Book Description
The study of the electronic structure of materials is at a momentous stage, with the emergence of new computational methods and theoretical approaches. This volume provides an introduction to the field and describes its conceptual framework, the capabilities of present methods, limitations, and challenges for the future. Many properties of materials can now be determined directly from the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics, bringing new insights into critical problems in physics, chemistry, and materials science.
Customer Reviews:
A Gr8 Book on DFT Concepts.......2007-07-05
I like this book and would recommend it to any beginner into density functional theory. It explains all the modern electronic structure techniques in a rather simple language. Its much more easier and quicker than going into hundreds of papers and not knowing where to start.
The biggest issue with this book is a rather poor organisational structure to the book. That's why I've given it a 4/5 rating. There are some concepts that have been easily thrown in at the end, into the appendices.. and having to turn pages too frequently can be annoying.
But the good work has been done & I'd ask Mr Martin to re-organise the content.
This book has the potential to be a classic.
Excellent book.......2006-03-21
As a graduate student attempting to learn density functional theory and its use in computer programmes, I have found this book to be an excellent addition to my library. Well structured and written.
Not impressive.......2005-06-30
Although the topics the book embrasses are current and essential for practising chemists, physisists and materials scientists the pedagogic care with which it explains some of the topics is poor.
The author makes the assumption that the reader is familiarized with the heavy mathematical formalism and notation which is commonplace in specialized physics articles but fails to remember that graduate students that don't have a physics background, and come from other schools of thought such as chemistry, biochemistry or materials science, might be target readers.
For instance the book's introduction to Hartree-Fock theory must be the most complicated I've ever seen with constant recourse to Dirac's delta function (without even revealing its presence, stating simply that it should be there). The link between DFT and statistical thermodynamics although interesting is not essential for the heart of the discussion. Some classic program applications like Siesta are presented but you get the feeling that it's just for show off.
All in all if you're a physicist with some years of experience in the field of planewave computation you might find the book interesting.
Otherwise if you're a beginner like me forget it! The book by Efthimios Kaxiras (Atomic and Electronic Structure of Solids) is more revealing and pedagogic and supplies every detail in the mathematical formalism. Some physicists with a more chemical sensitivity such as Harrison, chemists such as Roald Hoffmann, Jeremy Burdett or Michael Springborg or materials scientists like Adrian Sutton or David Pettifor are better suited for the novice.
Outstanding.......2004-07-07
This book was recommended to me to help me in my research, and has turned out to be one of the best recommendations I have ever received. This is a great book; by far the best I have come across on the topic of computing the properties of condensed phase materials by quantum mechanical simulations. Here are the reasons why.
1. The chapters are well laid out and one chapter flows neatly to the next.
2. The math is kept to a minimum; the author makes a point of communicating important principles and ideas in concise sentences without resorting to derivations. This is ideal for engineers like me; who by training do not know that much math as compared to physicists who specialize in the solid state.
3. Important ideas are clarified up front. Many texts will lead the reader through long and windy paths of proofs and logic before arriving at the conclusion; thereby losing their reader in the process. Not here; important points are stated clearly at the beginning and at the end of each section.
4. Compare, contrast, and context. There are many ideas, models, approximations, and theorems that have been developed in the past century related to electronic structure. Many of these are closely related to each other in their inspiration, derivation, practice, and/or applications. This book makes the connections between the different concepts. For a non-expert reading through the electronic structure literature, terms like APW, OPW, PAW, LAPW, LMTO, etc... can be quite confusing if not placed within an overriding context. This book provides that context.
5. Good use of appendices. Electronic structure is a lot like politics; most practicioners in either field did not receive formal educations in the subject, but instead got into it under the apprenticeship of other people. This is reflected by a lot of literature by those who succeeded in the field; most of it good in showing of the authors' achievements, but generally useless in preparing the next generation of practicioners. For electronic structure, this is manifested by the many books that require prior knowledge of quantum, thermo, crystallography, mat sci, etc.. In effect, these books were written by experts to be read by other experts. Not this book. Basic ideas are kept in the text; and specific proofs and derivations are kept in the appendices. The result is a text that is much easier to read than most others.
6. The book is concept driven; not application driven. Most texts in materials simulations are actually a compilation of chapters written independently by multiple authors. Each chapter might be given a general title; but the text will be bias towards the research of its authors. For example, a chapter on surface calculations might focus entirely on adsorption, or relaxation/reconstruction, or optical properties; but surely not touching all these subjects. This book does not do this; each chapter is driven by basic concepts, and one concept leads to the next.
In all, this is a great textbook and a handy reference book. I highly recommend it.
