Dealing with all aspects of Monte Carlo simulation of complex physical systems encountered in condensed-matter physics and statistical mechanics, this book provides an introduction to computer simulations in physics. This edition now contains material describing powerful new algorithms that have appeared since the previous edition was published, and highlights recent technical advances and key applications that these algorithms now make possible. Updates also include several new sections and a chapter on the use of Monte Carlo simulations of biological molecules. Throughout the book there are many applications, examples, recipes, case studies, and exercises to help the reader understand the material. It is ideal for graduate students and researchers, both in academia and industry, who want to learn techniques that have become a third tool of physical science, complementing experiment and analytical theory.

This book covers the techniques of computer simulations of disordered systems. It describes how one performs Monte Carlo simulations in condensed matter physics and deals with spin-glasses, percolating networks and the random field Ising model. Other methods mentioned are molecular dynamics and Brownian dynamics. Use of flow-diagrams enables the reader to grasp both the problem and its solution more readily. The book deals with highly complicated problems at a relatively simple level and will be most useful for advanced undergraduate and other courses in computational modelling.

Dealing with all aspects of Monte Carlo simulation of complex physical systems encountered in condensed-matter physics and statistical mechanics, this book provides an introduction to computer simulations in physics. This fourth edition contains extensive new material describing numerous powerful algorithms not covered in previous editions, in some cases representing new developments that have only recently appeared. Older methodologies whose impact was previously unclear or unappreciated are also introduced, in addition to many small revisions that bring the text and cited literature up to date. This edition also introduces the use of petascale computing facilities in the Monte Carlo arena. Throughout the book there are many applications, examples, recipes, case studies, and exercises to help the reader understand the material. It is ideal for graduate students and researchers, both in academia and industry, who want to learn techniques that have become a third tool of physical science, complementing experiment and analytical theory.

This volume presents the contributions to the international workshop entitled "Lattice Gauge Theory - a Challenge in Large Scale Computing" that was held in Wuppertal from November 4 to 7, 1985. This meeting was the third in a series of European workshops in this rapidly developing field. The meeting intended to bring together both active university research ers in this field and scientists from industry and research centers who pursue large scale computing projects on problems within lattice gauge theory. These problems are extremely demanding from the point of view of both machine hardware and algorithms, for the verification of the continuum fields theories like Quantum Chromodynamics in four-dimensional Euclidean space-time is quite cumbersome due to the tremendously large number of de grees of freedom. Yet the motivation of theoretical physicists to exploit computers as tools for the simulation of complex systems such as gauge field theories has grown considerably during the past years. In fact, quite a few prominent colleagues of ours have even gone into machine building, both in industry and research institutions: more parallelism, and more de dicated computer architecture are their design goals to help them boost the Megaflop rate in their simulation processes. The workshop contained several interesting seminars with status reports on such supercomputer projects like the Italian APE (by E. Marinari), the IBM project GF-11 (by D. Weingarten), and the Danish projects MOSES and PALLAS (by H. Bohr).

During the past 15 years, quantum field theory and classical statistical mechanics have merged into a single field, and the need for nonperturbative methods for the description of critical phenomena in statistical mechanics as well as for problems in elementary particle physics are generally acknowledged. Such methods formed the central theme of the 1987 Cargese Advanced Study Institut. e on "Nonpert. urbat. ive Quantum Field Theory." The use of conformal symmet. ry has been of central interest in recent years, and was a main subject at. t. he ASI. Conformal invariant quantum field theory describes statistical mechanical systems exactly at a critical point, and can be analysed to a remarkable ext. ent. by group t. heoretical methods. Very strong results have been obtained for 2-dimensional systems. Conformal field theory is also the basis of string theory, which offers some hope of providing a unified t. heory of all interactions between elementary particles. Accordingly, a number of lectures and seminars were presented on these two topics. After syst. ematic introductory lectures, conformal field theory on Riemann surfaces, orbifolds, sigma models, and application of loop group theory and Grassmannians were discussed, and some ideas on modular geometry were presented. Other lectures combined' traditional techniques of constructive quant. um field theory with new methods such as the use of index-t. heorems and infinite dimensional (Kac Moody) symmetry groups. The problems encountered in a quantum mechanical description of black holes were discussed in detail.