Materials Design by Computer Simulation II The Science Reports of the Research Institutes, Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan), RITU, Series A (Physics, Chemistry and Metallurgy), Vol. 40, No. 2.

1995, ca. 100 + 7 Seiten mit zahlreichen Bildern. Taschenbuch, Paperback.

The second volume of the series Materials Design by Computer Simulation" in RITU is issued as a collection of papers concerning phase transitions in physics. The papers were presented at a small conference held in the Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University in October, 1994 organized by Professor Masuo Suzuki of the University of Tokyo. Although the first aim of the conference was to mix various fields concerning the phase transitions, the actual members gathered were rather theoretical and the discussions have been confined. However, the results of the meeting is fruitful, because of the special and strong interests in the field. The volume covers the present interests in phase transitions in classical and quantum spin systems, large scale simulations in general, and industrial problems. The collected papers range from purely theoretical aspects of phase transitions to experimental data analysis by computer simulation, and keep the highest level in the present research. To my understanding, it is the main aim of the science in general to categorize the observed objects. In other words, any of the scientific knowledge achieved is a new "phase" in the human concept. A new phase is categorized by a critical exponent in the theoretical treatment. There are only limited number of new phases in the sense, and nature can be classified into a limited number of universality classes. It is known that the number of vocabularies of around 20,000 is the number of concepts we can handle. This issue should contribute to open a new field of interest in materials science to change it advanced from the old fashioned phase diagram treatment to a modern understanding of nature based on the fundamental theoretical point of view.".