Angular Momentum: Understanding Spatial Aspects in Chemistry and Physics

Rating:
Summary: This is a must-have for p-chem. graduate students !
Review: I have read this book with a great joy. The author of this book is a leading authority in the field of reaction dynamics, and has played a key role in applyingp the vector correlation in physical chemistry problems. The best part of this book probably is the example/problem set part where the reader is asked to use the knowledge obtained from the chapter to solve the "real" problem (mostly on spectroscopy and the gas phase reaction dynamics). I highly recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: This is a must-have for p-chem. graduate students !
Review: There are, of course, several other books that derive and explain the details and myriad equations involved in our understanding of angular momentum (e.g. Edmonds, Judd). However, none of them explain the mathematics and physical results in "simple English" as well as Zare's. The problem sets and applications are particularly helpful and relevant to a wide variety of common experimental techniques and data analyses. I also strongly recommend purchasing the companion solutions manual. The only derogatory comment that I can make is that there are much better programs available for calculating the 3, 6, and 9J symbols than those found in the appendix. I doubt this comes as a surprise to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Angular momentum for dummies...
Review: There are, of course, several other books that derive and explain the details and myriad equations involved in our understanding of angular momentum (e.g. Edmonds, Judd). However, none of them explain the mathematics and physical results in "simple English" as well as Zare's. The problem sets and applications are particularly helpful and relevant to a wide variety of common experimental techniques and data analyses. I also strongly recommend purchasing the companion solutions manual. The only derogatory comment that I can make is that there are much better programs available for calculating the 3, 6, and 9J symbols than those found in the appendix. I doubt this comes as a surprise to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: A well-written book focussed on experimental applications
Review: This is a well-written and very interesting book with (perhaps) an unfortunate title. My first reaction was "A book devoted to angular momentum? Who would read such a thing?"

Ignore the title and look at the sub-title: "Understanding Spatial Aspects in Chemistry and Physics." This book covers everything from polarized fluorescence spectroscopy to molecular beam scattering to molecular reorientation in liquids. All of these topics have one thing in common -- they are spatially anisotropic, and Zare leads the reader through a tutorial on their analysis.

There are other books on this topic. (The monographs by Rose and by Brink and Satchler come to mind.) To my taste, they are dry and boring.

Zare's book is different. Although he presents the material with the same rigor, he also includes 16 "applications" (i.e. problem sets) that showcase some of the most elegant physical chemistry/chemical physics problems of the century. For example, their are applications dealing with scattering, polarized fluorescence, Zeeman quantum beats, correlation functions in spectroscopy, and the spectroscopy of diatomic molecules. These applications usually cover real molecular problems -- not watered down analogues. Zare's discussion of spherical tensor operators deserves special note for its clarity.

This book should be approachable to anyone with at least one semester of graduate quantum chemistry or physics under their belt.