Basic Concepts for Simple and Complex Liquids

Accessible to graduate students with a basic knowledge of statistical physics or physical chemistry, this advanced text will be useful to physicists, chemists or chemical engineers seeking a broad-scope introduction to the liquid state of matter, from thermodynamics and structure to transport properties and activated dynamics.
Presenting a unified approach to the liquid state, this book focusses on the concepts and theoretical methods that are necessary for an understanding of the physics and chemistry of the fluid state. The authors do not attempt to cover the whole field in an encyclopedic manner. Instead, important ideas are presented in a concise and rigorous style, and illustrated with examples from both simple molecular liquids and more complex soft condensed matter systems such as polymers, colloids, and liquid crystals. After a general chapter introducing the liquid state, the book is in four parts devoted to: thermodynamics; structure and fluctuations; phase transitions, interfaces and inhomogeneous fluids; and, finally, transport and dynamics. Each chapter introduces a new set of closely related concepts and theoretical methods, which are then illustrated by a number of specific applications covering a broad range of physical situations.

1 An introduction to liquid matter
I Thermodynamics, structure and fluctuations
2 A reminder of thermodynamics
3 Equilibrium fluctuations
II Phase transitions
4 Mean field approaches
5 Critical fluctuations and scaling
III Interfaces and inhomogeneous fluids
6 Macroscopic description of interfaces
7 The density functional approach
8 Curvature and fluctuations
IV Dynamics
9 Phenomenological description of transport processes
10 Brownian motion, diffusion and the Langevin equation
11 Response and correlation functions
12 Slow relaxations
Index