Customer Reviews

Quantum Electronics

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3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
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This book is to the field of quantum electronics as Jackson's thick maroon book is to classical electrodynamics. The book covers a wide range of topics from basic concepts to advanced methods to real systems. It is a valuable reference, providing a wealth of knowledge for those who can get through it. Unfortunately, the text is brief and the derivations tend to make leaps and bounds without explanation. This is generally bad news for the student who wishes to learn the material for the first time. The use of examples throughout the book is appreciated, though they often deal with very specific problems and do not lend very well to understanding the basic concepts. Some prior knowledge of the subject, either mathematical or intuitive is recommended before delving into "Quantum Electronics". Kinda like Jackson's book, eh? My greatest complaint is the significant overlap with Yariv's other classic, "Optical Electronics". Imagine my shock and outrage when I discovered that the book I had just purchased repeats large sections of a book I already have, page-for-page verbatim. Perhaps a suggestion for future editions would be to combine the two books into one two volume work, thus eliminating redunancy and freeing up space to cover the material in greater detail.

Explanations are often brief, making reference to other works rather than filling in the details. As a student, I've used it for several graduate courses, and have found a need to reference other books such as Siegman's "Lasers" in order to understand the material. This is a common reaction, based upon classmates. Derivations leave out numerous steps for brevity, sometimes crucial ones. Often states results from other works, without any explanation. It often seems a collection of material drawn from numerous sources, with little thought to connecting the ideas and notation into a teaching tool. May be more useful as a reference.

This book is a quick intro into optoelectronics. I mean quick. Really. Not much rigor (physical or mathematical) is to be found in this book. As I read the book, I kept having the feeling that the mathematical derivations are laid out to lead to the results desired, and if there have to be a dozen assumptions and approximations or skips in steps made to achieve the goal, then so be it. As for the justifications for those assumptions, why, they help you get to the desired results. For your amusement, I will point out one of such sneaky skips. Look first at Eq 8-1-17. If you don't like to take things for granted, you have verified this expression to your satisfaction. You are happy with it. Now fast forward to 8-7-3. Look at how there is a degeneracy factor in the Rabi frequency. Can you verify it?

As I've said, if you want rigor, this book will disappoint you. Unfortunately, it appears that just about every book in optoelectronics is written rather loosely in this sense. So you are really stuck with this one, more or less.

Yariv's Quantum Electronics has not been updated in a long while. This is the "higher level" version of Photonics by Yariv (and now Yeh). I own both Quantum Electronics and Optical Electronics in Modern Communications (which was the title of the previous edition of Photonics). As others have said, there is a lot of overlap between the two. Quantum Electronics is in desperate need of a complete makeover. The book has the bones of a good text but lacks a coherent high level vision and the attention to detail that a good text has. Notation is wildly inconsistent and makes you pull your hair out trying to figure what convention he's adopted for the topic at hand. There are few worked examples. And the reliance on references to teach the material the text should teach is heavy, to the point of being ridiculous: there's at least one spot where the text sends the reader to a reference for a derivation, and the reference happens to be an earlier edition of Quantum Electronics! It makes you wonder if it's a mistake or if you really need that first edition.

I'd bet that another reviewer got it right when they said it was a collection of papers bound into a book. It would explain a lot of the text's shortcomings.

And yet, when I compare information from the quantum book with that in Photonics, I realize that some critical information from QE somehow got lost in the various updates. So I have to wonder if any attempt to edit Quantum Electronics will just make it worse. Maybe that's why there are references to old editions of the book.

You've got to have quantum mechanics under your belt (and then some) to really get this book. This book won't teach you enough quantum mechanics to do you any good.

I hate this book. I'm not well-read enough to say what a better text is. But the field deserves a better text than this.

I am extremely displeased with the experience of studying Quantum Electronics from this book. Its primary shortfall, given it was intended to achieve it, is its lack of explanatory notes and even more so the willingness of author to do it. It is difficult to explain my anger when following the text I would come across sudden results without any hint by the author as to its appearance except for a footnote referring to the original paper. I wish it would be a singularity here and there but unfortunately (for beginners) thats the order of the entire book.

The book certainly might be useful to learned readers for reference or those who have Quantum Electronics the only course with lots of time to dig out archives of research journals to follow the ideas in the book. But for wayfarers getting to have their maiden sojourn at Quantum Electronics, I will emphatically recommend to set your hands on something else.

I used this book for a graduate level course on quantum electronics. I agree with the other reviewers that the book requires a good background in a variety of subjects (primarily quantum mechanics and E&M), and also that the book is very comprehensive and covers a lot of topics (and consequently might serve as a reasonable reference to look up topics). Although, I was somewhat surprised at a previous reviewers comparison to Jackson Electrodynamics book, which, while similarly advanced, has a much clearer presentation

In my opinion, the book has several major shortcomings. Firstly, its presentation is unorganized, and terse. Rather than providing physical insight, or usefull discussion, Yariv opts for a barrage of messy formulas with haphazardly chosen (and often inconsistent) notation. Additionally, the book's ordering of topics is far from logical. There is no consistent narrative, and most of the chapters and subsections are at best, loosely correlated. Perhaps the most glaring weakness that I have discovered so far is Yariv's treatment of Gaussian beam propogation. The formulas are unnecessarily complicated, and the presentation is practically incoherent (it could certainly use a good converging lens!).

In short, this is a mediocre book at best, certainly not well suited for a course textbook. While, I have not had much exposure to other texts in the field, there are certainly better ones out there.

I have used this book for 3 courses in my faculty and i find this not a very good text for students.Mr Yariv style is a higly nonlinear one and he constantly assumes you know the things that you bought the book to understand.On the plus side his book is very comprehensive.I rate this book 2 stars.

this book is very good for graduate students who focus on quantum world. and the problems attached in each chapter are very useful for readers to check by themselves whether they really understand each topic or not. but my experience was that you usually need to read it twice to fully understand what the author's meaning. anyway, this is the best book i used among those optoelectronics's books.

I found this book to be a wonderful summary of what one needs to know in order to really understand the overall field of quantum electroncis. This is undoubtedly a mandatory addition to anyone's library if they regularly deal with lasers and nonlinear optics