This comprehensive, handbook-style survey of diffusion in condensed matter gives detailed insight into diffusion as the process of particle transport due to stochastic movement. It is understood and presented as a phenomenon of crucial relevance for a large variety of processes and materials. In this book, all aspects of the theoretical fundamentals, experimental techniques, highlights of current developments and results for solids, liquids and interfaces are presented.

This book describes the central aspects of diffusion in solids, and goes on to provide easy access to important information about diffusion in metals, alloys, semiconductors, ion-conducting materials, glasses and nanomaterials. Coverage includes diffusion-controlled phenomena including ionic conduction, grain-boundary and dislocation pipe diffusion. This book will benefit graduate students in such disciplines as solid-state physics, physical metallurgy, materials science, and geophysics, as well as scientists in academic and industrial research laboratories.

The usefulness of the book to the reader is exposure to many different classes of materials and relaxation phenomena. They are tied together by the universal relaxation and diffusion properties they share, and a consistent explanation of their origin. The readers can apply what they learn to solve their own problems and use it as a stepping-stone to make further advances in theoretical understanding of the origin of the universality.

The interest in diffusion in solids is as old as physical metallurgy or materials science. It stems from application-oriented as well as from scientific reasons. First, a knowledge of diffusion is basic to an understanding of many microstructural changes that occur in solid matter at elevated temperatures. For processes like phase transformations, precipitation or dissolution of a second phase, recrystallization, oxidation, creep, annealing etc., solid state diffusion is fundamental and ubiquitous. The second reason for studying diffusion is to learn more about how atoms move in solid matter. Volume III/26 presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of diffusion data for solid metals and alloys. The critical compilation of data has resulted in tables and series of diagrams which show in 13 chapters data for the following properties: Self- and impurity-diffusion in metallic elements, self-diffusion in homogeneous binary alloys, chemical diffusion in binary and ternary alloys, diffusion in amorphous alloys, diffusion of interstitial foreign atoms like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen in metallic elements, mass and pressure dependence of diffusion, diffusion along dislocations, grain and interphase boundary diffusion, and diffusion on surfaces.

A reference and text, Dissipative Phenomena treats the broadly applicable area of nonequilibrium statistical physics and concentrates the modelling and characterization of dissipative phenomena. A variety of examples from diverse disciplines, such as condensed matter physics, materials science, metallurgy, chemical physics, are discussed. Dattagupta employs a broad framework of stochastic processes and master equation techniques to obtain models for a range of experimentally relevant phenomena such as classical and quantum Brownian motion, spin dynamics, kinetics of phase ordering, relaxation in glasses, and dissipative tunnelling. This book will serve as a graduate/research level textbook since it offers considerable utility to experimentalists, computational physicists and theorists.