Customer Reviews

Foundations of Applied Superconductivity

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As a Physics professor, I have used this book for five years as the main textbook for my course "Introduction to Superconductivity", typically attended by Physics majors and graduates. Beyond its unique "electrical engineering flavour" (including the detailed explanation of many potential applications of superconductors), there is a second major achievement: the systematic unification of the phenomenology of superconductivity using an explicit macroscopic quantum approach.

This approach could be seen as a "mathematically softened" version of the Ginzburg-Landau theory of superconductivity, which makes it very convenient for undergraduate and graduate students --being engineers or physicists. The presentation of the material is extremely clear, with a very careful notation (typical of electrical engineers!) and excellent graphic material. There are appendices ranging from vector identities and special functions to High Tc data, which make the book very self-consistent. I recommend it as a rigorous introduction to the phenomenology of superconductivity without any reserve. It is really a pity that --as far as I know--there's no exercise solution book available!

I've been trying to get up to speed on some topics involving superconductors (SQUIDs, specifically), and I've found this book to be ultra-useful. What's so nice about it is that (as the previous reviewer mentioned) it has an EE flavour--which, as far as I can tell, means that it values clarity and applicability over terseness or 'elegance.' That's not to say that the book isn't well written; it is. But unlike some other texts I've looked through, this one aims at bottom-up completeness. The reader is expected to know some electrodynamics and circuit theory, but no prior knowledge of quantum mechanics is needed. The authors are very careful to derive all the necessary equations in a way that keeps the chain of logic taut at all times. After struggling with a few other books, this one felt like a gift.