Is There a Temperature?: Conceptual Challenges at High Energy, Acceleration and Complexity (Fundamental Theories of Physics, Band 171) - Softcover

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Tamás Biró received a master's degree in Physics and Biophysics and a Ph.D. from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He first worked on theoretical heavy-ion physics and strange quark production in quark-gluon plasma at KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest. He then continued as a researcher at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, at the GSI Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Giessen. From 2013 to 2019, he served as Vice Director of the Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics at the Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Budapest. He proposed the color rope model for describing the early phase of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions in 1983, participated in studies of chaotic dynamics in strongly interacting non-abelian gauge fields from 1991 to 2004, and then developed a framework for the statistical physics of complex systems and non-extensive thermodynamics. Currently, he leads the Nanoplasmonic Laser Inertial Fusion Experiment, NAPLIFE, at the Wigner RCP (2020-2025). He has collaborated with colleagues at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, at Bergen University in Norway, at the Universities of Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, at the Central China Normal University in Wuhan, China, at the Yukawa Institute in Kyoto, Japan, at the UBB Cluj in Romania, and at TU Wien in Austria. He edited Acta Physica Hungarica and served as Editor-in-Chief of EPJ A (Hadrons and Nuclei).

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Physical bodies can be hot or cold, moving or standing,simple or complex. In all such cases one assumes that their respective temperature is a well defined attribute. What if, however, the ordinary measurement of temperature by direct body contact is not possible? One conjectures its value, and yes, its very existence, by reasoning based on basic principles of thermodynamics.

Is There a Temperature? Conceptual Challenges at High Energy, Acceleration and Complexity, by Dr. Tamás Sándor Bíró, begins by asking the questions “Do we understand and can we explain in a unified framework the temperature of distant radiation sources, including event horizons, and that of the quark matter produced in high energy accelerator experiments? Or the astounding fluctuations on financial markets?”

The book reviews the concept of temperature from its beginnings through the evolution of classical thermodynamics and atomic statistical physics through contemporary models of high energy particle matter. Based on the views of high energy nuclear physicists, it crosses over several traditional disciplines of university physics. Recent developments towards an abstract, general and thermodynamically consistent treatment of non-extensive systems are worked in. Exercise problems and solutions help to deepen the reader’s understanding into the details behind the theories.