Specific Heats At Low Temperatures

This work was begun quite some time ago at the University of Oxford during the tenure of an Overseas Scholarship of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and was completed at Banga lore when the author was being supported by a maintenance allowance from the CSIR Pool for unemployed scientists. It is hoped that significant developments taking place as late as the beginning of 1965 have been incorporated. The initial impetus and inspiration for the work came from Dr. K. Mendelssohn. To him and to Drs. R. W. Hill and N. E. Phillips, who went through the whole of the text, the author is obliged in more ways than one. For permission to use figures and other materials, grateful thanks are tendered to the concerned workers and institutions. The author is not so sanguine as to imagine that all technical and literary flaws have been weeded out. If others come across them, they may be charitably brought to the author's notice as proof that physics has become too vast to be comprehended by a single onlooker. E. S. RAJA GoPAL Department of Physics Indian Institute of Science Bangalore 12, India November 1965 v Contents Introduction ................................................................. .

Recent discoveries of new materials and improvements in calorimetric techniques have given new impetus to the subject of specific heat. Nevertheless, there is a serious lack of literature on the subject. This invaluable book, which goes some way towards remedying that, is concerned mainly with the specific heat of matter at ordinary temperatures. It discusses the principles that underlie the theory of specific heat and considers a number of theoretical models in some detail. The subject matter ranges from traditional materials to those recently discovered — heavy fermion compounds, high temperature superconductors, spin glasses and so on — and includes a large number of figures, tables and references. The book will be particularly useful for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics and researchers./a

The birth of this monograph is partly due to the persistent efforts of the General Editor, Dr. Klaus Timmerhaus, to persuade the authors that they encapsulate their forty or fifty years of struggle with the thermal properties of materials into a book before they either expired or became totally senile. We recognize his wisdom in wanting a monograph which includes the closely linked properties of heat capacity and thermal expansion, to which we have added a little 'cement' in the form of elastic moduli. There seems to be a dearth of practitioners in these areas, particularly among physics postgraduate students, sometimes temporarily alleviated when a new generation of exciting materials are found, be they heavy fermion compounds, high temperature superconductors, or fullerenes. And yet the needs of the space industry, telecommunications, energy conservation, astronomy, medical imaging, etc. , place demands for more data and understanding of these properties for all classes of materials - metals, polymers, glasses, ceramics, and mixtures thereof. There have been many useful books, including Specific Heats at Low Tempera tures by E. S. Raja Gopal (1966) in this Plenum Cryogenic Monograph Series, but few if any that covered these related topics in one book in a fashion designed to help the cryogenic engineer and cryophysicist. We hope that the introductory chapter will widen the horizons of many without a solid state background but with a general interest in physics and materials.