Berne B.J. Modern Theoretical Chemistry. Volume 6. Statical Mechanics. Part B: Time-Dependent Processes

NY: Plenium Press, 1977. — 377 p. — ISBN: 0306335069(v.6) —V.8 V.6These volumes are designed for graduate students and research workers in statistical mechanics. Nevertheless, they should be useful in other areas as well. The choice of topics was dictated not only by the taste and interests of the editor, but also by the proviso that there did not already exist a didactic treatment of a topic in the literature. The topics fall rather neatly into two
categories: equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties of fluids. Thus, Volume 5 is devoted to equilibrium techniques and Volume 6 to nonequilibrium techniques.
Volume 6 begins with two chapters on the computer simulation of molecular dynamics in fluids. The first of these chapters is concerned with fluids consisting of hard elastic particles, whereas the second of these chapters is concerned with particles that interact via a continuous pair potential. These techniques have led to a renaissance in the theory of fluids by providing an accurate picture of fluids with known force laws. The chapters on molecular dynamics are followed by two chapters on the kinetic theory of fluids. The first
of the chapters covers many new topics in the kinetic theory of gases including the role of correlated collisions in producing long time-persistent effects and long time tails in time correlation functions, whereas the second of these involves the kinetic theory of dense gases and liquids and aims at a renormalized theory. This is followed by a treatment of projection operator techniques and symmetry relations mainly to provide background for a subsequent chapter on molecular hydrodynamics and mode-mode coupling theory. The book closes with a chapter on nonlinear processes in chemistry. This last chapter does not entirely fit with the rest of the book, but was judged to be of such importance to chemistry that its absence would be sorely missed.