These lectures illustrate some of the concepts of soft-condensed matter physics, taking examples from colloid physics. Many of the theoretical concepts will be illustrated with the results of computer simulations. After a brief introduction describing interactions between colloids, the paper...

Atomistic simulation can give insights to the mechanical behavior of stressed crystalline hard materials. Theoretical strength, defined in the long wavelength limit through elastic stability criteria, or more generally in terms of soft vibrational modes in the deformed lattice, can be studied by...

This dissertation reports work where physics methods are appliedto financial and economical problems. Some material in this thesisis based on $3$ published papers \cite{SY,SPY,income} which dividethis study into two parts. The first part studies stock marketdata (chapter 1 to 5). The second part...

Even simple, deterministic rules can generate interesting behavior in dynamical systems. This dissertation examines some real world systems for which fairly simple, locally defined rules yield useful or interesting properties in the system as a whole. In particular, we study routing in...

This paper argues that, for a prospective philosophical analysis of models and simulations to be successful, it must accommodate an account of mathematically rigorous results. Such rigorous results are best thought of as genuinely model-specific contributions, which can neither be deduced from...

Chains consisting of rigid segments connected by flexible joints constitute an important class of polymers. The joints may be modeled as rigid constraints (the needle chain polymer model) or as springs interconnecting the ends of nearest neighbor segments where both the equilibrium length and...

Monte Carlo simulations for a simple model for liquid crystals in the bulk are presented. The model potential describes the anisotropy of the particles in the attractive part of the Lennard Jones-like pair interaction. Isotherms were calculated with constant-volume and constant-pressure...

The liquid crystal phase transitions for a classical fluid mixture of hard ellipsoids with aspect ratios 10 : 1 and 1 : 10, and equal volume, have been studied at two compositions using Onsager theories and by computer simulation. The original Onsager from of the Helmholtz free energy contains...

This work is intended to be a brief introduction to smectic A and chiral smectic A liquid crystals and current research topics focusing on chiral smectic A liquid crystalline membranes. We derive the elastic free energies of smectic A and chiral smectic A phases, as well as the surface energies...

A generalized model taking into account the photoisomerization influence on the nematic ordering is presented. This generalized theory is used to investigate the effect of the nonextensivity on the concentration dependence of the long-range order parameter. The q-dependent variation of the...