Covering Condensed Matter Fundamentals

Coleman replies: The writer of a book review is caught between the conflicting requirements of encouraging the authors and assessing the book honestly for the community. In my review of the book by Philip Taylor and Olle Heinonen, I commended the authors on their effort, but expressed my concern that the book did not provide many of the basic principles that underpin modern correlated matter physics. I cited as possible shortcomings the authors’ failure to discuss the concept of broken symmetry and the notion of an order parameter with a phase stiffness; I also noted the absence of any discussion of the origin of local moments and the renormalization group description of the Kondo effect.

However, I apologize for a serious oversight in my review: The authors do, in the brief section 9.4, describe localization as an interference between time-reversed paths. The absence of a diagram to illustrate the point led me to overlook their written description and to claim that they had not covered that aspect of electron localization.