Customer Reviews

A Quantum Approach to Condensed Matter Physics

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Unfortunately it and its predecessor A Quantum Approach to Solid State are not very well-known yet. In conrast to many 'standard' Condensed Matter texts (like Ascroft & Mermin, Kittel, Marder, etc.) the authors do not attempt to cover all of the huge field. Instead they concentrate on the Quantum side of things which is reflected in the title (for example, no Soft Condensed Matter topics and purely classical results are included). This allows them to discuss several different approaches to the same question. To start they give you an appetizer which includes phonons, some magnetism and a short overview of what's to come. The arguments are intuitive at first and thus easy to understand Then they successfully bring more and more depth to the questions. This helps you to keep in mind the goal they are trying to achieve without getting lost in the forest of details. Quite often you can also use their derivation as a way to remember the result without memorizing it. You get a feel for what's to come and what is in need of patching (here is an example: they discuss Landau levels in a magnetic field by saying that a cirle looks like an oscillator from a side so the orbits should be quantized in the same way and then apply the same formula; this is an easy way to remember it but it is certainly not rigorous!). The book ends with a good discussion of the Quantum Hall effect and effect Kondo and thus cannot be called elementary. No shortcuts are taken so the presentation is smooth and easy to follow till the very end. The book was an enlightment when I first saw it!
On the minus side Taylor and Heinonen seem to be fond of indeces so some familiar expressions may look unexpectedly complicated and not immediately recognizable. An arguable drawback of the simplicity is that I adopt and 'privatize' their ideas so quickly that the second reading (the hunt for the missed points) is not that much fun (keeps me in a state of trying to figure out what was that that I was finding so difficult). Due to its limited content you will need to supplement this text with others which are more complete.
I hope that this short review helps spread the word about another good introduction to the complicated field of CMP.

Since the first edition of Ashcroft/Mermin 's Solid State Physics, the Condensed Matter Physics has been expanded a lot in all directions. Things like high Tc Superconductivity and Quantum Hall Effect were not even discovered in the 1970s. And even in this age, not many textbooks touched the areas that actually most researchers in Condensed Matter Physics are currently working on.
This book is a good try for putting all the new topics as well as the classical ones together in one textbook. But after reading it, I am afraid the book spreaded too much while most topics are not described very clearly in this small book.
My feeling is, looking at the content only, you'll find this a great book --- almost everything interesting has been included! But if you really try to learn some topics --- especially the "advanced ones" --- you'll find many chaptors just give rough ideas or descriptions and finally it turns out not that helpful.
But of course this is not a bad book in general. If you are not in the research of COndensed Matter Physics, browsing this book can give you an nice overview of the current Condensed Matter Physics.