Customer Reviews

Bose-Einstein Condensation (International Series of Monographs on Physics)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is not an easy book to read. It starts off with field theory and assumes a lot of knowledge, especially from Landau's books on fluid mechanics and statistical physics. The format of the writing is concise, almost journal publication style. Chapter 14 on angular momentum and vortices is very slick and hard to follow. Chapter's 7 and 8 on response theory and 4He introduce a lot of notation and constructs without definition or motivation. Their discussion of mean field theory in BEC, derivation of the Gross-Pitaevskii from the operator formalism, and discussion of Fermi gases is clearer than in the BEC book by Pethick and Smith. There is also a discussion of optical lattices and low dimensions that is not discussed in Pethick and Smith. The other standard topics such as dynamics of a BEC in a harmonic trap are covered better in Pethick and Smith. Cooling is not discussed in this book.

while the book is getting a little old, i find it to be an excellent text. it starts 'gently' (gently assuming youve had graduate stat mech, and know some many-body or field theory) with the ideal bose gas and the weakly interacting bose gas. they cover landau's theory of superfluidity and linear response in general before starting with atomic physics for traps and the condensate in a trap. towards the end some of the more 'modern' topics like mixtures, fermi condensates, phase effects, etc. if you wanted to work in BECs, a firm foundation would be this book plus a small selection of more recent review on topics that are too new for textbooks.

ive found it very clear and helpful.