Customer Reviews

Electronic Structure of Alloys, Surfaces and Clusters (Advances in Condensed Matter Science) (v. 3)

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This is one of the better books on the use of first-principles calculations to examine solid-state properties. The emphasis of this book is the analysis of non-periodic systems such as free surfaces, clusters, and both ordered and disordered alloys. The book is worth reading for several reasons.

1. There is good coverage of the various ab initio techniques used in electronic structure calculations: tight-binding, plane-wave psuedopotentials, LMTO, LAPW, KKR, Green's Functions, and Car - Parinello molecular dynamics. This coverage includes a thorough listing of important equations without too much math, and comparisons between different methods. The book does assume a basic knowledge of quantum mechanics, specifically operator algebra, so reader beware.

2. There are thorough definitions of the various properties that can be obtained by ab intio calculations. These include good descriptions of the density of states, cohesive energy, and configurational entropy.

3. The book is written more like a textbook than a publication of results. Each chapter focuses on a fairly narrow subject, but includes a thorough overview of the science involved, before getting into the simulation results.

4. The references given at the end of each chapter are very comprehensive, and often include other books written on materials simulations, electronic structure.

The only drawback I could find was in the chapter on recursion methods. This method is not used as often in quantum calculations, and was extremely difficult to understand.

Overall, this was a good book to read, though it is fairly expensive for 370 pages.