Book Description
From the reviews: "Anyone who has taught a course of quantum mechanics knows the difficulty of providing practical examples which are within the mathematical competence of the students and can be completed in a reasonable time. In this book will be found 219 problems, together with their solutions, which will greatly extend the repertoire. (...) The first volume deals exclusively with one-body problems without spin. (...) In the second volume the problems cover a wider range and include illustrations of the introduction of spin, the interactions between two and three particles, quantum statistics and the Dirac relativistic equation with shorter sections on non-stationary problems and radiation theory. (...)" Nature, Sept. 10, 1971. "The student who can master these problems will have a good grasp of the practical applications of quantum theory and, therefore, of the basic concepts as well. I recommend the book unreservedly." The Australian Physicist, May 1972.
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The Chaos Cookbook: A Practical Programming Guide
Joe Pritchard
Manufacturer: Butterworth-Heinemann
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Excellent!.......2000-06-23
It is not very often that you find a book that is able to illustrate complex ideas in an easy to understand manner. "The Chaos Cookbook" provides very simple explanations, examples, and computer programs of the mathematics of chaos and fractals. I highly recommend it to the chaos novice.
Book Description
This is the second volume of the third edition of a successful text, now substantially enlarged and updated to reflect developments over the last decade in the curricula of university courses and in particle physics research. Volume I covered relativistic quantum mechanics, electromagnetism as a gauge theory, and introductory quantum field theory, and ended with the formulation and application of quantum electrodynamics (QED), including renormalization. Building on these foundations, this second volume provides a complete, accessible, and self-contained introduction to the remaining two gauge theories of the standard model of particle physics: quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the electroweak theory. The treatment significantly extends that of the second edition in several important respects. Simple ideas of group theory are now incorporated into the discussion of non-Abelian symmetries. Two new chapters have been added on QCD, one devoted to the renormalization group and scaling violations in deep inelastic scattering and the other to non-perturbative aspects of QCD using the lattice (path-integral) formulation of quantum field theory; the latter is also used to illuminate various aspects of renormalization theory, via analogies with condensed matter systems. Three chapters treat the fundamental topic of spontaneous symmetry breaking: the (Bogoliubov) superfluid and the (BCS) superconductor are studied in some detail; one chapter is devoted to the implications of global chiral symmetry breaking in QCD; and one to the breaking of local SU(2)xU(1) symmetry in the electroweak theory. Weak interaction phenomenology is extended to include discussion of discrete symmetries and of the possibility that neutrinosare Majorana (rather than Dirac) particles. Most of these topics are normally found only in more advanced texts, and this is the first book to treat them in a manner accessible to the wide readership that the previous editions have attracted.
Customer Reviews:
Very clear and readable.......2007-03-21
Like the 2nd edition this 2 volume set is very readable. I like it's informal style, and the wealth of background material presented, as well as the hints about when to expect further discussions of a subject in succeding chapters. By far the best Quantum Field Theory book I've come across.
more understandable QFT for beginners.......2005-09-17
The 3rd edition of that book clarified to a degree the fog left in my mind by a two-semester QFT course. The book is better suited for beginners than Peskin & Shroeder, Mandl & Show or Lahiri & Pal simply because it senses better the difficult points for beginners and tries to explain them at lower level. It focuses on the main concepts and doesn't try to `cover broad material in shortest time' or get into extreme computational technicalities totally irrelevant to beginners. The correct historical perspective of many ideas is given and the important historical papers are cited. The theory is frequently compared to the experimental results. Violin string is used as a prototype of a continuous system described by a classical field which is the first field quantized later. The book develops physical intuition showing how a scattering process can be analyzed in full QED (all fields are operators), in semiclassical approximation (all fields are operators except the EM field) or using the lowest level wavefunction approximation (all fields are treated like wave functions just like scattering in nonrelativistic QM) often getting the same result (see chapter 8). Important concepts like Feynman diagrams and Renormalization of a theory are first explored in a simple theoretical playground - a hypothetical `ABC theory' of three massive scalar fields with an interaction ABC term - and later discussed again in the case of QED with all the complications like fermions and Electromagnetic gauge field.
Topics discussed include gauge invariance principle; relativistic field equations describing free particles like Klein-Gordon and Dirac; Feynman interpretation of the negative energy solutions of Dirac eq. (no its not `antiparticle going back in time'); Dirac equation with EM field; Lagrangian and Hamiltonian densities for continuous systems; quantization of free fields like KG (real and complex scalar), Dirac and Electromagnetic field [the quantization is by postulating commutators/anticommutators, no path integrals]; Normal ordering of operators; Interaction picture for interacting fields, Time ordering of operators, Dyson expansion of the S matrix; Wick's theorem; scattering processes in QED at tree level; Ward identity; form factors for scattering from non point particle; parton model, Bjorken scaling; diagrams with loops, regularization and renormalization of ultraviolet divergences in QED.
It took me a month and a half to read the book and solve all problems (10 problems per chapter on average). The problems are exactly the ones every beginner should solve and usually revolve about filling in details from the text or proving statements in the text. Solving them is usually easy with a few exceptions and teaches you the typical computational tricks of the trade. You have to know quantum mechanics (at least have seen scattering theory) and special relativity. You have to at least have heard of Green function and contour integration in the complex plane. The book provides nice appendices about all these.
