Contemporary Kinetic Theory of Matter

A new book “Contemporary Kinetic Theory of Matter” written by J. R. Dorfman, Henk van Beijeren, and T. R. Kirkpatrick, was published by Cambridge University Press, June, 2021.  Professors Dorfman and Kirkpatrick are both emeritus professors in IPST and Physics, University of Maryland, and Henk van Beijeren is an emeritus professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Utrecht.

The book summarizes major developments in kinetic theory over the past fifty years, to which the authors have made important contributions. The topics covered include transport in dilute gases and gas mixtures, the Enskog theory of dense hard sphere gases and crystals, the generalizations of the Boltzmann transport equation to dense gases, long-time-tails in time correlation functions and their consequences for transport theory, condensed Bose gases with a derivation of the two-fluid equations for superfluids, the physics of granular media, and the behavior of fluctuations in equilibrium and non-equilibrium fluids.  It has15 chapters and an extensive bibliography.

The book is dedicated to a close friend and longtime collaborator of the authors, Matthieu Ernst, emeritus professor at the University of Utrecht. The cover of the book is a seventeenth century Dutch painting by Cornelis de Man, "Three Geographers'', appropriate for a scientific book written by three authors who have worked closely together over many decades, and are, in one way or another, descendants of the Dutch school of statistical mechanics of H. A. Lorentz and P. Ehrenfest.