Electrical Properties of Materials

by Laszlo Solymar, Donald Walsh

The seventh edition of this classic text illustrates the fundamentals of the electrical properties of materials in the context of contemporary engineering applications. Written in an informal, accessible style, it emphasizes the core ideas relevant to understanding the subject and deliberately keeps the mathematical treatment simple. The book presents the simplest model that can display the essential properties of a phenomenon and examines it, showing the difference between ideal and actual behavior. Topics are selected so that the operation of devices having applications (or possible future applications) in engineering can be explained. Problems and worked examples are included throughout.

Features of the Seventh Edition


·Presents a comprehensive treatment of light emitting diodes, which are rapidly replacing classical lighting sources


·Covers new topics such as organic material (including various polymers) and artificial materials (including photonic gap materials and metamaterials)


·Provides insight into cutting-edge fields such as amorphous semiconductors and nanotechnology


·Discusses new devices including nanotube transistors, single electron transistors, magnetic tunnel junctions, quantum cascade lasers, and ferroelectric and superconducting memories


·A solutions manual and illustrations from the text are available for download

416 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1998

About the author

Laszlo Solymar is an Emeritus Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College, London. He graduated from the Technical University of Budapest in 1952 and received the equivalent of a Ph.D in 1956 from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1956 he settled in England where he worked first in industry and later at the University of Oxford. He did research on antennas, microwaves, superconductors, holographic gratings, photorefractive materials, and metamaterials. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabrück, Berlin, Madrid and Budapest. He published 8 books and over 250 papers. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1995. He received the Faraday Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1992.

Reviews

[Nadia]

This book is an extraordinarily accessible to electronic materials, but that's not why I love it.

I love it because the footnotes, snide remarks occupying the margins, are hilarious.

One of my favorites:
"According to most historians' definition, an event is important if it affects a large number of people to a considerable extent for a long time. If historians were faithful to this definition they should write a lot about Maxwell and Hertz because by predicting and proving the existence of electromagnetic waves, Maxwell and Hertz had more influence on the life of ordinary people nowadays than any nineteenth-century general, statesman, or philosopher (with the possible exception of Karl Marx)."

(this all refers to the sixth edition)