Properties of Materials: Anisotropy, Symmetry, Structure - Tapa dura

This book is a clear academic authority on the properties of a breadth of crystalline materials for many applications. It is particularly suitable for science and engineering students in the final years of undergraduate studies and a useful reference for research students in electrical, magnetic and optical materials science and engineering. Times Higher, December 2005.

Gives a great overview into the subject easy to understand even for people who just started getting into this subject covers all the important areas. A highly recommended book! (Michaela Kogler, University of Innsbruck)

Crystals are sometimes called 'Flowers of the Mineral Kingdom'. In addition to their great beauty, crystals and other textured materials are enormously useful in electronics, optics, acoustics and many other engineering applications. This richly illustrated text describes the underlying principles of crystal physics and chemistry, covering a wide range of topics and illustrating numerous applications in many fields of engineering using the most important materials today. Tensors, matrices, symmetry and structure-property relationships form the main subjects of the book. While tensors and matrices provide the mathematical framework for understanding anisotropy, on which the physical and chemical properties of crystals and textured materials often depend, atomistic arguments are also needed to quantify the property coefficients in various directions. The atomistic arguments are partly based on symmetry and partly on the basic physics and chemistry of materials. After introducing the point groups appropriate for single crystals, textured materials and ordered magnetic structures, the directional properties of many different materials are described: linear and nonlinear elasticity, piezoelectricity and electrostriction, magnetic phenomena, diffusion and other transport properties, and both primary and secondary ferroic behavior. With crystal optics (its roots in classical mineralogy) having become an important component of the information age, nonlinear optics is described along with the piexo-optics, magneto-optics, and analogous linear and nonlinear acoustic wave phenomena. Enantiomorphism, optical activity, and chemical anisotropy are discussed in the final chapters of the book.