Spontaneous Formation of Space-Time Structures and Criticality

Book excerpt: 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.