Electrical Properties of Materials PDF

Preface to the eighth edition

Once more we have taken the opportunity to bring our book up to date. The major change is due to the recent upsurge of interest in artificial materials (metamaterials in the modern jargon), which persuaded us to turn a small appendix into a full-blown chapter. In order to supply the theoretical foundations for this new chapter we have expanded our coverage of plasma phenomena in Chapter 1, and included a section in Chapter 10 on anomalous dispersion with the aim to introduce backward waves. Another expansion of Chapter 10 is due to the increasing interest in THz devices.We have included a treatment of optical phonons which have resonances in that frequency range.

Given the five years since the last edition, it is not surprising that we had to make some changes in every chapter, occasionally because we thought that the existing explanation could be improved upon, but mostly because of new developments. The chapter that received the greatest amount of new additions is that on semiconductor devices.We have included plasma etching, expanded the treatment of microelectromechanical systems, and pointed out the means by which those further miraculous reductions in minimum feature size have taken place. The progress in spintronics has been noted by trebling the size of the relevant section. The main addition to the laser chapter is on quantum dot devices; we have also added a brief section on laser cooling. The main change in the chapter on optoelectronics is our reassessment of too optimistic previous predictions on LEDs. Some modest advances in superconductors have also been noted. We have added new entries to existing tables and introduced three new tables: on infrared resonances of alkali halides, on piezoelectric constants, and on the critical temperatures of high-T_c superconductors.

Additions of which we could have thought earlier are explicit references to Nobel Prizes whenever we write about the relevant topics. We ourselves were surprised that the number of Nobel laureates included came to a figure as high as 50. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the research that has had the greatest influence upon the way we live has also attracted the best scientific minds. A list of these Nobel laureates is given in Appendix II.

We wish to thank, first, all those students and lecturers whose comments helped us to prepare this edition. We are grateful to Richard Syms, who gave us all the information needed to include mass spectrometers in Section 9.26 and who kindly read the final draft. We also wish to acknowledge the help we received from JohnAllen, Kristel Fobelets, and Paul Stavrinou, all of them from Imperial College, London, in the field of semiconductor devices and lasers.