Optically Polarized Atoms

Marcis Auzinsh is the Rector of the University of Latvia, where he was previously Chairman of the Senate, Dean of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics, and Head of Center of Excellence for Basic Research in Nanoscale Physics and Application. He has held visiting positions at universities around the world, and is a Member of Executive Commitee of the European Physical Society.Dmitry Budker took his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, where he won the 1994 American Physical Society Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics. He is now a Professor of Physics there. In 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and in 2009 became a American Physical Society Outstanding Referee.Simon M. Rochester is a Graduate Student Researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, where he holds a NASA Earth System Science Fellowship.

I highly recommend Optically Polarized Atoms and will probably use it next time I teach my graduate course. [...] The book is specifically intended for use in a one-semester course in which the symmetry and angular-momentum aspects of atomic structure and laser-atom interactions are central. [...] The level of detail and the clarity of explanations are admirable.

• I: INTRODUCTION TO LIGHT-ATOM INTERACTIONS ; 1. Introduction ; 2. Atomic States ; 3. A bit of angular-momentum theory ; 4. Atoms in external electric and magnetic fields ; 5. Polarized atoms ; 6. Polarized light ; 7. Atomic transitions ; 8. Coherence in atomic systems ; 9. Optical pumping ; 10. Light-atom interaction observed in transmitted light ; II: ADVANCED TOPICS ; 11. Nonlinear magneto-optical rotation ; 12. Perturbative analysis of light-atom interactions ; 13. Polarization effects in transitions with partially resolved hyperfine structure ; 14. The effect of hyperfine splitting on nonlinear magneto-optical rotation ; 15. Spectral properties of excitation light; ground-state coherence effects revisited ; 16. Collapse and revival in quantum beats ; 17. Nuclear quadrupole resonance and alignment-to-orientation conversion ; 18. Selective addressing of high-rank polarization moments ; 19. Tensor structure of the DC- and AC-Stark polarizabilities ; 20. Photoionization of polarized atoms with polarized light ; Appendix A Constants, units and notations ; Appendix B Units of energy, frequency and wavelength ; Appendix C Reference data for hydrogen and the alkali atoms ; Appendix D Nonlinear magneto-optical rotation with hyperfine structure ; Appendix E The Atomic Density Matrix software package