Basic Space Plasma Physics/Advanced Space Plasma Physics

Abstract

The book Advanced Space Plasma Physics by Rudolf Treumann and Wolfgang Baumjohann extends the material covered in the companion volume Basic Space Plasma Physics to topics like instabilities and nonlinear plasma phenomena. The book follows the same philosophy as the first volume, namely to introduce general concepts of plasma physics and to discuss their relevance for space plasmas at the same time. The topics covered in this book are macroscopic and kinetic instabilities (chapters 2�6), magnetic reconnection (chapter 7), wave�particle interaction and weak turbulence (chapters 8 and 9), nonlinear waves (chapter 10), strong turbulence (chapter 11), and collective effects (chapter 12). All these topics are vast and most of them are still acitve areas of research. The authors have done an excellent job in presenting the most important part of the individual topics in a form which should be accessible for someone who has knowledge at the level of the first book. But the more experienced reader will also find this book a useful overview of a field in which the literature is usually very diverse and widely scattered. A small weakness of the present book is that the authors refer extensively to material and equations presented in the companion volume. Without the first book, it is sometimes difficult to follow the lines of argument made in some chapters. Another point to mention is that, due to the enormous amount of material which has to be covered, the authors sometimes take short-cuts which may not always be transparent to the less experienced reader. One example of this is the discussion of the collisionless tearing mode where the authors suddenly, and without further explanation, use the ideal MHD energy principle to derive a result. In general, however, this is an excellent book and I enjoyed reading it. It will be a very useful addition to the bookshelf of everyone interested in an introduction to instabilities and nonlinear phenomena relevant for space plasma physics, and I hope that, as for the companion volume Basic Space Plasma Physics, a cheaper paperback edition will soon follow. Dr T Neukirch School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9SS