Spontaneous Formation of Space-Time Structures and Criticality

This volume contains the proceedings of a NATO Advanced study Institute held at Geilo, Norway between 2 - 12 april 1991. This institute was the eleventh in a series held biannually at Geilo on the subject of phase transitions. It was intended to capture the latest ideas on selforgan ized patterns and criticality. The Institute brought together many lecturers, students and active re searchers in the field from a wide range of NATO and non-NATO countries. The main financial support came from the NATO scientific Affairs Divi sion, but additional support was obtained from the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities (NAVF) and Institutt for energi teknikk. The organizers would like to thank all these contributors for their help in promoting an exciting and rewarding meeting, and in doing so are confident that they echo the appreciation of all the parti cipants. In cooperative, equilibrium systems, physical states are described by spatio-temporal correlation functions. The intimate connection between space and time correlations is especially apparent at the critical point, the second order phase transition, where the spatial range and the decay time of the correlation function both become infinite. The salient features of critical phenomena and the history of the devel opment of this field of science are treated in the first chapter of this book.

Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute, Geilo, Norway, April 2-12, 1991

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Scaling and universality in statistical physics.- Self-organized criticality and the perception of large events.- Dynamical aspects of sandpile cellular automata.- Steady state selection in driven diffusive systems.- Earthquakes and faulting: Self-organized crtical phenomena with a characteristic dimension.- Self-organized criticality in plate tectonics.- Experiments and simulations modeling earthquakes.- Fractal time-series and fractional Brownian motion.- 1/f noise, lattice gases, and diffusion.- Fluctuations in a Lévy flight gas.- Spatio-temporal correlations in semiconductors.- New travelling and stationary chemical patterns in open spatial reactors.- Structure of layered systems under reactions.- Localized and "blinking" traveling wave patterns in a convective binary mixture.- Localized solutions of generalized Swift-Hohenberg equation.- Experiments on the Couette-Taylor flow with an axial flow.- Convection in microemulsions.- Routes to chaos in a dissipative chain of strongly coupled driven spins.- Localized structures and solitary waves excited by interfacial stresses.- Subcritical bifurcations and spatiotemporal intermittency.- Spatiotemporal intermittency in coupled maps.- Multifractals, multiscaling and the energy cascade of turbulence.- Smooth and rough turbulence.- Structure functions in a "forest-fire" model of turbulence.- Magnetic flux tubes as coherent structures.- Helium in a big box.- Scaling laws in weak turbulence.- Selforganization and instabilities in a system of magnetic hole pairs.- Universality in fully developed chaos, and statistics at small scales in turbulence.- Does dimension grow in flow systems.- Turbulent flows and coupled maps.- New Monte Carlo renormalization group method for phase transitions of lattice systems.