Table of contents

Electrostatic correlations play an important role in physics, chemistry and biology. In plasmas they result in thermodynamic instability similar to the liquid–gas phase transition of simple molecular fluids. For charged colloidal suspensions the electrostatic correlations are responsible for screening and colloidal charge renormalization. In aqueous solutions containing multivalent counterions they can lead to charge inversion and flocculation. In biological systems the correlations account for the organization of cytoskeleton and the compaction of genetic material. In spite of their ubiquity, the true importance of electrostatic correlations has come to be fully appreciated only quite recently. In this paper, we will review the thermodynamic consequences of electrostatic correlations in a variety of systems ranging from classical plasmas to molecular biology.

Excitations in vortex cores in superconductors and other Fermi superfluids are single-particle excitations with a peculiar energy spectrum. These excitations are responsible for many important thermodynamic properties such as specific heat, London penetration length, etc. They also determine the dynamic characteristics of superconductors and superfluids through their interaction with vortices. Flux flow resistance, the Hall effect in type II superconductors and the mutual friction in superfluids are the most important phenomena which strongly depend on vortex core excitations. These phenomena determine the electromagnetic responses of type II superconductors and the hydrodynamic behaviour of superfluids and are of great significance for practical applications of superconducting devices and for understanding the most fundamental properties of correlated electrons and other Fermi particles. In this review we consider the dynamic properties of superconductors and superfluids and outline the basic ideas and results on the vortex dynamics in clean superfluid Fermi systems. The forces acting on moving vortices are discussed including the problem of the transverse force which was a matter of confusion for quite some time. We formulate the equations of the vortex dynamics, which include all the forces and the inertial term associated with excitations bound to the moving vortex.

This paper presents a review of the electronic, magnetic and spectroscopic properties of manganese (Mn)-based nanostructures. In the last few years a variety of techniques have been used to prepare mesoscopic transition-metal islands and novel effects associated with the electronic structure in nanoscale systems have been reported. Mn in the atomic configuration possesses a moment as high as 5μ_B so it should be very interesting to dope semiconductors with Mn for spin injection or to use Mn itself for permanent magnets. In this paper the introduction (section 1) focuses mainly on metallic Mn nanostructures which are the core of this review. Nevertheless we try to present a general overview of various kinds of Mn structures as well as several theoretical methods with their own limitations to handle the corresponding problems. More precisely, section 2 outlines a variety of bulk, surface, interface and cluster structures with their resulting magnetism as far as Mn is concerned. Actually, in these past two decades, considerable interest has been devoted to Mn nanostructures deposited on various metallic substrates (section 3). Because of its exotic structural and magnetic properties, Mn is indeed an interesting candidate for ultra-thin film growth as it is expected to accept different local configurations. Experimentally, one may attempt to stabilize normally high-temperature phases of Mn by epitaxial growth on a suitable substrate. Specifically, we shall point out the frequently occurring, important situation of magnetically stabilized surface alloys. Next (section 4) we first focus on spectroscopic properties of Mn compounds as well as Mn adsorbates upon graphite and other substrates both experimentally and theoretically. Moreover, we recall a few remarks about Mn impurities with respect to the Kondo problem and also with respect to semiconductors and spintronics. In the latter field, practical applications actually require room-temperature Mn ferromagnetism which is not that easy to obtain. Finally, in section 5, we point out that a given Mn nanostructure generally exhibits a non-collinear (NCL) structure which is often the most stable one among all the collinear and NCL ones. This fact explains why constrained collinear calculations have often disagreed with the corresponding experimental data. Section 6 is devoted to a short discussion where we recall a few important points that have been developed in this paper.