Book Description

The proceedings of this workshop contains 5 important papers by S A Edwards on the Edwards Model and includes discussions on recent theoretical developments in polymer physics.A few decades ago, polymers were not considered part of conventional physics. However, the scenario changed drastically in the sixties and seventies with the introduction of path integral methods, fields theory in the n limits, and renormalization group approach. A vital step in this progress is the path integral Hamiltonian that S F Edwards proposed in 1965-66 to study a single chain. This model now called the Edwards model, is considered to be the minimal model for polymers, and it has been phenomenal in unraveling the universal properties of polymers, be it a single chain or many, equilibrium or dynamics. It has now crossed the boundary of polymers and is finding applications through appropriate generalizations in many other problems. Contents: Some Reminiscences of the Sixties (S F Edwards)Some New Extensions of the Edwards Model (S F Edwards)Dynamical Extension of the Edwards Model (S F Edwards)Localisation via the Edwards Model (S F Edwards)The Glass Transition (S F Edwards)Statistical Methods for Polymers and Membranes: Renormalization, Conformal Invariance and Matrix Models (B Duplantier)Polymers on Fractal Lattices (D Dhar)Renormalization Group Analysis of the Dynamics of Dilute Polymer Solutions (S Puri)Simulating the Edwards Hamiltonian: From Polymers to Membranes (A Baumgartner)Statistics of Self-avoiding Walks on Random Lattices (B K Chakrabarti) Readership: Condensed matter physicists, theoretical chemists and materials scientists. "