This review addresses the current state-of-the-art in the physics of amorphous materials and its practical applications. Because of the keen interest in these new technological innovations in the amorphous material application fields, particular emphasis has been placed on some important basic knowledge and current topics in the application fields which inlude information directly useful to scientists and R&D engineers in industry, institutes and university laboratories.

The automatic generation of parallel code from high level sequential description is of key importance to the wide spread use of high performance machine architectures. This text considers (in detail) the theory and practical realization of automatic mapping of algorithms generated from systems of uniform recurrence equations (do-lccps) onto fixed size architectures with defined communication primitives. Experimental results of the mapping scheme and its implementation are given.

It is now ten years since it was first convincingly shown that below 1 K the ther mal conductivity and the heat capacity of amorphous solids behave in a way which is strikingly different to that of crystalline solids. Since that time there has been a wide variety of experimental and theoretical studies which have not only defined and clarified the low temperature problem more closely, but have also linked these differences between amorphous and crystalline solids to those suggested by older acoustic and thermal experiments (extending up to 100 K). The interest in this somewhat restricted branch of physics lies to a considerable extent in the fact that the differences were so unexpected. It might be thought that as the tempera ture, probing frequency, or more generally the energy decreases, a continuum de scription in which structural differences between glass and crystal are concealed should become more accurate. In a sense this is true, but it appears that there exists in an amorphous solid a large density of additional excitations which have no counterpart in normal crystals. This book presents a survey of the wide range of experimental investigations of these low energy excitations, together with a re view of the various theoretical models put forward to explain their existence and nature.

The structural properties of materials play a fundamental role in the determination of their suitability for a specific application. This book is intended as a contribution to the efforts to increase the knowledge of the influence exerted on the properties of materials by their crystalline or amorphous structure. To this aim, some of the materials that are most promising for their use in different technological fields have been studied, namely graphene, titanium oxide, several types of functional metal oxides, porphyrinic crystalline solids, plasma deposited polymers, amorphous silicon, as well as hydrogenated amorphous carbon. These materials have been presented by the authors for their use in different applications, including microelectronics, photonics, and biomedicine.

This second edition deals in an elementary way with electrons in non-crystalline systems. It reflects advances in the theory of interactions in non-crystalline systems, provides a more detailed discussion of the "minimum metallic conductivity", and addresses the relevance of disorder in the new high-temperature semiconductors.