Electrical Properties of Materials

An informal and highly accessible writing style, a simple treatment of mathematics, and clear guide to applications, have made this book a classic text in electrical and electronic engineering. Students will find it both readable and comprehensive. The fundamental ideas relevant to the understanding of the electrical properties of materials are emphasized; in addition, topics are selected in order to explain the operation of devices having applications (or possible future applications) in engineering. The mathematics, kept deliberately to a minimum, is well within the grasp of a second-year student. This is achieved by choosing the simplest model that can display the essential properties of a phenomenom, and then examining the difference between the ideal and the actual behaviour. The whole text is designed as an undergraduate course. However most individual sections are self contained and can be used as background reading in graduate courses, and for interested persons who want to explore advances in microelectronics, lasers, nanotechnology and several other topics that impinge on modern life.

Laszlo Solymar was born in 1930 in Budapest. He is Emeritus Professor of Applied Electromagnetism at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College, London. He graduated from the Technical University of Budapest in 1952 and received the equivalent of a Ph.D in 1956 from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1956 he settled in England where he worked first in industry and later at the University of Oxford. He did research on antennas, microwaves, superconductors, holographic gratings, photorefractive materials, and metamaterials. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabruck, Berlin, Madrid and Budapest. He published 8 books and over 250 papers. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1995. He received the Faraday Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1992. Donald Walsh is an Emeritus fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He first worked for about seven years at the Mullard Radio Valve Co, developing photo cells and flash tubes, then for about the same period at the Services Electronics Research Labs. (SERL) on travelling wave tubes, klystrons and TR switches. He came to the Department of Engineering Science, Oxford in 1956 as a research fellow to help the newly appointed Reader in Electrical Engineering start a research group in microwave electronics, and later became a lecturer and college fellow.