Elements of Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena

After spending three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie-Mellon University and Rutgers University in the US, Hidetoshi Nishimori returned to Japan, first as a research associate at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is now a professor of physics at the same Institute. He received the Nishina Memorial Prize in 2006 for his work on spin glasses. He is a Fellow of Institute of Physics.After receiving his PhD in Theoretical Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Gerardo Oritz continued his career in the US, first as a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and then as an Oppenheimer fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he stayed as a permanent staff member until 2006. He is currently Professor of Physics at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.

• 1. Phase transitions and critical phenomena ; 2. Mean-field theories ; 3. Renormalization group and scaling ; 4. Implementation of the renormalization group ; 5. Field theory ; 6. Conformal field theory ; 7. Kosterlitz-Thouless transition ; 8. Random systems ; 9. Exact solutions and related topics ; 10. Duality ; 11. Numerical methods ; Appendix: Solutions to exercises

'The strengths of this book are the quality and experience of Nishimori and Ortiz as researchers and teachers. They know well how to explain physical theories and formalisms, and their writings have a very low threshold for the interested and mathematically inclined reader. The book has a very nice selection of topics, ranging from the basics in the theory of classical spin systems, via renormalization group theory and conformal field theory, to duality arguments and disordered systems. Above all, the authors have succeeded brilliantly in conveying the elegance of this particular field of mathematical physics.'