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Materials Interfaces: Atomic-Level Structure and Properties D. Wolf and S. Yip (Chapman and Hall, London, 1992, 716 pages). ISBN: 0-412-41270-5
The study of interfaces has boomed since the early 1970s primarily owing to their central role in microelectronics, processing, and phase transformations, to mention just three areas of furtive research in the science and engineering of materials. This book contains 27 chapters spanning much of this immense field, each of which presents a snapshot of "research in progress" by leaders in the field, and many take the reader to the forefront of knowledge. The vast scope of this book sets it apart from earlier collections of papers, and the editors are to be congratulated for undertaking such a major project. Perhaps one of the greatest uses of the book will be as a source of ideas for new research projects. None of the chapters ends with a note of finality, but rather an appeal for more experiments, more theory, and more computer modeling to answer the many questions that are raised. The impression is that almost all we know is what we do not know, and the challenge is implied time and again to make some sense of it all. Many chapters contain significant new insights and useful distillations of a massive amount of experimental and theoretical data. Conflicting views are expressed by several authors, which make for lively and, at times, amusing reading. The great diversity of the chapters and the slender cohesion between them render the book unsuitable as a graduate-level textbook; nevertheless, it will be very useful for research, at least until it is outdated. The first two introductory chapters concern the geometry and experimental investigation of grain boundaries. They are both billed as addressing a wider range of interfaces, but the authors seem much more at home with grain boundaries. The geometry is repeated several times in the book, and one wonders why this is necessary or desirable, especially since it is nowhere near as general as recent treatments of bicrystallography. It would also have been appropriate in this book to devote a whole chapter to the thermodynamics of interfaces, which has advanced tremendously in the past 10-20 years and underpins the whole subject.
MRS BULLETIN/JANUARY 1995
The editors classify interfaces as bulk, semibulk, and thin film. This classification corresponds roughly to a division of the different experimental techniques used to study interfaces. Bulk interfaces appear between thick crystals, such as grain boundaries in ordinary polycrystalline matter. Interfaces between epilayers and thick substrates are examples of semibulk interfaces, and those in superlattices are examples of thin-film interfaces. Bulk interfaces are treated in six chapters forming Part I of the book, and semibulk and thin-film interfaces are discussed in eight chapters in Part II. Part III contains seven chapters on chemistry of interfaces and Part IV contains four chapters on fracture of interfaces. Part I on bulk interfaces is mainly concerned with grain boun
