Waves and Oscillations in Nature

A. Satya Narayanan is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. Dr. Narayanan has written two books and numerous research papers. His research interests include solar magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), waves, and oscillations.Now retired, Swapan K. Saha was a professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. Dr. Saha has written numerous research papers and several books, including High Resolution Imaging: Detectors and Applications. His research interests include observational astronomy, high-resolution imaging, aperture synthesis, adaptive optics, atmospheric science, and image processing.

"The range of topics covered in this introduction for researchers and reference volume can be summarized by a list of the nouns appearing just before the word 'waves' in the table of contents: harmonic, electromagnetic, longitudinal, dispersive, hydrodynamic, surface, Poincare and Kelvin, Lamb and Rayleigh, Rossby, MHD, sound, Alfven, magnetoacoustic, solitary, gravity (meaning the kind in a fluid with gravitation as the restoring force), inertial, and shock. ... Specific astronomical applications appear in discussions of radio antennae, ionospheric processes, and shock waves in the Sun, in connection with solar flares and coronal mass ejections. ... Indeed the bibliography is one of the joys of this treatise, including original papers by Hertz, Strutt (Rayleigh to most of us), Brillouin, Compton, Planck, Doppler, Young, Michelson & Morley, Kirchhoff, Babinet, Coulomb, Hall, Oersted, Thompson, Poynting, Taylor, Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, and Poincare. ... On the plus side, the numbers used in some MHD wave problems are appropriate for the solar corona."—Virginia Trimble, from The Observatory, February 2016"... Since the authors present a very rich compendium on waves and oscillations, the book is not only of an introductory character, but rather a kind of vademecum. It leads the reader through the very rich domain of oscillations and waves, starting from the most elementary simple ones and collecting nearly all chapters in physics, where the problems of oscillations and wave-like phenomena occur. ... The work is an excellent contribution with special aims. Namely, it offers an extremely broad treatment of the problems of oscillations and waves throughout the whole of physics. ... It is meant to be accessible to undergraduates, though readers among the 'elder' researchers also may make practical use of it. This is because the style of the presentation is rather concise; it does not spend too much space for the detailed explanation of the starting points of the cited results. In summary, we are persuaded that this work will be quite valuable for beginners (after obtaining some basic experience) as well as for working professionals."—Ivan Abonyi (Budapest), from Zentralblatt MATH 1323 — 1

• Introduction to Waves and Oscillations. Electromagnetic Waves. Waves in a Uniform Media. Hydrodynamic Waves. MHD Waves in a Uniform Media. MHD Waves in a Nonuniform Media. Shock Waves. Waves in Optics. Plasma Waves. Fluid and Plasma Instabilities. Appendices. Bibliography. Index.