Customer Reviews

The Physics Of Laser Plasma Interactions (Frontiers in Physics)

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The title pretty much says it all. I feel like this book was originally 2 or 3 times it's current length, i.e. the editors made Kruer cut it down to a lowly ~200 pages. The derivation provided is asymptotic to the Classical Electrodynamics, Jackson, level (i.e. terse, much outside work needed), and additionally suffers from a real lack of useful explanation/physical understanding (the first is ok, considering this is a graduate level subject, the second is most definitely not - read: why am I reading this book then?).

I would guess this book were written by a math major actually, if it weren't for the fact that it uses naught much more than Maxwell's equations (in Gaussian units, fyi) and the 2-fluid model (i.e. relatively simple). Also, the notation in this book is absolutely atrocious, probably one of the worst examples I have ever seen in any physical science document, ever. Seemingly random subscripts and variable letters appear/change on virtually every line. Variables from two chapters ago are randomly thrown in without explanation, it can really get tedious.

All that being said, the book WILL provide some insight, if you naturally have good insight into such topics, and you are willing to spend more time than should be necessary with it.

It sucks, I honestly really wanted this book to be my bible, but sadly I feel it falls far short of even a *decent* reference.