Covering Condensed Matter Fundamentals

It is an honor to have one's book reviewed in Physics Today, which has a wide and well-informed physics readership. The standard of reviews is generally very high.

We thus were disappointed to see, in the May 2003 issue (page 64), Piers Coleman's inaccurate and cursory review of our book, A Quantum Approach to Condensed Matter Physics (Cambridge U. Press, 2002). Coleman states that the section on mesoscopic physics "fails to explain localization as a constructive interference between time-reversed paths," yet section 9.4 is devoted to doing precisely that.

Furthermore, Coleman writes that our chapter on the Kondo model and heavy fermions "does not explain the concept of a localized moment." In fact, the sections on the Kondo problem are centered about the role of local spin and end by showing how the Kondo effect is well described by a density-of-states expression that adds a resonant state at the Fermi energy for each impurity with a local moment. Similarly, the chapter on superconductivity has a section on the Ginzburg-Landau theory of type II superconductivity. In that section, we explain how to construct the free-energy density in terms of a spatially varying complex gap parameter. Yet Coleman says instead that we "never allude . . . to the order parameter."

Authors must always be prepared for adverse reviews based on a reviewer's dislike of an author's choice of subject matter. However, it is painful indeed to have seeming omissions criticized by someone who does not seem to have read further than the table of contents.

Coleman replies: The writer of a book review is caught between the conflicting requirements of encouraging the authors and assessing the book honestly for the community. In my review of the book by Philip Taylor and Olle Heinonen, I commended the authors on their effort, but expressed my concern that the book did not provide many of the basic principles that underpin modern correlated matter physics. I cited as possible shortcomings the authors' failure to discuss the concept of broken symmetry and the notion of an order parameter with a phase stiffness; I also noted the absence of any discussion of the origin of local moments and the renormalization group description of the Kondo effect.

However, I apologize for a serious oversight in my review: The authors do, in the brief section 9.4, describe localization as an interference between time-reversed paths. The absence of a diagram to illustrate the point led me to overlook their written description and to claim that they had not covered that aspect of electron localization.