Optically Polarized Atoms

An accessible textbook for students and practitioners of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics. It will be useful for scientists working with lasers. The book comes with an extensive freely downloadable software package and many colourful and animated illustrations. Additional materials are available for instructors.

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 deals with the physics of spin-polarized free electrons. Many aspects of this rapidly expanding field have been treated in review articles, but to date a self-contained monograph has not been available. In writing this book, I have tried to oppose the current trend in science that sees specialists writing primarily for like-minded specialists, and even physicists in closely related fields understanding each other less than they are inclined to admit. I have attempted to treat a modern field of physics in a style similar to that of a textbook. The presentation should be intelligible to readers at the graduate level, and while it may demand concentration, I hope it will not require decipher ing. If the reader feels that it occasionally dwells upon rather elementary topics, he should remember that this pedestrian excursion is meant to be reasonably self-contained. It was, for example, necessary to give a simple introduction to the Dirac theory in order to have a basis for the discussion of Mott scattering-one of the most important techniques in polarized electron studies.

This book explains the theory and methods by which gas molecules can be polarized by light, a subject of considerable importance for what it tells us about the electronic structure of molecules and properties of chemical reactions. Starting with a brief review of molecular angular momentum, the text goes on to consider resonant absorption, fluorescence, photodissociation and photoionization, as well as collisions and static fields. A variety of macroscopic effects are considered, among them angular distribution and the polarization of emitted light, ground state depopulation, laser-induced dichroism, the effect of collisions and external magnetic and electric field effects. Most examples in the book are for diatomic molecules, but symmetric-top polyatomic molecules are also included. The book concludes with a short appendix of essential formulae, tables for vector calculus, spherical functions, Wigner rotation matrices, Clebsch-Gordan coefficients, and methods for expansion over irreducible tensors.

This book is an in-depth review of experiment and theory on electric-dipole polarizabilities. It is broad in scope, encompassing atomic, molecular, and cluster polarizabilities. Both static and dynamic polarizabilities are treated (in the absence of absorption) and a full tensor picture of the polarizability is used. Traditional experimental techniques for measuring electric polarizabilities are described in detail. Recently developed experimental methods, including light forces, position-sensitive time-of-flight deflection, and atom interferometry, are also extensively discussed. Theoretical techniques for calculating polarizabilities are reviewed, including a discussion on the use of Gaussian basis sets. Many important comparisons between theory and experiment are summarized in an extensive set of tables of polarizabilities of important atoms, molecules, and clusters. Applications of polarizabilities to many areas of chemistry and physics are described, including optics, chemical structure, interactions of gases and particles with surfaces, and the interaction of molecules with light. The emphasis is on a lucid presentation of the ideas and results with up-to-date discussions on important applications such as optical tweezers and nanostructure fabrication. This book provides an excellent overview of the importance of polarizabilities in understanding the physical, electronic, and optical properties of particles in a regime that goes from free atoms to condensed-phase clusters.

This is the first volume of textbooks on atomic, molecular and optical physics, aiming at a comprehensive presentation of this highly productive branch of modern physics as an indispensable basis for many areas in physics and chemistry as well as in state of the art bio- and material-sciences. It primarily addresses advanced students (including PhD students), but in a number of selected subject areas the reader is lead up to the frontiers of present research. Thus even the active scientist is addressed. This volume 1 provides the canonical knowledge in atomic physics together with basics of modern spectroscopy. Starting from the fundamentals of quantum physics, the reader is familiarized in well structured chapters step by step with the most important phenomena, models and measuring techniques. The emphasis is always on the experiment and its interpretation, while the necessary theory is introduced from this perspective in a compact and occasionally somewhat heuristic manner, easy to follow even for beginners.

Covering the most important knowledge on optical pumping of atoms, this ready reference is backed by numerous examples of modelling computation for optical pumped systems. The authors show for the first time that modern scientific computing software makes it practical to analyze the full, multilevel system of optically pumped atoms. To make the discussion less abstract, the authors have illustrated key points with sections of MATLAB codes. To make most effective use of contemporary mathematical software, it is especially useful to analyze optical pumping situations in the Liouville space of density matrices rather than in the traditional Hilbert space of wave functions. This unique approach allows modelling under most experimental conditions, e.g. - magnetic resonance with one or more oscillating magnetic fields, - coherent population trapping or CPG resonances induce by modulated light, - magneto-optic forces on multilevel atoms, - various spin-relaxation processes etc. The reader of this book should have a basic understanding of quantum mechanics, atomic physics, optics and magnetic resonance. Some familiarity with MATLAB would be helpful to a reader interested in writing specialized programs based on the illustrative codes to analyze specialized optical-pumping phenomena.

Advances in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics