Foundations of Nanomechanics: From Solid-State Theory to Device Applications , Andrew N.Cleland Springer-Verlag, New York, 2003. $69.95 (436 pp.). ISBN 3-540-43661-8

The potential for the field of nanotechnology to transform civilization—with major applications in areas that span materials, biology, manufacturing, and information technology—is breathtaking. Examples of such applications include self-repairing materials, quantum computers, regenerative biological tissues, in situ drug delivery, and space exploration by microcraft that are smaller than a sugar cube! Such dreams are realized only through the training of today’s and tomorrow’s scientists and engineers in the new arena of nanoscale phenomena; that training is largely absent in present undergraduate and graduate curricula.

Current technologies and university science courses that cover this field have originated largely from an understanding of either the very large scale of bulk materials properties or the very small scale involving atoms and molecules. Progress in nanoscale technology requires a fundamental understanding of the intermediate realms between those scales and a concomitant educational effort to transform into applications the knowledge that scientists have gained in those realms. Foundations of Nanomechanics: From Solid-State Theory to Device Applications, a text on the solid mechanics of very small objects, addresses this educational need head-on.

Andrew Cleland is intimately familiar with the task he undertakes in this book. He is a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a position he has held since 1997. His research involves the experimental development of nanomechanical and nanoelectronic devices. Cleland’s work covers ultrasensitive force and displacement detection, single-electron effects, bolometry and calorimetry, and explorations of linear and nonlinear effects in mechanical systems.

The book, aimed at advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, joins in one treatise an engineering treatment of solids as continuum objects with a condensed matter physics focus on the quantum mechanical nature of solids. Beginning with a bottom-up atomistic description of matter, Cleland seamlessly works his way up, in the first seven chapters, to a continuum description of matter. Topics range from the dynamical motion of a two-atom system and the quantum and thermodynamic behavior of linear chains to atomic lattices, elasticity and deformation of solids, and the dynamical behavior of solids. The final chapters are devoted to dissipation and noise—topics that loom large at the nanoscale—and experimental fabrication techniques for today’s nanostructures.

Some of the material covered in the book, especially with respect to phonons in solids, necessarily overlaps with material included in standard texts on condensed matter physics. Books that cover the theory of continuum mechanics include Acoustic Fields and Waves in Solids (R. E. Krieger, 1990) by Bertram A. Auld; Theory of Elasticity (Pergamon Press, 1986) by Lev D. Landau and Evgenni M. Lifshitz; and History of Strength of Materials (Dover, 1983) by Stephen Timoshenko. Those are all excellent summaries of the theory of mechanical systems but stop short of extensions into nanomechanical systems and the special aspects of very small mechanical systems. Books that provide excellent summaries on the experimental fabrication and measurement aspects of micro- and nanomechanical systems include Handbook of Microlithography, Micromachining, and Microfabrication, Vol. 2: Micromachining and Microfabrication (SPIE Optical Engineering Press and Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1997) edited by P. Rai-Choudhury and Fundamentals of Microfabrication: The Science of Miniaturization (CRC Press, 2002) by Marc J. Madou. No book, however, fills the unique role provided by Cleland’s monograph.

The most apparent use for Cleland’s book is in a semester- or year-long, special topic course on nanomechanics. The author also suggests it as a useful reference for the practicing scientist or engineer. Given the highly distilled discussions of the underlying physics, students enrolled in a nanomechanics course who wish to use this text ideally should have a very fresh knowledge of undergraduate classical and quantum mechanics. Instructors could also supplement and update existing physics and engineering courses by inserting the book’s material on nanoscale phenomena into the curriculum.

Used a little or used a lot, Foundations of Nanomechanics will be useful all around!