From the Back Cover
Optical anomalies in crystals are puzzles that collectively constituted the greatest unsolved problems in crystallography in the 19th Century. The most common anomaly is a discrepancy between a crystal's symmetry as determined by its shape or by X-ray analysis, and that determined by monitoring the polarization state of traversing light. These discrepancies were perceived as a great impediment to the development of the sciences of crystals on the basis of Curie's Symmetry Principle, the grand organizing idea in the physical sciences to emerge in the latter half of the 19th Century.
Optically Anomalous Crystals begins with an historical introduction covering the contributions of Brewster, Biot, Mallard, Brauns, Tamman, and many other distinguished crystallographers. From this follows a tutorial in crystal optics. Further chapters discuss the two main mechanisms of optical dissymmetry: 1. the piezo-optic effect, and 2. the kinetic ordering of atoms. The text then tackles complex, inhomogeneous crystals, and the complex optical properties resulting from the superposition of anomalies having various etiologies. The book treats the literature comprehensively, but uses illustrations from the authors' laboratories as the subjects of detailed analyses.
This is an invaluable text for crystallographers, mineralogists, and petrologists interested in the growth of minerals and synthetic crystals, and their optical properties. It is also ideally suited to students of optical mineralogy, professional scientists and engineers as well as historians of science.
Alexander Shtukenberg was born in St. Petersburg in 1971. He received his diploma in crystallography and mineralogy from the St. Petersburg State University in 1993, and his PhD in 1997. Following postdoctoral fellowships at the Mineralogy and Petrography Institute of the University of Bonn and at the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics, Berlin, he has returned to his alma mater as an instructor in crystallography. Shtukenberg's research has focused on the structure and properties of solid solutions. He has published 27 papers in addition to the monograph, Optical Anomalies in Crystals.
Yurii Punin was born in St. Petersburg in 1941. He completed his education at the St. Petersburg State University in 1963. Following military service, he began his research career at the Earth Crust Research Institute of St. Petersburg State University completing a PhD thesis in 1970 on the kinetics of crystal growth. After habilitation in 1994, Punin received a professorship in the crystallography at the St. Petersburg State University. He has served as the head of the crystallography department since 2002. Punin is a specialist in the field of crystal growth from solution, having developed the theory of strain induced growth defects that provides insights into twinning, mosaicity, and order-disorder transitions. He has created a widely regarded course of lectures on "Crystal Growth" in addition to the publication of 120 papers and 2 books.
Editor:
Bart Kahr was born in New York City in 1961. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont. Following doctoral research on the stereochemistry of unusual molecules at Princeton University, he joined the laboratory of J. Michael McBride at Yale University where he studied the history of optically anomalous crystals. In 1990, he joined the chemistry faculty of Purdue University and was named a National Science Foundation Young Investigator. In 1997, Kahr moved his laboratoryto the University of Washington in Seattle where he is currently Professor of Chemistry. His research group studies the growth, structure, and physical properties of crystalline solids, as well as the history of crystallography. He is the author or co-author of 100 scientific publications.
