Bücher der Reihe Partially Ordered Systems

Spatio-temporal patterns appear almost everywhere in nature, and their description and understanding still raise important and basic questions. However, if one looks back 20 or 30 years, definite progress has been made in the modeling of insta- bilities, analysis of the dynamics in their vicinity, pattern formation and stability, quantitative experimental and numerical analysis of patterns, and so on. Universal behaviors of complex systems close to instabilities have been determined, leading to the wide interdisciplinarity of a field that is now referred to as nonlinear science or science of complexity, and in which initial concepts of dissipative structures or synergetics are deeply rooted. In pioneering domains related to hydrodynamics or chemical instabilities, the interactions between experimentalists and theoreticians, sometimes on a daily basis, have been a key to progress. Everyone in the field praises the role played by the interactions and permanent feedbacks between ex- perimental, numerical, and analytical studies in the achievements obtained during these years. Many aspects of convective patterns in normal fluids, binary mixtures or liquid crystals are now understood and described in this framework. The generic pres- ence of defects in extended systems is now well established and has induced new developments in the physics of laser with large Fresnel numbers. Last but not least, almost 40 years after his celebrated paper, Turing structures have finally been ob- tained in real-life chemical reactors, triggering anew intense activity in the field of reaction-diffusion systems.

The usefulness of the book to the reader is exposure to many different classes of materials and relaxation phenomena. The readers can apply what they learn to solve their own problems and use it as a stepping-stone to make further advances in theoretical understanding of the origin of the universality.

The study of "soft matter" materials with complex properties has raised a number of interesting problems in basic physics, biology, and materials science, all of which promise new and important technological applications.

This is particularly true of media, such as crystals and liquid crystals, that have a periodic structure. After two chapters dealing with exact and approximate solutions to the scattering problem in periodic media in general, the author discusses: the diffraction of Moessbauer radiation in magnetically ordered crystals;

Describes the main aspects of chirality in liquid crystals, and points out some of the open questions of current research. The chapters review the highlights of the important topics and questions.

Intended for researchers and students in physics, chemistry and materials science, this book provides the necessary background information and sufficient mathematical and physical detail to study the current research literature.

Solitons are a well-known and intriguing aspect of nonlinear behavior in a continuous system such as a fluid: a wave propagates through the medium without distortion.

Over the last decades, the study of surfactants (detergents, for example) has been profoundly changed by ideas and techniques from physics, chemistry, and materials science. This book represents the first systematic account of these new developments, providing both a general introduction to the subject as well as a review of recent developments.

Polymer scientists also began to develop methods of synthesizing thermotropic LC polymers by incorporating mesogenic fragments in the main (main-chain LC polymers) or side branchings of the macromolecules (side-chain or comb shaped polymers).

In the last 20 years the study of nonlinear nonequilibrium phenomena in spa tially extended systems, with particular emphasis on pattern-forming phenomena, has been one of the very active areas in physics, exhibiting interesting ramifi cations into other sciences.

One of the most important aspects of solid materials is the regularity of the arrangement of the constituent molecules, that is, the long-range order. The chapters are tutorial reviews of the subject, written both for the active researcher looking for a review of a topic and for the graduate student investigating an exciting area of research.

In the last 20 years the study of nonlinear nonequilibrium phenomena in spa tially extended systems, with particular emphasis on pattern-forming phenomena, has been one of the very active areas in physics, exhibiting interesting ramifi cations into other sciences.

Solitons are a well-known and intriguing aspect of nonlinear behavior in a continuous system such as a fluid: a wave propagates through the medium without distortion.