Advances in science often involve initial development of individual specialized fields of study within traditional disciplines followed by broadening and overlap, or even merging, of those specialized fields, leading to a blurring of the lines between traditional disciplines. The pace of that blurring has accelerated in the past few decades, and much of the important and exciting research carried out today seeks to synthesize elements from different fields of knowledge. Examples of such research areas include biophysics and studies of nanostructured materials. As the study of the forces that govern the structure and dynamics of molecular systems, chemical physics encompasses these and many other emerging research directions. Unfortunately, the flood of scientific literature has been accompanied by losses in the shared vocabulary and approaches of the traditional disciplines, and there is much pressure from scientific journals to be ever more concise in the descriptions of studies, to the point that much valuable experience, if recorded at all, is hidden in supplements and dissipated with time. These trends in science and publishing make this series, Advances in Chemical Physics, a much needed resource.

The Advances in Chemical Physics is devoted to helping the reader obtain general information about a wide variety of topics in chemical physics: a field that we interpret very broadly. Our intent is to have experts present comprehensive analyses of subjects of interest and to encourage the expression of individual points of view. We hope that this approach to the presentation of an overview of a subject will both stimulate new research and serve as a personalized learning text for beginners in a field.

Stuart A. Rice
Aaron R. Dinner
July 2017, Chicago, IL, USA