The idea of writing this book orIgmates from a suggestion of Bernard Sapoval: "Why don't you write it?" he asked. "Coulomb screening is a problem that everybody encounters in many different contexts, and there is no textbook that gathers the various aspects ofthe subject. " The content ofthe book, in a shorter form, was first taught for four years as a course in Dipl6me d'Etudes Approfondies Sciences des Materiaux, headed by Prof. J. -F. Petroff, at Paris VI University. The present extended version was written after discussions with Alia Margolina-Litvin. An essential feature of screening is its role in many different scientific areas. For that reason, the book is intended for use by a multidisciplinary readership. Reading it requires only a basic knowledge ofelectromagnetism, elementary quantum mechanics, and thermal physics. The spirit of the pre sentation is "simplicity first": new concepts (e. g. , dielectric function) are first introduced in their most elementary form and are progressively extended to more generality. The book stays at a basic level, and additional abstract developments that might have been included have been either omitted, rele gated to an appendix, or summarized in a qualitative manner. Apart from these restrictions, care has been taken to keep the presentation as rigorous as possible: the topics addressed are dealt with quantitatively, the results are given in mathematical form, and the interested reader should be able to fol low the algebra all the way through.

The idea of writing this book orIgmates from a suggestion of Bernard Sapoval: "Why don't you write it?" he asked. "Coulomb screening is a problem that everybody encounters in many different contexts, and there is no textbook that gathers the various aspects ofthe subject. " The content ofthe book, in a shorter form, was first taught for four years as a course in Dipl6me d'Etudes Approfondies Sciences des Materiaux, headed by Prof. J. -F. Petroff, at Paris VI University. The present extended version was written after discussions with Alia Margolina-Litvin. An essential feature of screening is its role in many different scientific areas. For that reason, the book is intended for use by a multidisciplinary readership. Reading it requires only a basic knowledge ofelectromagnetism, elementary quantum mechanics, and thermal physics. The spirit of the pre sentation is "simplicity first": new concepts (e. g. , dielectric function) are first introduced in their most elementary form and are progressively extended to more generality. The book stays at a basic level, and additional abstract developments that might have been included have been either omitted, rele gated to an appendix, or summarized in a qualitative manner. Apart from these restrictions, care has been taken to keep the presentation as rigorous as possible: the topics addressed are dealt with quantitatively, the results are given in mathematical form, and the interested reader should be able to fol low the algebra all the way through.