
An asymptotic expansion is a series that provides a sequence of increasingly accurate approximations to a function in a particular limit. The formal definition, given by Poincare (1886, Acta Math. 8:295), is as follows. Given a function,
The NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Painleve Transcendents, their Asymp totics and Physical Applications", held at the Alpine Inn in Sainte-Adele, near Montreal, September 2 -7, 1990, brought together a group of experts to discuss the topic and produce this volume. There were 41 participants from 14 countries and 27 lectures were presented, all included in this volume. The speakers presented reviews of topics to which they themselves have made important contributions and also re sults of new original research. The result is a volume which, though multiauthored, has the character of a monograph on a single topic. This is the theory of nonlinear ordinary differential equations, the solutions of which have no movable singularities, other than poles, and the extension of this theory to partial differential equations. For short we shall call such systems "equations with the Painleve property". The search for such equations was a very topical mathematical problem in the 19th century. Early work concentrated on first order differential equations. One of Painleve's important contributions in this field was to develop simple methods applicable to higher order equations. In particular these methods made possible a complete analysis of the equation ;; = f(y',y,x), where f is a rational function of y' and y, with coefficients that are analytic in x. The fundamental result due to Painleve (Acta Math.
Present day heterogeneous catalysis is rapidly being transformed from a technical art into a science-based technology. A major contribution to this important change is the advance of surface spectroscopic techniques able to characterize the complex surfaces of the heterogeneous catalytic system. The Advanced Study Institute (on which the current proceedings is based) has as its primary aim the bringing together of a variety of lecturers, outstanding in those fields of experience, to enable a broad coverage of different relevant approaches. Not only catalyst characterization but also catalytic reactivity had to be covered in order to relate catalyst properties with catalyst performance. Since modern catalysis relates catalytic performance to microscopic molecular catalyst features, theoretical electronic aspects also had to be included. The Advanced Study Institute had a unique feature in that it brought together physicists, catalytic chemists and chemical engineers whom rarely directly interact. From physics especially new experimental possibilities of beams were emphasized. At present it is possible to obtain very detailed information on model catalysts, whilst the applications to practical catalysts are gaining rapidly in sophistication. Apart from the plenary lectures, the Institute included "hot topics" to highlight special developments and offered participants the opportunity to present contributed papers (either orally or as a poster). These contributions formed an integral part of the summer school and significantly enhanced the interaction between participants. Inclusion of the hot topics and contributed papers in these proceedings give them an added topical value.