This magisterial graduate and advanced undergraduate book is highly recommended for its unique features.
The author, a professor at the Institute for Physics, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria, taught the material to graduate students, and his pedagogical skills are outstanding. He develops the theory via two approaches: analytical solutions (Green’s functions) for specific problems; and numerical simulations, classical and quantum mechanical. All the steps of the derivations are included, and the key equations are boxed.
Various approaches to the theory are derived and critically compared, stressing their validity and limitations—time domain, frequency domain, Lagrange formulation, Hamilton formalism and canonical quantization. Various representations or pictures of quantum theory are compared. The last chapter provides several computational techniques, including finite-difference time domain (FDTD), boundary element method (BEM) and finite-element method (FEM).
The text is augmented by color figures, six comprehensive mathematical appendices, problem sets for each chapter, and access to the NANOPT toolbox of MATLAB files.
Review by Barry R. Masters, Fellow of AAAS, OSA, and SPIE.
The opinions expressed in the book review section are those of the reviewer and do not necessarily reflect those of OPN or OSA.