This book is the second volume of lecture notes on various topics in nonlinear physics delivered by specialists in the field who gave courses in the small village of Peyresq (France) during summer schools (2000, 2001, 2002) organised by the Institut Non Linéaire de Nice (INLN), in collaboration with the Institut de Recherche de Physique Hors Equilibre (IRPHE). The goal is to provide good summaries on the state of the art of some domains in physics having the common denominator of belonging to nonlinear sciences, and to promote the transfer of knowledge between them.
This book is the third volume of lecture notes from summer schools held in the small village of Peyresq (France). These lectures cover nonlinear physics in a broad sense. They were given over the period 2004 to 2008. The summer schools were organized by the Institut Non Linéaire de Nice (Nice, France), the Laboratoire de Physique Statistique (ENS Paris, France) and the Institut de Recherche de Physique Hors Equilibre (Marseilles, France). The goal of the book is to provide a high-quality overview on the state of the art in nonlinear sciences, and to promote the transfer of knowledge between the various domains in physics dealing with nonlinear phenomena.
"This book is the second volume of a compilation of lecture notes on various topics in nonlinear physics delivered by specialists during the summer schools organized by the Institut Non Linaeaire de Nice ... in Peyresq ... since 1998. The first volume, edited by R. Kaiser and J. Montaldi, contains courses from the years 1998 and 1999. This volume collects notes of the lectures given from the summers of 2000, 2001 and 2002"--Preface, v. 2.
This book is the third volume of lecture notes from summer schools held in the small village of Peyresq (France). These lectures cover nonlinear physics in a broad sense. They were given over the period 2004 to 2008. The summer schools were organized by the Institut Non Lin(r)aire de Nice (Nice, France), the Laboratoire de Physique Statistique (ENS Paris, France) and the Institut de Recherche de Physique Hors Equilibre (Marseilles, France). The goal of the book is to provide a high-quality overview on the state of the art in nonlinear sciences, and to promote the transfer of knowledge between the various domains in physics dealing with nonlinear phenomen
Nonlinear science has a very broad scope and the aim of this volume of lectures is to introduce different aspects of this vast domain to research students whose studies are necessarily concentrated on only one. The lectures given at summer schools in France between 1997 and 1999, describe analytical, geometrical and experimental approaches to subjects as diverse as turbulence, elasticity, physiology, classical mechanics, quantum chaos, water waves and the laser cooling of atoms.
The increasing power of computer resources along with great improvements in observational data in recent years have led to some remarkable and rapid advances in astrophysical fluid dynamics. The subject spans three distinct but overlapping communities whose interests focus on (1) accretion discs and high-energy astrophysics; (2) solar, stellar, and galactic magnetic fields; and (3) the geodynamo, planetary magnetic fields, and associated experiments. This book grew out of a special conference sponsored by the London Mathematical Society with the support of EPSRC that brought together leading researchers in all of these areas to exchange ideas and review the status of the field. The many interesting problems addressed in this volume concern:
The aim of this book is to present review articles describing the latest theoretical and experimental developments in the field of cold atoms and molecules. Our hope is that this series will promote research by both highlighting recent breakthroughs and by outlining some of the most promising research directions in the field.
This twelfth volume in the Poincaré Seminar Series presents a complete and interdisciplinary perspective on the concept of Chaos, both in classical mechanics in its deterministic version, and in quantum mechanics. This book expounds some of the most wide ranging questions in science, from uncovering the fingerprints of classical chaotic dynamics in quantum systems, to predicting the fate of our own planetary system. Its seven articles are also highly pedagogical, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience. Highlights include a complete description by the mathematician É. Ghys of the paradigmatic Lorenz attractor, and of the famed Lorenz butterfly effect as it is understood today, illuminating the fundamental mathematical issues at play with deterministic chaos; a detailed account by the experimentalist S. Fauve of the masterpiece experiment, the von Kármán Sodium or VKS experiment, which established in 2007 the spontaneous generation of a magnetic field in a strongly turbulent flow, including its reversal, a model of Earth’s magnetic field; a simple toy model by the theorist U. Smilansky – the discrete Laplacian on finite d-regular expander graphs – which allows one to grasp the essential ingredients of quantum chaos, including its fundamental link to random matrix theory; a review by the mathematical physicists P. Bourgade and J.P. Keating, which illuminates the fascinating connection between the distribution of zeros of the Riemann ζ-function and the statistics of eigenvalues of random unitary matrices, which could ultimately provide a spectral interpretation for the zeros of the ζ-function, thus a proof of the celebrated Riemann Hypothesis itself; an article by a pioneer of experimental quantum chaos, H-J. Stöckmann, who shows in detail how experiments on the propagation of microwaves in 2D or 3D chaotic cavities beautifully verify theoretical predictions; a thorough presentation by the mathematical physicist S. Nonnenmacher of the “anatomy” of the eigenmodes of quantized chaotic systems, namely of their macroscopic localization properties, as ruled by the Quantum Ergodic theorem, and of the deep mathematical challenge posed by their fluctuations at the microscopic scale; a review, both historical and scientific, by the astronomer J. Laskar on the stability, hence the fate, of the chaotic Solar planetary system we live in, a subject where he made groundbreaking contributions, including the probabilistic estimate of possible planetary collisions. This book should be of broad general interest to both physicists and mathematicians.
Nonlinear waves are pervasive in nature, but are often elusive when they are modelled and analysed. This book develops a natural approach to the problem based on phase modulation. It is both an elaboration of the use of phase modulation for the study of nonlinear waves and a compendium of background results in mathematics, such as Hamiltonian systems, symplectic geometry, conservation laws, Noether theory, Lagrangian field theory and analysis, all of which combine to generate the new theory of phase modulation. While the build-up of theory can be intensive, the resulting emergent partial differential equations are relatively simple. A key outcome of the theory is that the coefficients in the emergent modulation equations are universal and easy to calculate. This book gives several examples of the implications in the theory of fluid mechanics and points to a wide range of new applications.
