Good discussion of experimental data/techniques?

Physics Monkey

Hi all,

I'm looking for books or papers that give a pedagogically clear and reasonably up-to-date discussion of various experimental techniques in condensed matter physics. For example, ARPES, STM, NMR, muSR, ... As I suspect may be true for many theorists, I learned what I know of experimental techniques in piecemeal fashion, but I would like to do better by my own future students.

I realize this is very broad, but any suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm open to any anything, but what I have in mind would provide a nice balance of pedagogy and details. The audience I have in mind will not generally be building any apparatus, but I would like them to know how to roughly decode experimental data in papers, have some sense of what physics might obscure or complicate the result, and very importantly, have some idea of what the data would look like in a "conventional" or "paradigmatic" material.

Thanks!

ardie

I'm afraid there isn't any one book that I know of that satisfactorily describes all of these phenomena. But there are good ones I have come across for example NMR is described pretty thoroughly in "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" by PJ Hore. For STM, "Nanophysics and Nanotechnology" by E. Wolf has a very complete description with diagrams and data graphs. For Spectroscopy, I find "Handbook Of Spectroscopy" by G. Gauglitz , T. Vo-Dinh, to be pretty complete, I just have to know what I am looking for to get the relevant information. its very easy to get lost when looking in that book.

Physics Monkey

Thanks very much for the reply. The Wolf book looks very good. The book by Hore looks more chemistry oriented, do you think this is true? Haha, that spectroscopy book is a monster!

ZapperZ

Wolf also has another book that has become a standard for tunneling spectroscospy - Principles of Electron Tunneling spectroscopy. I used this text quite a bit for my graduate work.

As for ARPES, I can recommend several texts, but there are also review papers you can find that can be useful if you don't want to delve into the painful details:

http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0209476
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0208504

Although these focused on ARPES on high-Tc superconductors, the technique they described are quite universal.

Zz.

ardie

Glad I could help. I think you are quite right that the magnetic resonance book by Hore is more chemistry oriented. It sort of avoids making mathematical representations. Nonetheless it is quite strong in its description. Most books on NMR I find do not make the crucial connection between mathematical theory (image formation) and the description of observations.

Physics Monkey

Thanks, Zz. Do you know why inverse photoemission is not a more common probe (it seems like I almost never hear about it), or am I simply poorly informed?

ZapperZ

My understanding of the issues surrounding inverse photoemission (and it is at least 5 years old) is that the noise and resolution of the technique have not caught on with photoemission spectroscopy. Certainly, if one wants to probe the empty states, one can do a lot better with tunneling spectroscopy.

Zz.