A nonlinearity is one of the most important notions in modern physics. A plasma is rich in nonlinearities and provides a variety of behaviors inherent to instabilities, coherent wave structures and turbulence. The book covers the basic concepts and mathematical methods, necessary to comprehend nonlinear problems widely encountered in contemporary plasmas, but also in other fields of physics and current research on self-organized structures and magnetized plasma turbulence. The analyses make use of strongly nonlinear models solved by analytical techniques backed by extensive simulations and available experiments. The text is written for senior undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers and researchers in laboratory, space and fusion plasmas.
In 1979, a historical meeting took place at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kiev, USSR, where 48 American Scientists, specialists in nonlinear and turbulent processes, met for two weeks with their soviet counterparts. This meeting pro vided the unique opportunity for USA and USSR participants to directly interact personally and scientifically with each other. This interaction was of great impor not only for the individuals involved but also for the science of nonlinear tance phenomena in general. At the end of the meeting, it was agreed that this exchange should continue, and it was decided to have the next meeting in the USA in 1981. Unfortunately, due to the political situation at that time, the second meeting in the USA never materialized. However, in 1983, the Soviet scientists organized in Kiev a second Workshop. This second meeting was again quite successful. Similar meetings, with growing success were organized at Kiev in 1987, and 1989. It should be noted that 405 participants from 22 countries participated at the fourth Kiev workshop on Nonlinear and Turbulent Processes. The Chainnan of this workshop was V. Zakharov, who has also been a co-chainnan of all the previous workshops.
This text considers models of different "acoustic" media as well as equations and behavior of finite-amplitude waves. It also considers the effects of nonlinearity, dissipation, dispersion, and for two- and three-dimensional problems, reflection and diffraction on the evolution and interaction of acoustic beams.
This textbook is aimed at newcomers to nonlinear dynamics and chaos, especially students taking a first course in the subject. The presentation stresses analytical methods, concrete examples, and geometric intuition. The theory is developed systematically, starting with first-order differential equations and their bifurcations, followed by phase plane analysis, limit cycles and their bifurcations, and culminating with the Lorenz equations, chaos, iterated maps, period doubling, renormalization, fractals, and strange attractors.
The book is designed to serve as a textbook for courses offered to upper-undergraduate students enrolled in physics. The first edition of this book was published in 2014. As there is a demand for the next edition, it is quite natural to take note of the several advances that have occurred in the subject over the past five years and to decide which of these are appropriate for inclusion at the textbook level, given the fundamental nature and the significance of the subject area. This is the prime motivation for bringing out a revised second edition. Among the newer mechanisms and materials, the book introduces the super-continuum generation, which arises from an excellent interplay of the various mechanisms of optical nonlinearity. The topics covered in this book are quantum mechanics of nonlinear interaction of matter and radiation, formalism and phenomenology of nonlinear wave mixing processes, optical phase conjugation and applications, self-focusing and self-phase modulation and their role in pulse modification, nonlinear absorption mechanisms, and optical limiting applications, photonic switching and bi-stability, and physical mechanisms leading to a nonlinear response in a variety of materials. This book has emerged from an attempt to address the requirement of presenting the subject at the college level. This textbook includes rigorous features such as the elucidation of relevant basic principles of physics; a clear exposition of the ideas involved at an appropriate level; coverage of the physical mechanisms of non-linearity; updates on physical mechanisms and emerging photonic materials and emphasis on the experimental study of nonlinear interactions. The detailed coverage and pedagogical tools make this an ideal textbook for students and researchers enrolled in physics and related courses.
Translated from the Russian. Gathers together the basic ideas of nonlinear theory essential for all branches of physics: mechanics of continuous media, optics, radiophysics, solid state physics, plasma physics. Includes color plates. Two sets of computer software (eight scenarios of dynamic computer graphics, and an ATRS program for research workers) are available separately. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Physics of Plasmas provides a comprehensive introduction to the subject, illustrating the basic theory with examples drawn from fusion, space and astrophysical plasmas. A particular strength of the book is its discussion of the various models used to describe plasma physics and the relationships between them. These include particle orbit theory, fluid equations, ideal and resistive magnetohydrodynamics, wave equations and kinetic theory. The reader will gain a firm grounding in the fundamentals, and develop this into an understanding of some of the more specialised topics. Throughout the text, there is an emphasis on the physical interpretation of plasma phenomena. Exercises are provided throughout. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students of physics, applied mathematics, astronomy and engineering will find a clear but rigorous explanation of the fundamental properties of plasmas with minimal mathematical formality. This book will also appeal to research physicists, nuclear and electrical engineers.
This book focuses on a central question in the field of complex systems: Given a fluctuating (in time or space), uni- or multi-variant sequentially measured set of experimental data (even noisy data), how should one analyse non-parametrically the data, assess underlying trends, uncover characteristics of the fluctuations (including diffusion and jump contributions), and construct a stochastic evolution equation? Here, the term "non-parametrically" exemplifies that all the functions and parameters of the constructed stochastic evolution equation can be determined directly from the measured data. The book provides an overview of methods that have been developed for the analysis of fluctuating time series and of spatially disordered structures. Thanks to its feasibility and simplicity, it has been successfully applied to fluctuating time series and spatially disordered structures of complex systems studied in scientific fields such as physics, astrophysics, meteorology, earth science, engineering, finance, medicine and the neurosciences, and has led to a number of important results. The book also includes the numerical and analytical approaches to the analyses of complex time series that are most common in the physical and natural sciences. Further, it is self-contained and readily accessible to students, scientists, and researchers who are familiar with traditional methods of mathematics, such as ordinary, and partial differential equations. The codes for analysing continuous time series are available in an R package developed by the research group Turbulence, Wind energy and Stochastic (TWiSt) at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Joachim Peinke. This package makes it possible to extract the (stochastic) evolution equation underlying a set of data or measurements.
The idea of devoting a complete book to this topic was born at one of the Workshops on Nonlinear and Turbulent Processes in Physics taking place reg ularly in Kiev. With the exception of E. D. Siggia and N. Ercolani, all authors of this volume were participants at the third of these workshops. All of them were acquainted with each other and with each other's work. Yet it seemed to be somewhat of a discovery that all of them were and are trying to understand the same problem - the problem of integrability of dynamical systems, primarily Hamiltonian ones with an infinite number of degrees of freedom. No doubt that they (or to be more exact, we) were led to this by the logical process of scientific evolution which often leads to independent, almost simultaneous discoveries. Integrable, or, more accurately, exactly solvable equations are essential to theoretical and mathematical physics. One could say that they constitute the "mathematical nucleus" of theoretical physics whose goal is to describe real clas sical or quantum systems. For example, the kinetic gas theory may be considered to be a theory of a system which is trivially integrable: the system of classical noninteracting particles. One of the main tasks of quantum electrodynamics is the development of a theory of an integrable perturbed quantum system, namely, noninteracting electromagnetic and electron-positron fields.
