Covering both classical and quantum models, nonlinear integrable systems are of considerable theoretical and practical interest, with applications over a wide range of topics, including water waves, pin models, nonlinear optics, correlated electron systems, plasma physics, and reaction-diffusion processes. Comprising one part on classical theories

The study of integrable systems has opened new horizons in classical physics over the past few decades, particularly in the subatomic world. Yet despite the field now having reached a level of maturity, very few books provide an introduction to the field accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike, and none offer a systematic survey of the m

Contributed articles.

This volume will be the first reference book devoted specially to the Yang-Baxter equation. The subject relates to broad areas including solvable models in statistical mechanics, factorized S matrices, quantum inverse scattering method, quantum groups, knot theory and conformal field theory. The articles assembled here cover major works from the pioneering papers to classical Yang-Baxter equation, its quantization, variety of solutions, constructions and recent generalizations to higher genus solutions./a

The Cargese Summer School "Low Dimensional Applications of Quantum Field Theory" was held in July 1995. The School was dedicated to the memory of Claude Itzykson. This session focused on the recent progress in quantum field theory in two dimen sions with a particular emphasis on integrable models and applications of quantum field theory to condensed matter physics. A large fraction of the school was also devoted to a detailed review of the exciting developments in four dimensional super symmetric Yang-Mills theory. The diversity of the topics presented constitute, in our opinion, one of the most attractive features of these proceedings. Some contributions constitute a very thor ough introduction to their subject matter and should be helpful to advanced students in the field while others present entirely new research, not previously published, and should be of considerable interest to the specialist. There were in depth introductory lectures on the application of conformal field theory techniques to disordered systems, on the quantum Hall effect, on quantum in tegrable systems, on the thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz and on the new developments in supersymmetric gauges theories. The computation of the three point function of the Liouville model using conformal bootstrap methods was presented in detail.

This book shows how Lie group and integrability techniques, originally developed for differential equations, have been adapted to the case of difference equations. Difference equations are playing an increasingly important role in the natural sciences. Indeed, many phenomena are inherently discrete and thus naturally described by difference equations. More fundamentally, in subatomic physics, space-time may actually be discrete. Differential equations would then just be approximations of more basic discrete ones. Moreover, when using differential equations to analyze continuous processes, it is often necessary to resort to numerical methods. This always involves a discretization of the differential equations involved, thus replacing them by difference ones. Each of the nine peer-reviewed chapters in this volume serves as a self-contained treatment of a topic, containing introductory material as well as the latest research results and exercises. Each chapter is presented by one or more early career researchers in the specific field of their expertise and, in turn, written for early career researchers. As a survey of the current state of the art, this book will serve as a valuable reference and is particularly well suited as an introduction to the field of symmetries and integrability of difference equations. Therefore, the book will be welcomed by advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as by more advanced researchers.

Despite remarkable developments in the field, a detailed treatment of non-Kerr law media has not been published. Introduction to non-Kerr Law Optical Solitons is the first book devoted exclusively to optical soliton propagation in media that possesses non-Kerr law nonlinearities. After an introduction to the basic features of fiber-optic com

The field of stochastic processes and Random Matrix Theory (RMT) has been a rapidly evolving subject during the last fifteen years. The continuous development and discovery of new tools, connections and ideas have led to an avalanche of new results. These breakthroughs have been made possible thanks, to a large extent, to the recent development of various new techniques in RMT. Matrix models have been playing an important role in theoretical physics for a long time and they are currently also a very active domain of research in mathematics. An emblematic example of these recent advances concerns the theory of growth phenomena in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class where the joint efforts of physicists and mathematicians during the last twenty years have unveiled the beautiful connections between this fundamental problem of statistical mechanics and the theory of random matrices, namely the fluctuations of the largest eigenvalue of certain ensembles of random matrices. This text not only covers this topic in detail but also presents more recent developments that have emerged from these discoveries, for instance in the context of low dimensional heat transport (on the physics side) or integrable probability (on the mathematical side).

This book, now in its second edition, introduces the singularity analysis of differential and difference equations via the Painlevé test and shows how Painlevé analysis provides a powerful algorithmic approach to building explicit solutions to nonlinear ordinary and partial differential equations. It is illustrated with integrable equations such as the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, the Korteweg-de Vries equation, Hénon-Heiles type Hamiltonians, and numerous physically relevant examples such as the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, the Kolmogorov-Petrovski-Piskunov equation, and mainly the cubic and quintic Ginzburg-Landau equations. Extensively revised, updated, and expanded, this new edition includes: recent insights from Nevanlinna theory and analysis on both the cubic and quintic Ginzburg-Landau equations; a close look at physical problems involving the sixth Painlevé function; and an overview of new results since the book’s original publication with special focus on finite difference equations. The book features tutorials, appendices, and comprehensive references, and will appeal to graduate students and researchers in both mathematics and the physical sciences.

This volume contains the proceedings of the conference on 'Exactly Soluble Models in Statistical Mechanics: Historical Perspectives and Current Status', held at Northeastern University in March 1996 — the first ever conference to deal exclusively with this topic. Besides invited presentations by leading researchers in the field, the conference held a session of contributed papers by participants from throughout the world. The proceedings, which include both the invited and the contributed papers, reflect the broad range of interest in exactly soluble models as well as the diverse fields in physics and mathematics that they connect. Apart from providing concise and timely reviews, the papers in this volume give a snapshot of the current state of affairs. The topics covered range from a historical survey of the field (by E H Lieb) to the latest formulation of a star-star transformation of spin models (by R J Baxter).