Corrections and Comments, Fifth Printing:

A fifth printing was issued on February 16, 2004, removing almost all known errors from the previous version. Ways to identify this printing: (a) On the reverse of the title page under the words Printed in the United States of America there are the numbers 10 9 8 7 6 5, indicating that this is the fifth printing. (b) Open to page 8. If the arrow a2 in the upper left hand corner points up rather than down, this is the fifth printing.

I will be grateful to all readers who point out errors, large and small. Small errors such as those listed below will be corrected every time the book is reprinted.

Return to book home page. Send comments to marder@chaos.ph.utexas.edu

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World-wide typo-finders:

Roberto Diener [UT Austin] has found 244 (!)
Dominic Holland [San Diego Supercomputer Center] has found 33
Erkki Thuneberg [University of Oulu, Finland] has found 20
Dale Kitchen [University of Illinois-UC] has found 15
Qian Niu [UT Austin] has found 11
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Rick Matthews [Wake Forest] has found 1

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

p. 31. For the tetragonal system as shown, one should write a \neq b = c rather than a = b \neq c

p. 32. The discussion of the monoclinic lattice is misleading, and inconsistent with the figure on page 31. Distortions of the Base-Centered, Body-Centered, and Face-Centered Orthorhombic lattices shown in Table 2.8 into the Monoclinic lattice shown below it all are equivalent to the Base-Centered Monoclinic lattice shown in the figure. Often, this lattice is simply called Centered Monoclinic. Here (8 KB, pdf) is a figure illustrating the equivalence of the Base-Centered and Body-Centered Monoclinic lattices. Note that if the Base-Centered Orthorhombic lattice had been decorated on its bottom face, then the distortion leading to the Monoclinic lattice would have produced another Simple Monoclinic lattice. This observation is the source of the claim on page 32 that distorting the Base-Centered Orthorhombic lattice produces a Simple Monoclinic lattice.

p. 36. Problem 4 is Problem 1.4

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

p. 88 in the marginal comment on Equation 5.1, the approximation should read N(N-1)\dots (N-M+1)\approx N^M

Chapter 6:

Chapter 7:

Wave Packets: There have been more queries and complaints about wave packets than any other single topic in the book. I am hoping that with a few extra words, I can help clear up some of the confusion. Comments on whether the extra words help or make things worse are welcome! Click here for extra comments on wave packets (90 kB, pdf) (104 kB, PostScript)

Chapter 8:

Tight Binding: The introduction of the tight binding model is somewhat obscure, and raises more questions than it answers. I have written some extra notes on the tight binding model. Click here for extra comments on tight binding models (60 kB, pdf) (88 kB, Postscript)

Chapter 9:

p. 207, Equation (9.21); the final delta function is confusing. According to Equation (9.10), two particles have the same spin if they share the same function $\chi_l(\sigma)$. The final delta function is meant to indicate that there is a factor of 1 if particles i and j both have the spin-up or spin-down function, and a factor of zero otherwise. The proper notation would be [\sum_\sigma \chi_i(\sigma)\chi_j(\sigma)], but this doesn't fit on one line anymore. I think that pages 206 through 209 are a great argument for second quantization. In Equation (9.22), need parenthesis around argument of first integral.

p. 219 A perceptive reader asks about the ``freedom'' to modify the exchange-correlation term in Equation (9.80). How can there be any freedom to modify such a thing in what is supposed to be a first-principles business? Are we not deriving behavior of matter from the fundamental knowledge of quantum mechanics? And yet there is indeed freedom, if only judging by the many modifications and variants of (9.80) that have appeared over the years. There is a gap between the rhetoric of performing first-principles calculations, and the reality, which is that Equation (9.1) is completely intractable, and replaced by other equations. Applied mathematicians coming to physics tend to assume that there must be some rational basis for choosing approximations to (9.1); some small parameter in which one expands, keeping terms to some order. There is no such thing. There are physical arguments, and approximations found through trial and error to reproduce some quantities in agreement with experiment. Anyone who holds this process in contempt is welcome to try to find something better, but should be warned that a large segment of the physics community has worked for over 40 years to improve dramatically upon (9.80) without much success, and (9.80) won Walter Kohn the Nobel Prize.

Chapter 10:

p. 234. One reader gently suggests that a sentence near the bottom of the page is so abominably written that I should be shot. The sentence in question is ``The pseudopotential can handle these by generalizing the Kohn-Sham equations so that they solve the Dirac equation, and then arranging for the solution of Schr\"odinger's equation for the pseudopotential to produce wave functions and energies matching solutions of the Dirac equation for the original potential.'' The reader suggests that I greatly expand the sentence. I cannot fit the expansion in this edition of the text, but put it here:
"For heavy atoms, relativistic effects become important because electrons near the nuclei move at speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light. The electron wavefunctions near the nuclei must therefore be described by the Dirac equation. However, the pseudopotential method can also be applied here. To determine the radial wavefunctions, one must work with a generalization of the radial Kohn-Sham equations (10.9) that correspond to the Dirac equation. The previous steps in creating a pseudopotential are now modified as follows:
Step 1 on page 232 is the same except that one must write down and solve a version of the Kohn-Sham equations that generalizes the Dirac equation, rather than the Kohn-Sham equations presented in the text.
Step 2 on page 233 is unchanged; again, one draws smooth replacements for the original wiggly wave functions.
Step 2 on page 233 is unchanged. One can take the original nonrelativistic Kohn-Sham equation in (9.79) and put a pseudopotential in it that produces the wave functions obtained in the previous step. Now the pseudopotential is not only compensating for the smoothing procedure of step 2 that removed wiggles from the wave function, but also is compensating for the differences between the Dirac equation and the Schroedinger equation. That is, the pseudopotential is chosen to produce a wave function for the Schroedinger equation that is also a solution of the original Dirac equation.

Chapter 11:

Chapter 12:

Chapter 13:

Chapter 14:

Chapter 15:

Chapter 16:

p. 432: Figure 16.9 and the discussion around it are misleading. They imply that it is possible in an ordinary metal to apply such a strong electric field that electrons travel in circular orbits within a unit cell. Problem 1 of the chapter shows that this is simply impossible. In addition, the enormous electric fields required to see Wannier-Stark ladders in pure metals would induce Zener tunneling, drag electrons out of inner shells, and otherwise rip the metal to shreds. The closest one can come in a solid state system is in super-lattices; in that case, the cells in the figure are super-lattice cells on the order of 100 Angstroms. Furthermore, electrons are not rigidly required to stay within a single unit cell as the discussion after the figure states.

p. 440. The volume number of Krieger and Iafrate is 33

Chapter 17:

Chapter 18:

Chapter 19:

Chapter 20:

Chapter 21:

Chapter 22:

Chapter 23:

Chapter 24:

Chapter 25:

Chapter 26:

p. 747, after Equation 26.6, the discussion implies that the four wave functions under discussion are exact eigenfunctions of the full Hamiltonian. But the full Hamiltonian has not even been written down. All one can say is that they are eigenfunctions in the four-dimensional subspace they span, and the following discussion finds which of them has the lowest energy, not the true ground state of the system.

p. 771, first paragraph, the magnetic correlations it is natural to assume produced are antiferromagnetic, not ferromagnetic.

p. 772 UBE_{13}--> UBe_{13}. Rather than saying that electron spins are locked in the same direction as the uranium local moments, it is better to say that they tend to point in the opposite direction.