Optically Polarized Atoms: Understanding light-atom interactions

Optically Polarized Atoms is addressed at upper-level undergraduate and graduate students involved in research in atomic, molecular, and optical Physics. It will also be useful to researchers practicing 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-optical effects. 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.

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.