Solid State Physics: Essential Concepts

Description

By identifying unifying concepts across solid state physics, this text covers theory in an accessible way to provide graduate students with an intuitive understanding of effects and the basis for making quantitative calculations. Each chapter focuses on a different set of theoretical tools, using examples from specific systems and demonstrating practical applications to real experimental topics. Advanced theoretical methods including group theory, many-body theory, and phase transitions are introduced in an accessible way, and the quasiparticle concept is developed early, with discussion of the properties and interactions of electrons and holes, excitons, phonons, photons, and polaritons. New to this edition are sections on graphene, surface states, photoemission spectroscopy, 2D spectroscopy, transistor device physics, thermoelectricity, metamaterials, spintronics, exciton-polaritons, and flux quantization in superconductors. Exercises are provided to help put knowledge into practice, with a solutions manual for instructors available online, while appendices review the basic mathematical methods used in the book.

David W. Snoke is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh where he leads a research group studying quantum many-body effects in semiconductor systems. In 2007, his group was one of the first to observe Bose-Einstein condensation of polaritons. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

'David W. Snoke is an experimental physicist with a deep understanding of solid state theory. His masterly distillation of the necessary mathematical ideas into understandable physics gained the first edition of this book an enthusiastic readership. This second edition preserves the readability while expanding the content to include some of the most up-to-date 'essential concepts'. A thorough study of the text will provide a new graduate student with a firm foundation for participating in the latest research.' Michael Stone, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign