book review

Nanophotonics
by Arthur McGurn
Springer, 2018, 558 pages

Reviewed by T. Nelson

This physics textbook with big chapters on photonic crystals, plasmonics, and metamaterials should have been fascinating. There's great stuff here: surface plasmons, which are light waves that travel along a surface instead of through space; metamaterials, which are useful for cloaking and for making flat optical lenses with “infinite” aperture and compact antennas with enormous directional gain; and “spasers,” which are nano-lasers that generate intense coherent beams of surface plasmon-polaritons that have no apparent practical use at all.

The author even adds a chapter on finite difference time domain simulations and ends the book with short mostly non-technical chapters on lasers, optical tweezers, nearfield optics, nonlinear optics, quantum computing, and the Casimir effect, where metallic plates attract each other via zero-point energy. All great stuff. Even better, it's done with no quantum mechanics, hardly, and almost no half-page-long formulas, making it accessible to newcomers.

But the back cover gives away the problem: it's “readable,” which turns out to be a euphemism for “mind-bogglingly verbose.” And somewhat repetitive, with paragraphs that say exactly the same thing over and over. Some newcomers might appreciate that, but others will probably just go into skimming mode.

Aristotle's advice was: “Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and tell them what you've told them.” But maybe Lewis Carroll was wiser: “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.”

jan 12, 2025