This volume comprised the proceedings of a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in Geilo, Norway between 29 March and 9 April 1987. Al though the principal support for the meeting was provided by the NATO Cornrni ttee for Scientific Affairs, a number of additional sponsors also contributed. Additional funds were received from: Institutt for Energiteknikk (Norway) The Norwegian Research Council for Science and Humanities NORDITA (Denmark) VISTA (Norway) The organizing cornrni ttee would like to take this opportunity to thank all sponsors for their help in promoting an exciting and rewarding meeting. This Study Institute was the ninth of a series of meetings held in Geilo on subjects related to phase transitions and was a natural successor to the 1985 meeting on Scaling Phenomena in Disordered Systems. Many of the subjects discussed at the latter meeting were revisited in 1987, with time dependence as an added feature. Often the common theme was the concept of fractals first introduced into statistical physics some six years ago. However, by no means all disordered systems can be forced into a fractal framework, and many of the lectures reinforced this lesson.

Inhalt

Aggregation and crystal growth.- Role of fluctuations in fluid mechanics and dendritic solidification.- The growth of fractal aggregates.- Colloidal flow.- The microworld of electrodeposition.- DLA with short-range interactions.- Effect of rotational diffusion on quasi-elastic light scattering from fractal clusters.- Theory of dielectric breakdown in metal-loaded dielectrics.- Fractal interpretation of dielectric response.- Dynamics and structure of viscous fingers in porous media.- Viscous fingering instabilities in porous media.- Multifractals.- Multifractality on percolation clusters.- Multifractals: Formalism and experiments.- On multifractals: Thermodynamics and critical exponents.- On the characterization of chaotic systems using multifractals.- Viscous fingering on percolation clusters.- Self-avoiding walks between terminals on percolation clusters.- Diffusion on percolation clusters.- Fluctuation and dissipation on fractals: A probabilistic approach.- Time-dependent effects near the percolation threshold in water-in-oil microemulsions.- Tracer dispersion, a new characteristic length scale measurement in heterogeneous porous media.- Relaxation in the random energy model.- Scaling theories for anomalous dynamics on fractals: Fractons.- Fracton interpretation of thermal conductivity of amorphous materials.- Fracton excitation in silica smoke-particle aggregates.- Evidence for phonon-fracton crossover in silica aerogels by Brillouin-scattering measurements.- Critical behaviour of elastic stiffness moduli in a random network of rigid and nonrigid bonds.- 1/f noise in random systems: recent progress.- The glass transition of polymers.- Time dependent nonlinear response of a dipolar glass.- Slow relaxation of organic low temperature glasses.- Spin dynamics in dilute systems.- Spin glass theory.- Graph partitioning as a spin glass problem.- Random lattice impurities in the zero-density limit.- Glassy relaxation in charge density wave systems.- Neural networks and statistical mechanics.- Comparison of domain growth in two and three dimensions.- Metastability and instability in an orientational glass.- Recent Theoretical developments in the kinetics of first order phase transitions.- A neutron scattering study of the kinetics of phase separation in Mn1?xCux.- On dense branching phase separation.- Crystallization kinetics of metallic glasses Co78?xFexSi9B13 probed by electrical resisfivity and magnetization.- Polymer dynamics and gelation.- Optical investigations of aggregation processes in aqueous noble metal colloid systems.- Pattern formation in lipid membranes.- Direct spectroscopy of microemulsion droplet fluctuations.- Renormalization group results for random resistor networks.- Hamiltonian formulation for the conformation and resistance of random walks.- Resonant scattering and classical localization.- Quantum percolation: Meaning and results.- Participants.