Leticia F. Cugliandolo

Lydéric Bocquet

David Quéré

Thomas A. Witten

Many of the distinctive and useful phenomena of soft matter come from its interaction with interfaces. Examples are the peeling of a strip of adhesive tape, the coating of a surface, the curling of a fiber via capillary forces, or the collapse of a porous sponge. These interfacial phenomena are distinct from the intrinsic behavior of a soft material like a gel or a microemulsion. Yet many forms of interfacial phenomena can be understood via common principles valid for many forms of soft matter. Our goal in organizing this school was to give students a grasp of these common principles and their many ramifications and possibilities. The Les Houches Summer School comprised over fifty 90-minute lectures over four weeks. Four four-lecture courses by Howard Stone, Michael Cates, David Nelson and L. Mahadevan served as an anchor for the program. A number of shorter courses and seminars rounded out the school. This volume collects the lecture notes of the school.

Lecture Notes of the Les Houches Summer School: Volume 98, July 2012

Soft Interfaces

Christine Ziegler

François Parcy

Eva Pebay-Peyroula

Hugues Nury

Rob W. H. Ruigrok

The book gathers lecture notes of courses given at the 2014 summer school on integrated biology in Les Houches, France, Session CII. It addresses an emerging field ranging from molecules to cells and to organisms. Through examples it presents a new way of thinking using a combination of interdisciplinary and cutting-edge methods, bridging physics and biology beyond current biophysics. Important novel developments are expected in the coming years that may well introduce paradigm shifts in biological science. The school had the ambition to prepare participants to become major actors in these breakthroughs. The power of integrated approaches is illustrated through two cases: interactions between viruses and host cells, and flower development. The role of forces in biology, as well as their mathematical modeling, is illustrated in both processes: how they allow flower organs to emerge or how they control membrane fusion during virus budding. The book also underlines the importance of conformational changes and dynamics of proteins particularly during membrane processes. It explains how membrane proteins can be handled and studied by molecular simulations. Finally, the book also contains concepts in cell biology, in thermodynamics and several novel approaches such as in-cell NMR. Altogether, the chapters show how examining a biological system from different viewpoints based on multidisciplinary aspects often leads to enriching controversial arguments.

Lecture Notes of the Les Houches School of Physics: Volume 102, July 2014

From Molecules to Living Organisms: An Interplay Between Biology and Physics

Claudio Chamon

Mark O. Goerbig

Roderich Moessner

Topological condensed matter physics is a recent arrival among the disciplines of modern physics of a distinctive and substantive nature. Its roots reach far back, but much of its current importance derives from exciting developments in the last half-century. The field is advancing rapidly, growing explosively, and diversifying greatly. There is now a zoo of topological phenomena-the quantum spin Hall effect, topological insulators, Coulomb spin liquids, non-Abelian anyonic statistics and their potential application in topological quantum computing, to name but a few-as well as an increasingly sophisticated set of concepts and methods underpinning their understanding. The aim of this Les Houches Summer School was to present an overview of this field, along with a sense of its origins and its place on the map of advances in fundamental physics. The school comprised a set of basic lectures (Part I) aimed at a pedagogical introduction to the fundamental concepts, which was accompanied by more advanced lectures (Part II) covering individual topics at the forefront of today's research in condensed matter physics.

École de Physique Des Houches, Session CIII, 4-29 August 2014

Topological Aspects of Condensed Matter Physics

The aim of this title is to familiarise the new generation of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows with the principles and methods of modern lattice field theory, which aims to resolve fundamental, non-perturbative questions about QCD without uncontrolled approximations.

From Molecules to Living Organisms: an Interplay Between Biology and Physics

Matthias Weidemüller

Antoine Browaeys

Thierry Lahaye

Trey Porto

Charles S. Adams

This book gathers the lecture notes of courses given at Session CVII of the summer school in physics, entitled "Current Trends in Atomic Physics" and held in July, 2016 in Les Houches, France. Atomic physics provides a paradigm for exploring few-body quantum systems with unparalleled control. In recent years, this ability has been applied in diverse areas including condensed matter physics, high energy physics, chemistry and ultra-fast phenomena as well as foundational aspects of quantum physics. This book addresses these topics by presenting developments and current trends via a series of tutorials and lectures presented by international leading investigators.

