Customer Reviews

Band Theory and Electronic Properties of Solids (Oxford Master Series in Condensed Matter Physics)

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This book is a good bridge between very abbreviated descriptions of solid state physics found in most EE semiconductor device books and a tome like Ashcroft and Mermin's standard Solid State Physics book. It is mainly descriptive and elementary (the Boltzmann transport equation is barely mentioned). I like it because the author often plainly says useful things like the effective masses of electrons and light holes are similar, or that the heavy hole masses are pretty much the same for common semiconductors. The coverage of optical properties is minimal, apparently by design since the book is part of a series (Optical Properties of Solids by Fox).

In solid state/condensed matter physics, there is somewhat of a gap between introductory books and research papers on actually doing cutting edge work in band theory. Singleton attempts to remedy that with a text aimed squarely at honours-level students (in the UK), which is equivalent to senior level undergrads in the US.

He starts with the simple Drude and Sommerfeld models. These are historically important, and also don't need much in the way of computation. They could not have, actually, since they were devised at a time (pre-1940s), when electronic computers were unavailable. Singleton then quickly moves to the tight-binding model, which leads directly into modern band structure.

From this, he shows how we get semiconductors and insulators. Then, how nowadays we can do better than nature. Instead of restricting ourselves to band structures of bulk compounds, we can synthesise heterostructures, and thus manipulate the resultant band structures in a quantitative fashion, giving novel and useful properties on a bulk scale.

This might also motivate some readers to do research into such new materials.

This book offers a pretty decent overview of band theory, but it's woefully lacking in detail, especially in the later chapters, which seem to get progressively more qualitative. You shouldn't rely on this book to give a thorough knowledge of band theory, but it's worth reading. I think it would be especially useful when preparing for talks, because the explanations in the book are pretty easy to understand.