PrefaceThis book is written for an interdisciplinary readership of graduate students and researchers interested in nonlinear dynamics, stochastic processes, statistical mechanics on the one hand and high energy physics, quantum field theory, string theory on the other. In fact, one of the goals that I had in mind when writing this book was to make particle physicists become interested in nonlinear dynamics, and nonlinear physicists become interested in particle physics. Why that? Didn't so far these two subjects evolve quite independently from each other? So what is this book about? Mathematically, the subject of the book are coupled map lattices exhibiting spatio-temporal chaotic behaviour. Physically, the subject is a topic that lies at the heart of elementary particle physics: There are about 25 free parameters in the standard model of electroweak and strong interactions, namely the coupling strengths of the three interactions, the fermion and boson masses, and various mass mixing angles. These parameters are not fixed at all by the standard model itself, they are just measured in experiments, and a natural question is why these free parameters take on the numerical values that we observe in nature and not some other values. It will turn out that the answer is closely related to certain distinguished types of coupled map lattices that we will consider in this book as suitable models of vacuum fluctuations. These dynamical systems, called 'chaotic strings' in the following, are observed to have minimum vacuum energy for the observed standard model parameters. They yield an extension of ordinary quantization schemes which can account for the free parameters.In this sense this book deals with both, nonlinear dynamics and high energy physics. So far only very few original papers have been published Vlll Preface on this very new subject. With the current book I hope to make these important new applications for coupled chaotic dynamical systems accessible to a broad readership. The book consists of 12 chapters. The first few chapters will mainly concentrate onto the theory of the relevant class of coupled map lattices, their use for second quantization purposes, and their physical interpretation in terms of vacuum fluctuations. In the later chapters concrete numerical results are presented and these are then related to standard model phenomenology. Sections marked with an asterisk can be omitted at a first reading, these sections deal with interesting side issues which, however, are not necessary for the logical development of the following chapters. In view of the fact that (unfortunately!) many readers may not have the time to read this book from the beginning to the end, I included a very detailed summary as a self-contained chapter 12. This summary contains the most important concepts and results of this book and is written in a self-consistent way, i.e. no knowledge of previous chapters is required.The research described in this book developed over a longer period of time at various places. I started to work o...