Principles of Nonlinear Optical Spectroscopy: 6 (Oxford Series on Optical and Imaging Sciences, 6) - Softcover

* This review takes up two fields (too long to fit into one) "In this book [Mukamel] has brought his many contributions together and has woven a fabric that brilliantly ties fundamental principles to experiment with an elegant formalism. This book is of extraordinary value to both the advanced student and researcher in the field. "[It] is written in such a way that it serves as both an advanced text as well as a reference book for the experimentalist. Prof. Mukamel has develped a very powerful unified correlation approach that is applicable to condensed phase systems as well the gas phase. The book provides Green's function techniques which are useful for interpreting nonlinear spectra of frequency and time domain nonlinear spectra of frequency and time domain complex systems. Several applications of current interest are treated in the book including Raman spectrocopies, photon echoes, pump-probe, hole burning, polarization spectroscopies, and impulsive effects.

"Possibly the most important contribution made by this book is that it brings together the techniques of nonlinear spectroscopies with analytical and conceptual foundations that make an important step toward creating a new science for probing the properties of matter."―Charles V. Shank, Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

"I can recommend this book wholeheartedly both as a textbook in a graduate course in modern fast spectroscopy and as a reference monograph for researchers in the field."―Robert J. Silbey, Journal of the American Chemical Society

This textbook presents a systematic and unifying viewpoint for a wide class of nonlinear spectroscopic techniques in time domain and frequency domain. It is directed towards active researchers in physics, optics, chemistry, and materials science, as well as graduate students who enter this complex and rapidly developing field.
Nonlinear optical interactions of laser fields with matter provide powerful spectroscopic tools for the understanding of microscopic interactions and dynamic processes. One of the major obstacles facing researchers in this field, however, is the flood of experimental techniques and terminologies, which create a serious language barrier. The general microscopic correlation function approach to the nonlinear optical response developed in this book is essential for understanding the relationships among different techniques and a comparison of their information content, the design of new measurements, and for a systematic comparison of the optical response of different systems such as dyes in solutions, atoms and molecules in the gas phase, liquids, molecular aggregates and superlatives, and semiconductor nanostructures. The approach is based on formulating the nonlinear response by representing the state of matter by the density matrix and following its evolution on Liouville space. Current active research areas such as femtosecond time-domain techniques, semi-classical and wave-packet dynamics, pulse shaping, pulse locking, exciton confinement, and the interplay of electronic, nuclear and field coherence are emphasized.
The material has been developed from the author's highly successful interdisciplinary course at the University of Rochester attended by science and engineering graduate students.