Fractals Scaling And Growth Far From Equilibrium

A comprehensive, 1998 account of the practical aspects and pitfalls of the applications of fractal modelling in the physical sciences.

The investigation of phenomena involving fractals has gone through a spectacular development in the last decade. Many physical, technological and biological processes have been shown to be related to and described by objects with non-integer dimensions. The physics of far-from-equilibrium growth phenomena represents one of the most important fields in which fractal geometry is widely applied. During the last couple of years considerable experimental, numerical and theoretical information has accumulated concerning such processes.This book, written by a well-known expert in the field, summarizes the basic concepts born in the studies of fractal growth and also presents some of the most important new results for more specialized readers. It also contains 15 beautiful color plates demonstrating the richness of the geometry of fractal patterns. Accordingly, it may serve as a textbook on the geometrical aspects of fractal growth and it treats this area in sufficient depth to make it useful as a reference book. No specific mathematical knowledge is required for reading this book which is intended to give a balanced account of the field.

The focus of this book is on modeling and simulations used in research on the morphological evolution during film growth. The authors emphasize the detailed mathematical formulation of the problem. The book will enable readers themselves to set up a computational program to investigate specific topics of interest in thin film deposition. It will benefit those working in any discipline that requires an understanding of thin film growth processes.

This book collects recent results in systems whose evolutions are dominated by fluctuations, driven systems in which the way to dissipate driving forces is relevant, and systems in which disorder induces highly non-trivial dynamics leading naturally to questions of computational complexity. Topics of the 14 papers include multiplicative noise in non-equilibrium phase transitions, the stochastic population dynamics of spiking neurons, anomalous velocity distributions in elastic Maxwell gases, universality issues in surface kinetic roughening of thin solid films, and multi-state neural networks based upon spin glasses. Some of the chapters have appeared in the arXiv.org database. No information is given about the authors. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This book, based on presentations made at the international conference Fractals 2002, is of interest to everyone in the general field of nonlinear dynamics. The abundance of papers from numerous disciplines makes it exciting reading and provides a unifying thread through the topics, such as ray tracing, structure of peptides, modeling fractal surfaces, cancer growth, macaque monkey cortical neurons, occurrence of earthquakes, and patterns of the World Wide Web. Contents: Modeling Cerebellar Dynamics (M G Velarde et al.)Two and Three Dimensional Computer Simulation of Cancer Growth (S Flores Ascencio et al.)Structural and Dynamic Complexity of an Elastin-Related Peptide (A Bonelli et al.)Cumulative Effective Hölder Exponent Based Indicator for Real-Time Fetal Heartbeat Analysis During Labour (Z R Struzik & W J van Wijngaarden)Fractal Features in the Nonstationarity of Physiological Time Series (P Ch Ivanov et al.)Fractal Analysis of Aggregates of Non-Uniformly Sized Particles: An Application to Macaque Monkey Cortical Pyramidal Neurons (B I Henry et al.)Dynamics of Solar Magnetic Field from Synoptic Charts (N G Makarenko & L M Karimova)Side-Branching in the Nonlinear Zone: A Self-Similar Region in Dendritic Crystal Growth (R González-Cinca)and other papers Readership: Researchers in nonlinear science. Keywords:

Every reader will find something of interest in this book — from superdiffusion of the ocean surface to fetal heartbeats, from solar wind to the wearing-out of tools, from radioactive contamination to texture analysis, from image rendering to neural developments. The all-pervading link connecting these disparate disciplines is the realization that a linear approach to the majority of natural processes is at best only an approximation that can frequently be downright misleading. Consequently, the rise of what is broadly called the theory of complexity has gained tremendous momentum in the last decade or two. This modern approach aims at, and frequently succeeds in, correctly explaining many natural processes.The papers in this volume are based on presentations of the sixth international conference exploring the above-mentioned issues. These conferences are now regular and well established among the nonlinear series of conferences. This conference series is organized in different geographical regions, to encourage international collaboration. Among the distinguishing features of the series is its multidisciplinary nature, which has been growing steadily.

This book covers the results of the Tera op Workbench, other projects related to High Performance Computing, and the usage of HPC installations at HLRS. The Tera op Workbench project is a collaboration between the High Performance C- puting Center Stuttgart (HLRS) and NEC Deutschland GmbH (NEC-HPCE) to s- port users in achieving their research goals using High Performance Computing. The rst stage of the Tera op Workbench project (2004–2008) concentrated on user’s applications and their optimization for the former ag ship of HLRS, a - node NEC SX-8 installation. During this stage, numerous individual codes, dev- oped and maintained by researchers or commercial organizations, have been a- lyzed and optimized. Within the project, several of the codes have shown the ability to outreach the TFlop/s threshold of sustained performance. This created the pos- bility for new science and a deeper understanding of the underlying physics. The second stage of the Tera op Workbench project (2008–2012) focuses on c- rent and future trends of hardware and software developments. We observe a strong tendency to heterogeneous environments on the hardware level, while at the same time, applications become increasingly heterogeneous by including multi-physics or multi-scale effects. The goal of the current studies of the Tera op Workbench is to gain insight in the developments of both components. The overall target is to help scientists to run their application in the most ef cient and most convenient way on the hardware best suited for their purposes.

The papers included in this issue of ECS Transactions were originally presented in the symposium ¿Chemical Mechanical Polishing 9¿, held during the 213th meeting of The Electrochemical Society, in Phoenix, Arizona from May 18-23, 2008.