Customer Reviews

Modern Optical Spectroscopy: With Exercises and Examples from Biophysics and Biochemistry

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

 

 

As a biochemist who uses electronic spectroscopy as a tool for solving biochemical problems I have come to appreciate certain deficiencies in my academic training. Aspects of quantum mechanics and molecular orbital theory that are not normally a core part of biochemistry curricula are clearly important for understanding and interpreting experimental findings obtained by spectroscopic methods such as ultraviolet absorbance and circular dichroism. Perhaps the most useful text that I've found to help me come to grips with the subject is the 1962 classic "Theory and Applications of Ultraviolet Spectroscopy," by Jaffé and Orchin. Here the focus is on organic chemistry, but William W. Parson has now provided a deeper treatment of the theory that draws examples from biophysics and biochemistry. Parson has filled in the many gaps that appear to have emerged in the discipline in the past 45 years. For me it has been a revelation to see explanations from first principles for the origins of the Rosenfeld equation and the point-dipole approximation, for example. Parson makes an interesting connection between Förster and exciton theories as variations on a common theme of excited state delocalization, but at greater and shorter distances, respectively. One criticism is that the discussion of the exciton effect seems to be limited entirely to the degenerate case where chromophores having identical energies interact. I would like to have seen the non-degenerate case discussed as Harada and Nakanishi treated it previously in Chapter 10 of their treatise on circular dichroism. I have not had a chance to read Parson's entire book, but what I have consulted has been gripping and easy to comprehend - the appendices on vectors, matrices, and Fourier transforms have certainly helped me to overcome some of my own deficiencies with the mathematics. Ultimately, Parson strives to create a physical picture that mathematics only serves to summarize, which is precisely what I want to know. I suspect that "Modern Optical Spectroscopy" will become an essential reference for experimentalists who seek to be quantitative in interpreting their observations derived from a wide range of electronic spectroscopic methods.

Whether you'll want this book or not depends on your training and purpose. If you need a good description of the quantum mechanics of spectroscopy, buy this book. But if you're developing methods or are interested in using spectroscopy as a tool, there isn't much here to help you out. Parson's style is as follows: describe a transition in quantum mechanics terms, derive out all the physical properties of that transition (using matrices, Feynman diagrams, and operators galore), and conclude with a couple of few-sentence examples. If you "think in quantum mechanics", of course, this is a perfectly logical style. However I can't help but think this book was written for people who have to describe spectroscopy without ever actually DOING it. Instrumentation is given only a cursory once-over in the first chapter, and practical strengths and limitations (why you'd use a certain technique for a certain purpose, and what its blind spots might be) are almost totally ignored (or buried in paragraphs on selection rules). On top of that the formulaic and math-heavy text is awfully dry (it's not an "excitation laser", it's an "incident wavepacket") and there's a sameness to the chapters that makes it a chore to read. It's nice to have a handy reference on the quantum mechanics, but for an applications-oriented person like myself there is not much practical in this book.