Bøger i Texts and Monographs in Theoretical Physics serien

This book sets out to give a rigorous mathematical description of the greenhouse effect through the theory of infrared atmospheric emission. In contrast to traditional climatological analysis, this approach eschews empirical relations in favour of a strict thermodynamical derivation, based on data from NASA and from the HITRAN spectroscopy database. The results highlight new aspects of the role of clouds in the greenhouse effect.

This volume provides a compact presentation of modern statistical physics at an advanced level, from the foundations of statistical mechanics to the main modern applications of statistical physics. Special attention is given to new approaches, such as quantum field theory methods and non-equilibrium problems. This second, revised edition is expanded with biographical notes contextualizing the main results in statistical physics.

This work concerns the computational modelling of the dynamics of partially ionized gases, with emphasis on electrodischarge processes. Understanding gas discharges is fundamental for many processes in mechanics, manufacturing, materials science, and aerospace engineering. This second edition has been expanded to include the latest developments in the field, especially regarding the drift-diffusion model and rarefied hypersonic flow.

This book shows how quantum physics can be understood by taking as objective properties the q-expectations of products of quantum fields and what is computable from these. Probability and measurement are eliminated from the foundations and reappear as simplified coarse-grained descriptions of what exists. The resulting dissipation and nonlinearity may lead to bistability and explains the binary nature of paradigmatic quantum measurements.

The monograph is devoted to the investigation of physical processes that govern the phonon transport in bulk and nanoscale single-crystal samples of cubic symmetry. Special emphasis is given to the study of phonon focusing in cubic crystals and its influence on the boundary scattering and lattice thermal conductivity of bulk materials and nanostructures.

This book is essentially based on the lecture course on "e;Statistical Physics"e;, which was taught by the author at the physical faculty of the Ural State University in Ekaterinburg since 1992. This course was intended for all physics students, not especially for those specializing in theoretical physics. In this sense the material presented here contains the necessary minimum of knowledge of statistical physics (also often called statistical mechanics), which is in author's opinion necessary for every person wishing to obtain a general education in the field of physics. This posed the rather difficultproblem of the choice of material and compact enough presentation. At the same time it necessarily should contain all the basic principles of statistical physics, as well as its main applications to different physical problems, mainly from the field of the theory of condensed matter. Extended version of these lectures were published in Russian in 2003. For the present English edition, some of the material was rewritten and several new sections and paragraphs were added, bringing contents more up to date and adding more discussion on some more difficult cases.

This monograph takes stock of the situation in higher spin gauge theories for the first time. Besides a thorough recapitulation of the field's history, it reviews the progress that has been made and offers a pedagogical introduction to the subject. Abstract approaches to the theory are offered to facilitate a conceptual rethinking of the main problems and to help see patterns hidden by heavy formalism.