Nonlinearity with Disorder

These conference articles provide strategies for combining the features of many physical situations where disorder, noise and nonlinearity occur together. Physical applications are reported in condensed matter, optical and biophysics contexts. Emphasis is put on energy localization and transport.

---

In the past three decades there has been enormous progress in identifying the essential role that nonlinearity plays in physical systems, including supporting solition-like solutions and self-trapped excitations such as polarons. During the same period, similarly impressive progress has occurred in understanding the effects of disorder in linear quantum problems, especially regarding Anderson localization arising from impurities, random spatial structures, stochastic applied fields, and so forth. These striking consequences of disorder, noise and nonlinearity frequently occur together in physical systems. Yet there have been only limited attempts to develop systematic techniques which can include all of these ingredients, which may reinforce, complement or frustrate each other. This book contains a range of articles which provide important steps toward the goal of systematic understanding and classification of phenomenology.
Experts from Australia, Europe, Japan, the USA, and the USSR describe both mathematical and numerical techniques - especially from the field of soliton and statistical physics - and applications to a number of important physical systems and devices, including optical and electronic transmission lines, liquid crystals, biophysics and magnetism.