Fritz Haake | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

Nine years have passed since I dispatched the second edition, and the book still appears to be in demand. The time may be ripe for an update. As the perhaps most conspicable extension, I describe the understanding of u- versal spectral ?uctuations recently reached on the basis of periodic-orbit theory. To make the presentation of those semiclassical developments selfcontained, I decided to to underpin them by a new short chapter on classical Hamiltonian mechanics. Inasmuch as the semiclassical theory not only draws inspiration from the nonlinear sigma model but actually aims at constructing that model in terms of periodic orbits, it appeared indicated to make small additions to the previous treatment within the chapter on superanalysis. Less voluminous but as close to my heart are additions to the chapter on level dynamics which close previous gaps in that approach to spectral universality. It was a pleasant duty to pay my respect to collegues in our Transregio- Sonderforschungsbereich, Martin Zirnbauer, Alex Altland, Alan Huckleberry, and Peter Heinzner, by including a short account of their beautiful work on nonstandard symmetry classes. The chapter on random matrices has not been expanded in proportion to the development of the ?eld but now includes an up-to-date treatment of an old topic in algebra, Newton’s relations, to provide a background to the Riemann-Siegel loo- like of semiclassical periodic-orbit theory.