Most structure formation processes rely on some kind of relaxation of a system with many atoms to a state of equilibrium with its environment. Due to the interaction between the atoms very complex behaviour of the system (e.g. a cloud of atoms) may arise where experimentalists observe phase transitions, metastable states, aging and memory effects and the need for special process schedules to produce desired results (e.g. high yield of matter with a particular structure).

Applying the concept of energy landscapes introduced earlier, this lecture shows how to obtain useful predictions for experimental setups where the energy landscapes may seem too complex at first. We will learn about methods to extract some corse grained structurual information about the energy landscapes in reasonable time, explore theoretical models that show the effects of some common coarse grained structures on the dynamics of such systems and show how to use this coarse grained energy landscapes to predict or explain experimental results.