Superconductivity and Superfluidity

  • Toshihiko Tsuneto &
  • Mikio Nakahara
) Cambridge University Press: 1998. 207pp. £45, $69.95

Also available Superconductivity

  • J. B. Ketterson &
  • S. N. Song
Cambridge University Press: 1999. £29.95, $49.95

Most of today's standard textbooks on superconductivity (and on the superfluidity of liquid 4He) date from the heyday of research on ‘low-temperature’ superconductors in the 1960s. But since then, in addition to these ‘classic’ superfluids, several related but interestingly different superfluid systems have been realized experimentally — the low-temperature phases of liquid 3He, the ‘heavy-fermion’ and copper oxide superconductors and the (presumably superfluid!) Bose-condensed phase of dilute alkali gases.

Superconductivity and Superfluidity, which originally appeared in Japanese in 1993, is intended in some sense as an update of, or supplement to, the standard texts in the light of these developments. However, it concentrates mainly on the Fermi superfluids, with a couple of short sections on 4He and a postscript on the alkalis.

A distinguishing feature of the book is its treatment of Cooper pairing, which starts froman arbitrary spin and orbital state, thereby permitting unified treatments of classic superconductivity, copper oxide (and heavy-fermion) superconductors and 3He. Although the coverage of these systems is not complete (impossible in a book of this length), most of the key phenomena, at both the microscopic and the phenomenological level, are addressed.

The exposition is well organized and crisp, and the translation generally runs smoothly. The book should be useful to graduate students and those who have had some exposure to field-theoretic and diagrammatic methods but who are not ready to take the plunge into more specialized texts such as that of Vollhardt and Wölfle on superfluid 3He.