Chemical Education Today
Physical Adsorption: Forces and Phenomena L. W. Bruch, Milton W. Cole, and Eugene Zaremba. International Series of Monographs on Chemistry, Vol. 33. Clarendon: New York, 1997. 340 pp. ISBN 0-19-8556381. $85.00.
Physical Adsorption: Forces and Phenomena is an interesting and detailed review of the theory of adsorption and various dynamical behaviors of thin films. The authors have chosen to focus almost exclusively on atomic adsorption in the submonolayer-to-monolayer coverage regime. Overall, the book is quite informative and well written. Initially, I had guessed the intended audience to be students or researchers wanting to learn more about physical adsorption on surfaces. However, as I proceeded through the monograph I became less at ease with this guess. While at times the discussion is simple, clear, and concise, a few portions of chapters delve too deeply into complicated formalisms that can leave the beginning student feeling inadequate. In addition, some key definitions and preliminary discussions are left out. The monograph opens with a definition of physical adsorption and monolayer physics in Chapter 1. Here the scope of the book is clearly defined and outlined and various experimental techniques are very briefly described. The strength of this chapter is the inclusion of a bibliography providing an excellent summary of recent works. There is also a much more extensive bibliography at the end of the book. All readers, especially beginners, can note both sources, as they are often tapped later in the monograph. Chapter 2 describes the nature of interactions between atoms and surfaces. It starts with simple adsorption interactions but quickly dives into rather involved statistical and quantum mechanics. It is at this point where I began to feel less confident about my initial impression of the intended audience. Some
sections are clearly not for a casual beginning student to read. In addition, I am not sure of the usefulness of these discussions in this monograph. Despite a considerable amount of time spent building the foundations of a quantum mechanical description of adsorption interactions, they are eventually abandoned and never revisited. Most readers can completely skip these sections and proceed to the more practical and useful semiempirical descriptions, which are the real emphasis of the rest of the monograph. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the structure of monolayer and statistical models of adsorption and film behavior. Most, if not all, of the today’s useful models are described, including the noninteracting lattice gas and continuum models. I found these discussions very well presented and pertinent to various phenomena one can observe. However, the authors assume that readers have working knowledge of such concepts as superfluidity and various types of phase transitions. None of these are clearly defined, which may force some readers to consult other sources before making sense of the arguments and results presented. Chapter 5 expands on the noninteracting models by adding many-body interactions. Overall, this chapter abounds with interesting insight on the dynamics of monolayer systems. The monograph ends with discussions of specific systems of noble gases on graphite and selected transition metal and ionic surfaces. The discussions are somewhat incomplete in the sense that some of the data are not really discussed in terms of the models which had previously been described with considerable effort. Also, much of the interesting data were included as tables in earlier chapters. I found myself going back to review the essential models and data. The strongest and most interesting feature of this final chapter is its comparisons of adsorption on the various types of surfaces. Todd J. Raeker Department of Chemistry Kent State University Kent, OH 44242-0001
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 12 December 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education
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