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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2009

Dieter Suter
Affiliation:
Swiss Federal University (ETH), Zürich
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Summary

Light interacting with material substances is one of the prerequisites for life on our planet. More recently, it has become important for many technological applications, from CD players and optical communication to gravitational-wave astronomy. Physicists have therefore always tried to improve their understanding of the observed effects. The ultimate goal of such a development is always a microscopic description of the relevant processes. For a long time, this description was identical with a perturbation analysis of the material system in the external fields. More than a hundred years ago, such a microscopic theory was developed in terms of oscillating dipoles. After the development of quantum mechanics, these dipoles were replaced by quantum mechanical two-level systems, and this is still the most frequently used description.

However, the physical situation has changed qualitatively in the last decades. The development of intense, narrowband or pulsed lasers as tunable light sources has provided not only a new tool that allows much more detailed investigation, but also the observation of qualitatively new phenomena. These effects can no longer be analysed in the form of a perturbation expansion. One consequence is that the actual number of quantum mechanical states involved in the interaction becomes relevant. It is therefore not surprising that many newly discovered effects are associated with the details of the level structure of the medium used in the experiment. Two popular examples are the discovery of sub-Doppler laser cooling and the development of magnetooptical traps, which rely on the presence of angular momentum substates.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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  • Preface
  • Dieter Suter, Swiss Federal University (ETH), Zürich
  • Book: The Physics of Laser-Atom Interactions
  • Online publication: 13 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511524172.001
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  • Preface
  • Dieter Suter, Swiss Federal University (ETH), Zürich
  • Book: The Physics of Laser-Atom Interactions
  • Online publication: 13 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511524172.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Preface
  • Dieter Suter, Swiss Federal University (ETH), Zürich
  • Book: The Physics of Laser-Atom Interactions
  • Online publication: 13 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511524172.001
Available formats
×