Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics and Physical Kinetics

Авторы: H. Bikkin, I. Lyapilin
Информация о издательстве: Berlin-Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2014.,ISBN 978-3-11-033769-3

The book offered to the reader’s attention is largely based on lectures that the authors have been delivering for many years at the Physics Department of the Urals State University and the Physical Engineering Department of the Urals State Technical University.

The main goal pursued by the authors in writing this book is to set forth systematic and consistent principles of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and physical kinetics in the form primarily available to both the students and undergraduates who begin to study theoretical physics and the postgraduates and experienced research scientists working in a new field of study.

First of all, we point out principles that have guided us in selecting appropriate material. Physical kinetics or a theory of transport phenomena is a very broad and rapidly developing subject area of physics. On this subject matter, there are a sufficient number of educational papers as well as monographic studies, which discuss various aspects of the kinetic theory. However, most publications are expected to be understood by readers who have a substantial scientific background rather than by third year students.

Therefore, there is an acute shortage of literature for “beginners” where natural balance between general postulates of the theory and simple examples of the practical implementation would be observed. Another guiding approach in writing the present book consists in authors’ attempting to avoid as far as possible such turns о speech as “obviously” and “it is easy to show”. There is no secret that cumbersome, time- consuming calculations are very often hidden behind these words.

The authors were trying to write the text in such a manner so that those phrases should acquire their original meaning. Perhaps, the authors did not always succeed in doing so. Finally, also the authors have done their best to present different techniques to describe non-equilibrium systems and construct schemes of the theory of transport phenomena but they would not like to focus on the problem of a calculation of the kinetic coefficients for various model systems. This approach allows one to illustrate contemporary directions of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics which are now developed along with “classical” sections of kinetics.