Product Description
Pethick and Smith provide a unified introduction to the physics of ultracold atomic Bose and Fermi gases for students, experimentalists and theorists alike. This book explains the phenomena in ultracold gases from basic principles, without assuming a detailed knowledge of atomic, condensed matter, and nuclear physics. This book provides chapters to cover the statistical physics of trapped gases, atomic properties, cooling and trapping atoms, interatomic interactions, structure of trapped condensates, collective modes, rotating condensates, superfluidity, interference phenomena, and trapped Fermi gases. Problems are included at the end of each chapter.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 2 reviews)

Best so far in the subject, good but not great.

Of the three main books on laser cooling and BEC that are on the market right now (Laser Cooling by Metcalf and Atom Optics by Meystre) this one is by far the best. There are a lot of details here, but unfortunately a lot more are still left out. Chapter 8, and sections 11.3, and 14.3 in particular should be rewritten. Too many equations are written down from nowhere without any derivation. Some sections, like 13.2, are clearer in the original papers. So while this book is a vast improvement over the current state of affairs, there is quite a ways to go for a truly good textbook in this subject. Still, while the quality of the exposition varies wildly from chapter to chapter, many of the chapters ARE well written, and so you can still learn a great deal from this book. Until a better book comes along, this is the book to buy in this subject.
October 29, 2003

Nicely balanced

I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to get into the field of Bose-Einstein condensation. Myself being a novice to the subject, I found a very well structured text with an exceptional balance between experiment and theory. All dicussions are well supported with examples. The theory parts are very detailed so that even the unexperienced reader can easily follow.
July 11, 2002

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

Bose-Einstein Condensation (The International Series of Monographs on Physics)
by L. Pitaevskii, S. Stringari

Quantum Liquids: Bose Condensation and Cooper Pairing in Condensed-Matter Systems (Oxford Graduate Texts)
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Laser Cooling and Trapping (Graduate Texts in Contemporary Physics)
by Harold J. Metcalf, Peter van der Straten

Solid State Physics
by Neil W. Ashcroft, N. David Mermin

Quantum Theory of Many-Particle Systems
by Alexander L. Fetter, John Dirk Walecka