A Kinetic View of Statistical Physics

Aimed at graduate students, this book explores some of the core phenomena in non-equilibrium statistical physics. It focuses on the development and application of theoretical methods to help students develop their problem-solving skills. The book begins with microscopic transport processes: diffusion, collision-driven phenomena, and exclusion. It then presents the kinetics of aggregation, fragmentation and adsorption, where the basic phenomenology and solution techniques are emphasized. The following chapters cover kinetic spin systems, both from a discrete and a continuum perspective, the role of disorder in non-equilibrium processes, hysteresis from the non-equilibrium perspective, the kinetics of chemical reactions, and the properties of complex networks. The book contains 200 exercises to test students' understanding of the subject. A link to a website hosted by the authors, containing supplementary material including solutions to some of the exercises, can be found at www.cambridge.org/9780521851039.

Pavel L. Krapivsky is Research Associate Professor of Physics at Boston University. His current research interests are in strongly interacting many-particle systems and their applications to kinetic spin systems, networks, and biological phenomena.

Sid Redner is a condensed-matter theorist whose research focuses on non-equilibrium statistical physics and its applications. Dr Redner has been on the physics faculty at Boston University since 1978 and has been a full professor since 1989. He has published 230 research articles and is the author of A Guide to First-Passage Processes (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Dr Redner is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was a visiting scientist at Schlumberger Research in 1984–1985, the Ulam Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2004–2005 and a visiting professor at the Universite Paul Sabatier (Toulouse) and Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) in 2008.

Eli Ben-Naim is a theoretical physicist who conducts research in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. His focus is interacting particle systems and their application to soft matter and complex systems. At the Theoretical Division in Los Alamos National Laboratory, he currently serves as the deputy group leader of the Physics of Condensed Matter and Complex Systems Group and is an affiliate of the Center of Nonlinear Studies. He received his B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 1990 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Boston University in 1994. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago before moving to Los Alamos. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (US) and the Institute of Physics (UK). He also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Physics A, the Journal of Statistical Mechanics and the European Journal of Physics B.