In response to the explosion of theories and experiments since the appearance of the first edition, the author has revised and expanded his basic text. New sections include up-to-date discussions of multiphoton ionization, and electron-atom and atom-atom scattering in laser fields, reaffirming the work's position as the standard introduction to the field.
This book provides an introduction to the body of theory shared by several branches of modern optics--nonlinear optics, quantum electronics, laser physics, and quantum optics--with an emphasis on quantum and statistical aspects. It is intended for well prepared undergraduate and graduate students in physics, applied physics, electrical engineering, and chemistry who seek a level of preparation of sufficient maturity to enable them to follow the specialized literature.
Introduction and handbook to high-power laser-matter interaction, laser generated plasma, nonlinear waves, particle acceleration, nonlinear optics, nonlinear dynamics, radiation transport, it provides a systematic review of the major results and developments of the past 25 years.
This book is addressed to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students involved in research in atomic, molecular, and optical physics. It will also be useful to researchers practising in this field. It gives an intuitive, yet sufficiently detailed and rigorous introduction to light-atom interactions with a particular emphasis on the symmetry aspects of the interaction, especially those associated with the angular momentum of atoms and light. The book will enable readers to carry out practical calculations on their own, and is richly illustrated with examples drawn from current research topics, such as resonant nonlinear magneto-opticals. The book comes with a software package for a variety of atomic-physics calculations and further interactive examples that is freely downloadable from the book's web page, as well as additional materials (such as power-point presentations) available to instructors who adopt the text for their courses.
This book grew out of a graduate course given in the Physics Department of the City College of New York for the first time during the 1976-1977 academic year and a series of lectures given at the Catholic University of Louvain, at Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium during the Spring and Summer of 1977. I am indebted to Professor F. Brouillard and the DYMO group at that institution for the stimulation and hospitality provided during that period. In both cases, the lectures were at a level that assumed only a knowledge of elementary quantum mechanics of a typical first-year grad uate course. I have tried to continue that level of discussion in this book and to make it self-contained for any discussions that go beyond that level. In some sections of the book, the problems dealt with are too complicated to provide the entire description here. In that case, references to the original work are given.
Due to the rapid progress in laser technology a wealth of novel fundamental and applied applications of lasers in atomic and plasma physics have become possible. This book focuses on the interaction of high intensity lasers with matter. It reviews the state of the art of high power laser sources, intensity laser-atom and laser-plasma interactions, laser matter interaction at relativistic intensities, and QED with intense lasers.
This book deals specifically with the manipulation of atoms by laser light, describing the focusing, channeling and reflection of atoms by laser fields. It also describes the potential fields required to cause the phase change of the wave function necessary for the atomic interactions to occur.