Advanced Solid State Physics [Paperback]

Philip Phillips (Author), Phil Phillips (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0813340144 | ISBN-13: 978-0813340142 | Publication Date: July 15, 2002 | Edition: 1st

This is a modern book in solid state physics that should be accessible to anyone who has a working level of solid state physics at the Kittel or Ashcroft/Mermin level. The key point of this book is the development of classic topics in a way that makes it easy to present current topics. The book starts with the non-interacting electron gas and develops in great depth such topics of immense currency as the Kondo problem, Bosonizations, local moments in metals, quantum phase transitions, insulator-superconductor and insulator-metal transitions, and the quantum Hall effect. The presentation of these topics starts from the beginning where no prior knowledge is assumed. Hence, this book should be extremely useful to those seeking an introduction tot he practice of modern solid state physics.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book has an excellent choice of both traditional and modern topics, which is not found elsewhere. Students and researchers will find it to be a valuable introduction to advanced solid state physics. The text is lucidly written, and there are many supplementary exercises for students to enhance their understanding."
Sudip Chakravarty, Distinguished Professor and David S. Saxon Presidential Term Chair of Physics, University of California Los Angeles --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description

Providing an up-to-date and lucid presentation of phenomena across modern advanced-level solid state physics, this new edition builds on a basic understanding to introduce students to the key research with the minimum of mathematics. It covers cutting-edge topics, including electron transport and magnetism in solids, topological insulators and strongly correlated electrons. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Westview Press; 1st edition (July 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813340144
• ISBN-13: 978-0813340142
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #147,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #34 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Solid-State Physics
  • #98 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Electromagnetism

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A concise but thorough treatment of Adv. Solid State !, December 12, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Advanced Solid State Physics (Paperback)

I just attended a course based on this book and all I can say is wow.
P. Philips avoids falling into excessive formalism and manages to present
the essence of each subject.

Readers with preparation in the introductory S. State will certainly
benefit from the straight and insightful treatment of the subjects.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars luck, June 8, 2006

By 

Chi-ken Lu "luck" (Taiwan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Advanced Solid State Physics (Paperback)

After the book of A/M solid state physics, there is no consensus on the most suitable and modern solid state physics textbook. One of the main reason is the rapid developements of some fancy theory, like bosonization, RG, etc after 70s. This book written by Phillips convers almost
all the contemporary topics in condensed matter theory except the high-Tc part. On this ground, this book is worthy recommendation.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good overview of standard theory and more modern developments, January 21, 2007

By 

Dr. Lee D. Carlson (Baltimore, Maryland USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Advanced Solid State Physics (Paperback)

Condensed matter physics has been and will always be the most important branch of physics, due mostly to its role in technological developments. Advances in medicine have also depended directly on advances in condensed matter physics, along with advances in materials science and computer technology. Armies of researchers and billions of research dollars have poured into this field, and throughout its history it has been marked by brilliant developments. Many of these developments are discussed in this book, which targets a readership that already has had exposure to condensed matter physics and statistical mechanics at the elementary level. Although somewhat short considering the subject matter, the author is still able to give the details on the subjects that have given the most surprises to researchers in recent decades.

For example, this book has one of the best overviews of the Kondo problem of all the current books on advanced condensed matter physics. The author presents the problem as one that will definitely need a treatment not possible in the context of mean-field theory, since the latter is mostly applicable to high temperatures. The goal is to study the affects of local magnetic moments on the transport and magnetic properties of a particular metal and how these moments behave as the temperature is lowered. Interestingly, and of great surprise when it was discovered, above the so-called Kondo temperature, the magnetic susceptibility of a magnetic impurity obeys the usual Curie law. However below the Kondo temperature it approaches a constant. Thus magnetism ceases at low temperatures, which definitely countered what was expected, namely that there is always magnetization below the Curie temperature. The analysis of the problem boils down to studying the interaction of the spin of the impurity with the conduction electrons, and the original solution by Kondo diverged at temperatures below the Kondo temperature. An approach based on the renormalization group (ala Kenneth Wilson) finally solved the Kondo problem, and this approach is discussed, along with the others that were proposed before it and based on second-order perturbation theory. These developments are discussed in the book.

The treatment of the electron gas, the Hartree-Fock approximation, and plasma oscillations is fairly standard but detailed. For the noninteracting electron gas the author actually calculates the pressure in the ground state and quotes the value: one million atmospheres (!) with this coming solely from the Pauli exclusion principle. In his discussion of the Wigner solid, the author mentions, but does not discuss in detail, the experiments in the dilute two-dimensional electron gas that indicate a metal-insulator transition in this system for zero magnetic field. A reference is given however for readers who want to familiarize themselves with what was known experimentally at the time of publication. Interest in the two-dimensional electron gas has waxed and waned over the last few decades. This reviewer studied this system in the context of metal-insulator-semiconductor structures with narrow gap semiconductors in the early 1980's.

Also discussed in the book, and of great interest to other areas of physics and mathematics such as the theory of exactly solved models in statistical mechanics and conformal field theory, is the topic of bosonization. The author motivates this subject by considering the case of the dynamics of the Fourier components of the electron density for the interacting electron gas in the regime where plasma oscillations exist. This dynamics is governed by a harmonic oscillator equation, which gives credence to the view that plasma oscillations can be viewed as bosonic excitations in the interacting electron gas. A natural question to ask then is whether this can be generalized, namely can one start with a system governed by Fermi-Dirac statistics and map it into one that is governed by Bose-Einstein statistics. A general procedure for doing this is unknown, but it has been done rigorously for the case of interacting electrons in one dimension. The author discusses this for the case of the one-dimensional Hubbard model, which when subjected to bosonization becomes the Luttinger liquid. He reminds the reader though that one must not impute too much to bosonization in this case since it is merely an equivalence of their equations of motion. He does note however that for the case of interacting electrons in one-dimension there is interesting physics that can be illuminated by the process of bosonization, namely that the electron in this case can be viewed as a composite particle consisting of a `holon' and a `spinon', both of which obey Bose statistics.

The most interesting part of the book, and one that is full of lively discussion, is the one on localization in disordered solids. At least for Anderson localization, which was the first considered historically, the dependence on dimension is obvious, with the Anderson transition only occurring in dimensions three or more. The absence of the transition in dimensions less than three is perhaps not too surprising if one remembers the results in rigorous statistical quantum physics about the absence of phase transitions in dimensions this low. But here one is studying the occurrence of a transition between insulating and conducting regimes, which is dependent on the degree of disorder, and not the temperature (the insulator-metal transition is thus a `quantum phase transition'). It is clear from the perusal of this chapter that localization is a difficult problem whose study requires many tools, each one of these by itself insufficient to capture the entire phenomenon. Indeed, the Boltzmann transport theory cannot describe the Anderson transition, due to its insistence that the mean free path be greater than the lattice spacing. If one uses Green functions, one must compute the site self-energy, which as the author shows (but briefly) can be done but it masks the essential physics of the localization transition. Thus the author resorts to scaling theory, which via a single parameter, the conductance, completely characterizes the localization transition.