Statistical Physics of Fields

Textbook on statistical field theories for advanced graduate courses in statistical physics.

Mehran Kardar (Author)

9780521873413, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 June 2007

370 pages, 115 b/w illus. 65 exercises
24.9 x 18.5 x 2.5 cm, 0.88 kg

'… the first eight chapters of Statistical Physics of Fields are stunning. … Kardar has produced an excellent and unique textbook that will serve our community well for many years.' Physics Today

While many scientists are familiar with fractals, fewer are familiar with scale-invariance and universality which underlie the ubiquity of their shapes. These properties may emerge from the collective behaviour of simple fundamental constituents, and are studied using statistical field theories. Initial chapters connect the particulate perspective developed in the companion volume, to the coarse grained statistical fields studied here. Based on lectures taught by Professor Kardar at MIT, this textbook demonstrates how such theories are formulated and studied. Perturbation theory, exact solutions, renormalization groups, and other tools are employed to demonstrate the emergence of scale invariance and universality, and the non-equilibrium dynamics of interfaces and directed paths in random media are discussed. Ideal for advanced graduate courses in statistical physics, it contains an integrated set of problems, with solutions to selected problems at the end of the book and a complete set available to lecturers at www.cambridge.org/9780521873413.

1. Collective behaviour, from particles to fields
2. Statistical fields
3. Fluctuations
4. The scaling hypothesis
5. Perturbative renormalization group
6. Lattice systems
7. Series expansions
8. Beyond spin waves
9. Dissipative dynamics
10. Directed paths in random media
Solutions to selected problems
Index.

Subject Areas: Statistical physics [PHS]