Statistical Physics Book Review

Statistical Physics is one of the important fields of modern physics, and as it happens with Thermodynamics it can be classified as equilibrium and nonequilibrium statistical physics. The most elementary equilibrium theory is the one typically taught in undergraduate courses, while the more advanced nonequilibrium theory is usually left for postgraduate courses, whenever the opportunity to teach it exists. As a matter of fact, there are very few textbooks on the field, and the existing ones are rather specialized. From this point of view, the arrival of this book is very welcome since this is definitely a textbook on the subject primarily designed for students. Its teaching is important and necessary since Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics

The authors have organized the contents into three main parts, containing seven chapters and nineteen short appendices. The first part, including two chapters, dealing with basic topics. A second part, chapters three and four, including topics such as nonequilibrium phase transitions. And the third part, the last three chapters, is the one more related to the personal research interest of the authors and concerns kinetic roughening, phenomena of phase-ordering, and pattern formation. Each chapter starts with an overview, and then an introduction, which I have found very helpful to have an idea of what is expected to see in the chapter, and offering an excellent overview of the main ideas contained. At the end of each chapter, there is a short section devoted to bibliographic notes, with an outstanding and careful selection of references with comments, which I consider very useful. The textbook is written with a pedagogical style and the authors have paid much attention to just mention certain key ideas and, avoiding a detailed description that certainly would go beyond its scope. This is the case for instance of the Renormalization

Special attention is given to the two most important local universality classes: Edwards–Wilkinson (EW) and Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ). Finally, the nonlocal model diffusion limited aggregation (DLA), which present familiar fractal patterns, is described. Chapter six is devoted to phase-order kinetics and addresses question of relaxation to equilibrium from a disordered state. Two types of processes are involved in the ensuing dynamics: coarsening and nucleation, which is discussed in a rather simple and qualitative manner. The last chapter is devoted to the topic of pattern formation out-of-equilibrium. Attention is focused on Turing patterns and pattern formation in the Rayleigh-Bénard instability. The topic constitutes by itself the subject of monographs, so it is easy to figure out that all this is described in a qualitative manner, including several models in partial differential equations. This topic is also treated in monographs devoted to nonlinear physics and its nonlinear dynamics is modelled by partial differential