Macroscopic physics provides us with a great variety of pattern-forming systems displaying propagation phenomena, from reactive fronts in combustion, to wavy structures in convection and to shear flow instabilities in hydrodynamics. These proceedings record progress in this rapidly expanding field. The contributions have the following major themes: - The problems of velocity selection and front morphology of propagating interfaces in multiphase media, with emphasis on recent theoretical and experimental results on dendritic crystal growth, Saffman-Taylor fingering, directional solidification and chemical waves. - The "unfolding" of large-scale, low-frequency behavior in weakly confined homogeneous systems driven far from equilibrium, and more specifically, the envelope approach to the mathematical description of textures in different cases: steady cells, propagating waves, structural defects, and phase instabilities. - The implications of the presence of global downstream transport in open flows for the nature, convective or absolute, of shear flow instabilities, with applications to real boundary layer flows or shear layers, as reported in contributions covering experimental situations of fundamental and/or engineering interest.

Autorentext
Dr. Nino Boccara is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie de la Ville de Paris, and Former Director of Research in Theoretical Physics at the CNRS.

Inhalt
I Introduction.- Propagation in Systems Far from Equilibrium: Introduction and Overview.- II Interfaces and Fronts.- Dendritic Crystal Growth: Recent Progress and Current Issues.- Velocity Selection for Needle Crystals in the 2-D One-Sided Model.- The Problem of Directional Solidification Revisited.- Cellular Instabilities in Directional Solidification.- Cellular and Dendritic Fronts in Directional Solidification: Experiments by the Light of Pattern Selection.- On the Analogy of Anomalous Viscous Fingers with Crystalline Dendrites.- Diffuse Interfaces.- III Chemical Waves.- Chemical Waves and Periodic Precipitation Processes.- Wave Propagation in Chemical Nonequilibrium Systems: New Experimental Results.- Spatio-Temporal Phase Patterns Near a Hopf Bifurcation in 2D Systems.- IV Envelope Equations and Localized Excitations.- The Dynamics of Patterns: A Survey.- Phase Turbulence and Mean Flow Effects in Rayleigh-Bénard Convection.- Defects in Waves.- Propagative Structures and Localization in the Convection of a Liquid Crystal.- Dynamics of Codimension-One Defects.- Localized Instabilites and Nucleation of Dislocations in Convective Rolls.- V Phase Dynamics and Pattern Selection.- Phase Dynamics - A Review and a Perspective.- Phase Diffusion in a Ramped Convection Channel.- Pattern Selection in the Bénard-Marangoni Instability.- Pattern Selection in Convective Instabilities with Axial Anisotropy.- Pattern Selection in Salt Fingers.- Model Systems for Long-Scale Convection.- The Kuramoto-Sivashinsky Equation: A Progress Report.- VI Propagation in Confined Systems.- Two-frequency States at the Onset of Convection in Binary Fluid Mixtures.- A Galerkin Approximation for Convection in Binary Mixtures with Realistic Concentration Boundary Conditions.- Convection in BinaryMixtures.- Convection in Viscoelastic Fluids.- An Overview of the Flow Regimes in a Circular Couette System.- New Bifurcations in a Partially Filled, Horizontal, Rotating Cylinder.- New Patterns in the Flow Between Two Horizontal Coaxial Rotating Cylinders with Partially Filled Gap.- Strong Resonance in Forced Oscillatory Convection.- VII Open Flow Systems.- On the Absolute/Convective Nature of Primary and Secondary Instabilities.- The Bénard-Von Kármán Instability in Laminar Regimes.- Nonlinear Limit-Cycle Solutions - A Rational Method for Transition Prediction in Shear Flows?.- Questions About an Experiment on the Wake of a Sphere in a Stratified Fluid.- Experimental and Theoretical Studies of the Three-Dimensional Boundary-Layer Transition.- On the Instability of Laminar Boundary Layers Along Concave Walls Towards Görtler Vortices.- Experimental Study of the Taylor-Görtler Instability.- Lattice Gas Hydrodynamics.- Index of Contributors.