Researchers publish review article on the physics of interacting particles
Scientific articles in the field of physics are mostly very short and deal with a very restricted topic. A remarkable exception to this is an article published recently by physicists from the Universities of M眉nster and D眉sseldorf. The article is 127 pages long, cites a total of 1075 sources and deals with a wide range of branches of physics鈥攆rom biophysics to quantum mechanics.
The article is a so-called review article and was written by physicists Michael te Vrugt and Prof. Raphael Wittkowski from the Institute of Theoretical 糖心视频ics and the Center for Soft Nanoscience at the University of M眉nster, together with Prof. Hartmut L枚wen from the Institute for Theoretical 糖心视频ics II at the University of D眉sseldorf. The aim of such review articles is to provide an introduction to a certain subject area and to summarize and evaluate the current state of research in this area for the benefit of other researchers. "In our case we deal with a theory used in very many areas鈥攖he so-called dynamical density functional theory (DDFT)," explains last author Raphael Wittkowski. "Since we deal with all aspects of the subject, the article turned out to be very long and wide-ranging."
DDFT is a method for describing systems consisting of a large number of interacting particles such as are found in liquids, for example. Understanding these systems is important in numerous fields of research such as chemistry, solid state physics or biophysics. This in turn leads to a large variety of applications for DDFT, for example in materials science and biology. "DDFT and related methods have been developed and applied by a number of researchers in a variety of contexts," says lead author Michael te Vrugt. "We investigated which approaches there are and how they are connected鈥攁nd for this purpose we needed to do a lot of work acting as historians and detectives," he adds.
The article has been published in the journal Advances in 糖心视频ics, which has an impact factor of 30.91鈥攎aking it the most important journal in the field of condensed matter physics. It only publishes four to six articles per year. The first article on DDFT, written by Robert Evans, was also published in Advances in 糖心视频ics, in 1979. "This makes it especially gratifying that our review has also been published in this journal," says secondary author Hartmut L枚wen. "It deals with all the important theoretical aspects and fields of application of DDFT and will probably become a standard work in our field of research."
More information: Michael te Vrugt et al, Classical dynamical density functional theory: from fundamentals to applications, Advances in 糖心视频ics (2020).
Provided by University of M眉nster