Current Trends in Atomic Physics

Alexander Altland

Yan V. Fyodorov

Neil O'Connell

Gregory Schehr

This text covers in detail recent developments in the field of stochastic processes and Random Matrix Theory. Matrix models have been playing an important role in theoretical physics for a long time and are currently also a very active domain of research in mathematics.

Lecture Notes of the Les Houches Summer School: Volume 104, July 2015

Stochastic Processes and Random Matrices

Christophe Salomon

Georgy V. Shlyapnikov

This book provides authoritative tutorials on the most recent achievements in the field of quantum gases at the interface between atomic physics and quantum optics, condensed matter physics, nuclear and high-energy physics, non-linear physics, and quantum information.

Lecture Notes of the Les Houches Summer School: Volume 94, July 2010

Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases

Grégory Schehr

The field of stochastic processes and Random Matrix Theory (RMT) has been a rapidly evolving subject during the last fifteen years. The continuous development and discovery of new tools, connections and ideas have led to an avalanche of new results. These breakthroughs have been made possible thanks, to a large extent, to the recent development of various new techniques in RMT. Matrix models have been playing an important role in theoretical physics for a long time and they are currently also a very active domain of research in mathematics. An emblematic example of these recent advances concerns the theory of growth phenomena in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class where the joint efforts of physicists and mathematicians during the last twenty years have unveiled the beautiful connections between this fundamental problem of statistical mechanics and the theory of random matrices, namely the fluctuations of the largest eigenvalue of certain ensembles of random matrices. This text not only covers this topic in detail but also presents more recent developments that have emerged from these discoveries, for instance in the context of low dimensional heat transport (on the physics side) or integrable probability (on the mathematical side).

Claude Fabre

Vahid Sandoghdar

Nicolas Treps

Quantum Optics and Nanophotonics consists of the lecture notes of the Les Houches Summer School 101 held in August 2013. Some of the most eminent experts in this flourishing area of research have contributed chapters lying at the intersection of basic quantum science and advanced nanotechnology. The book is part of the renowned series of tutorial books that contain the lecture notes of all the Les Houches Summer Schools since the 1950's and cover the latest developments in physics and related fields.

Quantum Optics and Nanophotonics

Michel Devoret

Benjamin Huard

Robert Schoelkopf

The beginning of the 20th century saw a revolution in Physics with the discovery that the fundamental constituents of matter and radiation do not obey Newtonian laws, but those of an entirely new theory of motion and its measurement: quantum mechanics. After a century of experimentation in the world of photons, atoms, molecules, and other microscopic particles, the application of quantum laws is presently being extended to the world of macroscopic, engineeredsystems, whose complexity is such that an exhaustive, bottom-up description is both impossible and fruitless. In these so-called quantum machines, the very level of control signals that govern theevolution of the system operates quantum-mechanically. Quantum machines are based on artificial structures like superconducting tunnel junction circuits or semiconductor quantum dots, and this book provides the conceptual tools to build and utilize them.

Measurement and Control of Engineered Quantum Systems

Quantum Machines

Lenka Zdeborova

Eric W. Tramel

Florent Krzakala

Federico Ricci-Tersenghi

Riccardo Zecchina

In the last decade, there have been an increasing convergence of interest and methods between theoretical physics and fields as diverse as probability, machine learning, optimization and compressed sensing. In particular, many theoretical and applied works in statistical physics and computer science have relied on the use of message passing algorithms and their connection to statistical physics of spin glasses. The aim of this book, especially adapted to PhD students, post-docs, and young researchers, is to present the background necessary for entering this fast developing field.

Lecture Notes of the Les Houches School of Physics: Special Issue, October 2013

Statistical Physics, Optimization, Inference, and Message-Passing Algorithms

Leticia F. Cugliandolo

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