Not everything is crystal clear in that book, sometimes it took me a few days for an idea to sink in or I understood some paragraphs only after I read the whole book. Other ideas I did not understand at all. Sometimes it's hard to tell what they are trying to say although they say it several times from different angles ... The authors should work on expressing an idea in a direct succinct way once and for all instead of repeating several fuzzy versions of it. Overall that book made me understand MUCH more than a regular QFT course and I highly recommend it as a prep for such a course.
If you are having trouble with QFT - BUY THIS BOOK!.......2003-04-13
This book (2nd edition) has 15 chapters . I have just finished chapter 4 entitled QFT and I am compeled to write this review! After a year of studying of QFT informally I can report that this is the way to introduce yourself to the topic. I've been through Mandl & Shaw, Peskin & Schoeder, Ryder, Weinberg and a few others and this is heads and tails the BEST intro available. In 42 pages, Aitchison & Hey make the transistion from classical to QM and from QM to QFT as gracefully as I can conceive. For example, the transition from the discrete Lagrangian to the field Lagrangian is very explicit. One benfit of this is that the dependence of L on partial of phi wrt x is clearly motivated leading to the manifestly relativistically invariant form of L. They explicitly develop physical intuition at every step of the way - for example, this is the only book that I have found that explicitly asks the question where is QM's wavefunction in the QFT formalism? Answer - The vacuum to one-particle matrix elements of the field operators. The transistion from free fields to interacting fields is far clearer than any other treatment I've seen. I also appreciated that the problems were used to basically fill in details left out of the text. I was able to 'practice' the various kinds of manipulations that are required.
Amazingly clear introduction to the subject.......1998-08-03
This book is the best book I've seen on the subject. The qualitative description of qunatum field theory in particular are amazingly lucid for the subject. The only possible flaw in the book is that the problems at the end of each chapter are both few in number and for the most part do not challenge the student at all; for the most part they are just rote calculations.
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Practical Quantum Electrodynamics (Pure and Applied Physics)
Douglas M. Gingrich
Manufacturer: CRC
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String Theory and M-Theory: A Modern Introduction
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Quantum Field Theory
ASIN: 1584885424 |
Book Description
Taking a heuristic approach to relativistic quantum mechanics, Practical Quantum Electrodynamics provides a complete introduction to the theory, methodologies, and calculations used for explaining the physical interaction of charged particles. This book combines the principles of relativity and quantum theory necessary for performing the calculations of the electromagnetic scattering of electrons and positrons and the emission and absorption of photons. Beginning with an introduction of the wave equations for spin-0 and spin-1/2 particles, the author compares and contrasts the relativistic and spin effects for both types of particles. He emphasizes how the relativistic treatment of quantum mechanics and the spin-1/2 degree of freedom are necessary to describe electromagnetic interactions involving electron scattering and points out the shortfalls of the wave-equation approach to relativistic quantum mechanics. Developing the Feynman rules for quantum electrodynamics by example, the book offers an intuitive, hands-on approach for performing fundamental calculations. It also illustrates how to perform calculations that can be related to experiments such as diagrams, lifetimes, and cross sections. Practical Quantum Electrodynamics builds a strong foundation for further studies and research in theoretical and particle physics, particularly relativistic quantum field theory or nonrelativistic many-body theory.
Book Description
This is a comprehensive textbook on divergent perturbation series in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory with special emphasis on practical applications. The first part of this book deals with the derivation of high-order terms of divergent perturbation series using quasiclassical path integral methods. The basic notions are introduced using ordinary integrals. The theoretical framework is applied to quantum mechanics and generalized to quantum field theories which, in particular, have important applications in the theory of critical phenomena. The material is presented at three levels of complexity: a) undergraduate, b) post-quantum mechanics I, c) graduate up to current research. The second part starts with a general introduction to resummation methods for divergent series. Subsequently, Borel's theory is implemented as a simple algorithm allowing for easy practical applications to numerous problems. This is illustrated for three typical examples, again with the above three levels of complexity. All non-trivial algebraic manipulation are programmed in special computer languages (REDUCE and RIEMANN). These algebraic as well as some numerical computer programs are supplied on a diskette to come with the book.
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Wave Phenomena: Theoretical, Computational, and Practical Aspects : Proceedings of the First Woodward Conference San Jose State University June 2-3,
Manufacturer: Springer
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- Error Control Coding, Second Edition
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- Generalized Additive Models: An Introduction with R (Texts in Statistical Science)
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Atomic and Electronic Structure of Solids
Electronic Structure Calculations for Solids and Molecules: Theory and Computational Methods
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A Primer in Density Functional Theory (Lecture Notes in Physics)
