Jürn W. P. Schmelzer Knihy

“This book contains overviews on technologically important classes of glasses, their treatment to achieve desired properties, theoretical approaches for the description of structure-property relationships, and new concepts in the theoretical treatment of crystallization in glass-forming systems. It contains overviews about the state of the art and about specific features for the analysis and application of important classes of glass-forming systems, and describes new developments in theoretical interpretation by well-known glass scientists. Thus, the book offers comprehensive and abundant information that is difficult to come by or has not yet been made public.” Edgar Dutra Zanotto (Center for Research, Technology and Education in Vitreous Materials, Brazil) Glass, written by a team of renowned researchers and experienced book authors in the field, presents general features of glasses and glass transitions. Different classes of glassforming systems, such as silicate glasses, metallic glasses, and polymers, are exemplified. In addition, the wide field of phase formation processes and their effect on glasses and their properties is studied both from a theoretical and experimental point of view.

Written by renowned researchers in the field, this up-to-date treatise fills the gap for a high-level work discussing current materials and processes. It covers all the steps involved, from vitrification, relaxation and viscosity, right up to the prediction of glass properties, paving the way for improved methods and applications. For solid state physicists and chemists, materials scientists, and those working in the ceramics industry. With a preface by L. David Pye and a foreword by Edgar D. Zanotto

An overview of recent developments in the field of first-order phase transitions, which may be considered a continuation of the previous work 'Aggregation Phenomena in Complex Systems', covering work done and discussed since then. Each chapter features a different aspect of the field written by international specialists, and covers such topics as nucleation and crystallization kinetic of silicate glasses, nucleation in concentration gradients, the determination of coefficients of emission of nucleation theory, diamonds from vitreous carbon.

Aggregation phenomena such as the formation of droplets at the gas-liquid phase transition play a major role in a variety of processes in nature and technology.This comprehensive text introduces the reader to the physics of aggregation phenomena. The first part gives a brief survey of the physics of highly nonlinear, complex systems and the basic methods of their description. Different analytical theories (nucleation and growth, spinodal decomposition etc.) are discussed in detail, and an overview on computer simulation methods (stochastic approaches, Monte Carlo methods, cellular automata models) of aggregation phenomena is presented. A separate chapter is devoted to the concepts of self similarity and self-organized criticality.The second part presents applications to different specific processes (nucleation and growth in expanding matter, multifragmentation in nuclear collisions, evolution of the element size distribution in the early universe, segregation in porous materials, spinodal decomposition in adiabatically isolated systems, aggregation in traffic flow).An inspiring reading, this volume serves also as a source of recent information in the highly exciting and rapidly developing field of the analysis of complex systems.