Customer Reviews

Electron Paramagnetic Resonance: Elementary Theory and Practical Applications

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As a graduate student at Caltech, I first started learning about EPR from the first edition of this book. The first edition (much slimmer) was not perfect, and I found useful complementary information in the works of Poole and Baird, but I noticed that I kept returning to Weil and Bolton for answers to my most fundamental questions. The appendices including lucid treatments on instrumental design and the relevant quantum mechanics were particularly useful in my overall understanding of the theory and practice of EPR. In the newest edition, the subject is given an even broader overview, with clear discussions of modern techniques. The best of the bunch. I also recommend Poole's _Electron Spin Resonance: A Comprehensive Treatise on Experimental Techniques_, Bersohn Baird's _Electron Paramagnetic Resonance_, and the _Handbook of Electron Spin Resonance_, edited by Poole and Farach.

Electron paramagnetic resonance is a fairly complicated experimental technique, and the task of writing a textbook on this method is extremely challenging. This particular book is written by experienced scientists and covers all major modifications of EPR, as well as extensive bibliography. However, the presentation of the material could be much, much better. I found it very hard to follow the authors mostly because the systematics in presentation, from full explanation of simple things to more complicated ones, is lacking almost completely. Sometimes I even had a strange feeling that subsections of the book were written independently and were just put next to each other in the final manuscript, so different is their writing style, and so weakly they are related to each other. Unfortunately, there are not so many books on EPR published recently which are available at bookstores, so the readers do not have a lot of choice...