Wolfhard Janke - Böcker

This volume on spin glasses, structural glasses and biological macromolecules collects pedagogically written lecture notes of internationally renowned - perts from eight countries, who work on di?erent physical problems but - ploy similar theoretical concepts and computational methods. The research into at ?rst sight quite di?erent physical phenomena, therefore, faces related problems, whose origin can be traced back to the di?culties of numerical simulations of systems with rugged free-energy landscapes. Many of the or- inal publications presuppose quite specialized “common” knowledge, usually readily accessible only to the experts in each of these ?elds. Moreover, they are typically published in quite di?erent sets of scienti?c journals. The main objective of these Lecture Notes is, therefore, to provide the necessary ba- ground material in a coherent fashion and thereby to initialize knowledge transfer of advanced methodologies across the boundaries of the disciplines. It can be anticipated that future successful computer simulation studies of static and dynamic properties of the three systems considered here as well as the further development of improved numerical algorithms will greatly pro?t from an interaction among researchers in these di?erent ?elds. More speci?cally, the merits and drawbacksof the various variants of g- eralized ensemble methods as employed in computational studies of glassy systems and biomolecules as well as the complicated interplay of di?erent - gorithms in combined methods are discussed from rather di?erent viewpoints in this volume.

This volume on spin glasses, structural glasses and biological macromolecules collects pedagogically written lecture notes of internationally renowned - perts from eight countries, who work on di?erent physical problems but - ploy similar theoretical concepts and computational methods. The research into at ?rst sight quite di?erent physical phenomena, therefore, faces related problems, whose origin can be traced back to the di?culties of numerical simulations of systems with rugged free-energy landscapes. Many of the or- inal publications presuppose quite specialized “common” knowledge, usually readily accessible only to the experts in each of these ?elds. Moreover, they are typically published in quite di?erent sets of scienti?c journals. The main objective of these Lecture Notes is, therefore, to provide the necessary ba- ground material in a coherent fashion and thereby to initialize knowledge transfer of advanced methodologies across the boundaries of the disciplines. It can be anticipated that future successful computer simulation studies of static and dynamic properties of the three systems considered here as well as the further development of improved numerical algorithms will greatly pro?t from an interaction among researchers in these di?erent ?elds. More speci?cally, the merits and drawbacksof the various variants of g- eralized ensemble methods as employed in computational studies of glassy systems and biomolecules as well as the complicated interplay of di?erent - gorithms in combined methods are discussed from rather di?erent viewpoints in this volume.

This volume covers the following fields: path integrals, quantum field theory, variational perturbation theory, phase transitions and critical phenomena, topological defects, strings and membranes, gravitation and cosmology.