Optically Polarized Atoms: Understanding Light–Atom Interactions

Optically Polarized Atoms: Understanding Light–Atom Interactions , Marcis Auzinsh, Dmitry Budker, and Simon M. Rochester, New York, 2010. $79.95 (376 pp.). ISBN 978-0-19-956512-2

The teaching of atomic structure has undergone something of a metamorphosis in the past decade or so. Traditionally, the subject would be served to third- or fourth-year undergraduate students in a one-semester course—sometimes with a laboratory component as added seasoning—as a means to exercise their recently acquired quantum mechanics skills. The course usually relied on such texts as E. U. Condon and G. H. Shortley’s classic The Theory of Atomic Spectra (Cambridge University Press, 1935) or B. H. Bransden and C. J. Joachain’s compendious Physics of Atoms and Molecules (Benjamin Cummings, 2nd edition, 2003). And the syllabus could be summarized as “one, two, many”: hydrogen first, then helium, followed by multielectron atoms, and rounded off with fine structure and the Zeeman effect.

However, with crowded schedules, and with new and exciting branches of physics demanding their place in the syllabus, such courses nowadays seem to be more the exception and less the rule. Atomic physics, rather than being an end unto itself, is now valued as an essential tool in various subfields. Thus courses aimed at advanced undergraduates or beginning graduate students are concentrating on aspects of atomic physics needed to carry out experiments with ultracold atoms confined in various traps and laser-cooled to unprecedentedly low temperatures. For example, a course may feature the structure of alkali-like atoms and their interactions with lasers and static electromagnetic fields; I have taught such a course to graduate students at the University of Toronto for the past five years.

Modern textbooks suitable for this new approach are few. Perhaps the best introductory work is C. J. Foot’s Atomic Physics (Oxford University Press, 2005), which provides a good survey but not the level of detail graduate students need for a quantitative mastery of atomic systems’ intricate physics. Necessary details can be found in more complex monographs, such as Igor Sobelman’s Atomic Spectra and Radiative Transitions (Springer, 2nd edition, 1992), but such tomes are not suitable for classroom use.

Optically Polarized Atoms: Understanding Light–Atom Interactions by Marcis Auzinsh, Dmitry Budker, and Simon M. Rochester aims to fill the void. 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 first half of the book covers the basic material, with an emphasis on applications of the quantum theory of angular momentum. The second half contains 10 reasonably self-contained chapters discussing specific applications: It might be used in a longer course to illustrate the first half’s material. The level of detail and the clarity of explanation are admirable.

I do have a few niggles: The authors’ use of Gaussian units, which most students today do not understand, is an irritating distraction, and the absence of end-of-chapter problems is similarly irksome to instructors, who are forced to devise their own. Nonetheless, I highly recommend Optically Polarized Atoms and will probably use it next time I teach my graduate course.