The ninth volume of Annual Reviews of Computational Physics has as a special feature a comprehensive compendium of interatomic potentials as used for materials properties. Other articles deal with simulations of magnetic nanostructures, improved Monte Carlo methods (e.g. for nucleation studies in Ising models), fluid dynamics with large mean free paths, the growing field of ?sociophysics,? and teaching of undergraduate computational physics (including an introduction to Java).

Quantum phenomena and methods are the core of this volume in our series which publishes rapidly reviews of topics in computational physics. In addition, we look at phase transitions in Ising lattices, in continuum fluids, polymer solutions, and end with biological ageing. As before, papers were submitted by e-mail, and these files were used directly to produce the book, for increased speed and reliability.

The seventh volume of this invaluable series focuses an applications ? from Ising models to the formation of small clusters and phase ordering in fluids, to the structure of concrete, to the growth of cities built from it, to the traffic jams and the biology of life in the cities, and to the marketing of products to consumers. Thus the interdisciplinary research potential of computational physics is particularly well documented.

This volume is based on an international school on “Scaling and Disordered Systems” organized by M R H Khajehpour, M R Kolahchi and M Sahimi. Despite the common theme, it covers fields as diverse as basic and applied percolation, and biological prey-predator and ageing simulations. The advantages of computer simulation thus become particularly clear in the reviews, which have been written by leading experts.

In this fifth volume of the authoritative series, the simulation of forest fires, flames, and hydrodynamics is presented in the first three articles. The next two deal with quantum simulations, in particular for two dimensions (quantum Hall effect and monolayers). Biology is connected with the last two articles: we learn from biological evolution to complement computer hardware and software with evolware, or we simulate immunology.

This series of books covers all areas of computational physics, collecting together reviews where a newcomer can learn about the state of the art regarding methods and results.The present volume emphasizes simulations of specific materials (polymers, water, and amphiphilic systems), and then discusses surfaces, percolation, and critical slowing-down. Also emphasized is complex optimization, such as spin glasses, simulated annealing, and the graph colouring problem.

The sixth volume of the series covers topics ranging from the generation of good random numbers to statistical physics, quantum mechanics, quantum computers and polymers, to protein folding and immunology simulations. It should thus be of interest not only to computational physicists but also to experts in computer science as well as theoretical biology.