The term active fluids refers to motions that are created by transforming energy from the surroundings into directed motion. There are many examples, both natural and synthetic, including individual swimming bacteria or motile cells, drops and bubbles that move owing to surface stresses (so-called Marangoni motions), and chemical- or optical-driven colloids. Investigations into active fluids provide new insights into non-equilibrium systems, have the potential for novel applications, and open new directions in physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. This book provides an expert introduction to active fluids systems, covering simple to complex environments. It explains the interplay of chemical processes and hydrodynamics, including the roles of mechanical and rheological properties across active fluids, with reference to experiments, theory, and simulations. These concepts are discussed for a variety of scenarios, such as the trajectories of microswimmers, cell crawling and fluid stirring, and apply to collective behaviours of dense suspensions and active gels. Emerging avenues of research are highlighted, ranging from the role of active processes for biological functions to programmable active materials, showcasing the exciting potential of this rapidly-evolving research field.
The changing focus and approach of geomorphic research suggests that the time is opportune for a summary of the state of discipline. The number of peer-reviewed papers published in geomorphic journals has grown steadily for more than two decades and, more importantly, the diversity of authors with respect to geographic location and disciplinary background (geography, geology, ecology, civil engineering, computer science, geographic information science, and others) has expanded dramatically. As more good minds are drawn to geomorphology, and the breadth of the peer-reviewed literature grows, an effective summary of contemporary geomorphic knowledge becomes increasingly difficult. The fourteen volumes of this Treatise on Geomorphology will provide an important reference for users from undergraduate students looking for term paper topics, to graduate students starting a literature review for their thesis work, and professionals seeking a concise summary of a particular topic. Information on the historical development of diverse topics within geomorphology provides context for ongoing research; discussion of research strategies, equipment, and field methods, laboratory experiments, and numerical simulations reflect the multiple approaches to understanding Earth’s surfaces; and summaries of outstanding research questions highlight future challenges and suggest productive new avenues for research. Our future ability to adapt to geomorphic changes in the critical zone very much hinges upon how well landform scientists comprehend the dynamics of Earth’s diverse surfaces. This Treatise on Geomorphology provides a useful synthesis of the state of the discipline, as well as highlighting productive research directions, that Educators and students/researchers will find useful. Geomorphology has advanced greatly in the last 10 years to become a very interdisciplinary field. Undergraduate students looking for term paper topics, to graduate students starting a literature review for their thesis work, and professionals seeking a concise summary of a particular topic will find the answers they need in this broad reference work which has been designed and written to accommodate their diverse backgrounds and levels of understanding Editor-in-Chief, Prof. J. F. Shroder of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, is past president of the QG&G section of the Geological Society of America and present Trustee of the GSA Foundation, while being well respected in the geomorphology research community and having won numerous awards in the field. A host of noted international geomorphologists have contributed state-of-the-art chapters to the work. Readers can be guaranteed that every chapter in this extensive work has been critically reviewed for consistency and accuracy by the World expert Volume Editors and by the Editor-in-Chief himself No other reference work exists in the area of Geomorphology that offers the breadth and depth of information contained in this 14-volume masterpiece. From the foundations and history of geomorphology through to geomorphological innovations and computer modelling, and the past and future states of landform science, no "stone" has been left unturned!
The book contains review articles on recent advances in first-passage phenomena and applications contributed by leading international experts. It is intended for graduate students and researchers who are interested in learning about this intriguing and important topic. Book jacket.
This thesis both broadens and deepens our understanding of the Brownian world. It addresses new problems in diffusion theory that have recently attracted considerable attention, both from the side of nanotechnology and from the viewpoint of pure academic research. The author focusses on the difussion of interacting particles in restricted geometries and under externally controlled forces. These geometries serve, for example, to model ion transport through narrow channels in cell membranes or a Brownian particle diffusing in an optical trap, now a paradigm for both theory and experiment. The work is exceptional in obtaining explicit analytically formulated answers to such realistic, experimentally relevant questions. At the same time, with its detailed exposition of the problems and a complete set of references, it presents a clear and broadly accessible introduction to the domain. Many of the problem settings and the corresponding exact asymptotic laws are completely new in diffusion theory.
Do the movements of animals, including humans, follow patterns that can be described quantitatively by simple laws of motion? If so, then why? These questions have attracted the attention of scientists in many disciplines, and stimulated debates ranging from ecological matters to queries such as 'how can there be free will if one follows a law of motion?' This is the first book on this rapidly evolving subject, introducing random searches and foraging in a way that can be understood by readers without a previous background on the subject. It reviews theory as well as experiment, addresses open problems and perspectives, and discusses applications ranging from the colonization of Madagascar by Austronesians to the diffusion of genetically modified crops. The book will interest physicists working in the field of anomalous diffusion and movement ecology as well as ecologists already familiar with the concepts and methods of statistical physics.
This book deals with the most fundamental and essential techniques to simulate complex systems, from the dynamics of molecules to the spreading of diseases, from optimization using ant colonies to the simulation of the Game of Life.
During a century, from the Van der Waals mean field description (1874) of gases to the introduction of renormalization group (RG techniques 1970), thermodynamics and statistical physics were just unable to account for the incredible universality which was observed in numerous critical phenomena. The great success of RG techniques is not only to solve perfectly this challenge of critical behaviour in thermal transitions but to introduce extremely useful tools in a wide field of daily situations where a system exhibits scale invariance. The introduction of scaling, scale invariance and universality concepts has been a significant turn in modern physics and more generally in natural sciences. Since then, a new "physics of scaling laws and critical exponents", rooted in scaling approaches, allows quantitative descriptions of numerous phenomena, ranging from phase transitions to earthquakes, polymer conformations, heartbeat rhythm, diffusion, interface growth and roughening, DNA sequence, dynamical systems, chaos and turbulence. The chapters are jointly written by an experimentalist and a theorist. This book aims at a pedagogical overview, offering to the students and researchers a thorough conceptual background and a simple account of a wide range of applications. It presents a complete tour of both the formal advances and experimental results associated with the notion of scaling, in physics, chemistry and biology.
Random walks proved to be a useful model of many complex transport processes at the micro and macroscopical level in physics and chemistry, economics, biology and other disciplines. The book discusses the main variants of random walks and gives the most important mathematical tools for their theoretical description.
