Propagation in Systems Far from Equilibrium: Proceedings of the Workshop, Les Houches, France, March 10–18, 1987

Macroscopic physics provides us with a great variety of pattern-forming systems displaying propagation phenomena, from reactive fronts in combustion, to wavy structures in convection and to shear flow instabilities in hydrodynamics. These proceedings record progress in this rapidly expanding field. The contributions have the following major themes: - The problems of velocity selection and front morphology of propagating interfaces in multiphase media, with emphasis on recent theoretical and experimental results on dendritic crystal growth, Saffman-Taylor fingering, directional solidification and chemical waves. - The "unfolding" of large-scale, low-frequency behavior in weakly confined homogeneous systems driven far from equilibrium, and more specifically, the envelope approach to the mathematical description of textures in different cases: steady cells, propagating waves, structural defects, and phase instabilities. - The implications of the presence of global downstream transport in open flows for the nature, convective or absolute, of shear flow instabilities, with applications to real boundary layer flows or shear layers, as reported in contributions covering experimental situations of fundamental and/or engineering interest.