| Preface | p. vii |
| From millisecond to attosecond laser pulses | p. 1 |
| From millisecond to nanosecond pulses | p. 3 |
| From nanosecond to femtosecond pulses | p. 4 |
| The attosecond regime | p. 8 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 11 |
| References | p. 11 |
| Conical diffraction: Hamilton's diabolical point at the heart of crystal optics | p. 13 |
| Introduction | p. 15 |
| Preliminaries: electromagnetism and the wave surface | p. 18 |
| The diabolical singularity: Hamilton's ray cone | p. 20 |
| The bright ring of internal conical refraction | p. 23 |
| Poggendorff's dark ring, Raman's bright spot | p. 26 |
| Belsky and Khapalyuk's exact paraxial theory of conical diffraction | p. 31 |
| Consequences of conical diffraction theory | p. 34 |
| Experiments | p. 41 |
| Concluding remarks | p. 43 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 45 |
| Paraxiality | p. 45 |
| Conical refraction and analyticity | p. 47 |
| References | p. 48 |
| Historical papers on the particle concept of light | p. 51 |
| Introduction | p. 53 |
| Einstein's light quanta | p. 56 |
| Planck's radiation law | p. 57 |
| The radiation laws of Rayleigh and Wien | p. 59 |
| Entropy of radiation | p. 61 |
| Hypothesis of light quanta | p. 62 |
| A glimpse of the wave-particle duality | p. 64 |
| Guiding fields for light quanta | p. 65 |
| Slater's virtual radiation field | p. 66 |
| The Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory: virtual fields without light quanta | p. 67 |
| Photons - a new kind of atoms? | p. 70 |
| Light quanta and matter waves | p. 70 |
| De Broglie's phase wave | p. 71 |
| De Broglie's world vector relation, J[micro] = hO[micro] | p. 73 |
| Wave equation for light corpuscles? | p. 76 |
| Photon wave mechanics | p. 79 |
| The light quantum theory of Landau and Peierls | p. 80 |
| Oppenheimer's note on light quanta | p. 86 |
| Eikonal equation for the photon | p. 91 |
| References | p. 93 |
| Field quantization in optics | p. 97 |
| Introduction | p. 99 |
| Background basics | p. 100 |
| Coherence theory: Classical and quantum | p. 104 |
| Semiclassical radiation theory | p. 111 |
| Non-classical light | p. 117 |
| Quantum noise | p. 126 |
| Remarks | p. 132 |
| Acknowledgement | p. 133 |
| References | p. 133 |
| The history of near-field optics | p. 137 |
| Introduction | p. 139 |
| The diffraction limit | p. 142 |
| Synge and Einstein | p. 145 |
| First developments | p. 150 |
| Surface plasmons and surface enhanced Raman scattering | p. 152 |
| Studies and applications of energy transfer | p. 153 |
| First developments of near-field optical microscopy | p. 155 |
| Theoretical near-field optics | p. 161 |
| Near-field scattering and field enhancement | p. 165 |
| Near-field optics and antenna theory | p. 170 |
| Concluding remarks | p. 174 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 175 |
| References | p. 175 |
| Light tunneling | p. 185 |
| Introduction: Newton and contemporaries | p. 187 |
| Classical diffraction theory | p. 195 |
| The optomechanical analogy | p. 201 |
| Modern developments in diffraction theory | p. 202 |
| The geometrical theory of diffraction | p. 202 |
| Fock's theory of diffraction | p. 203 |
| Exactly soluble models | p. 205 |
| Exact solutions | p. 205 |
| Mie scattering | p. 205 |
| The localization principle | p. 206 |
| Watson's transformation | p. 207 |
| CAM theory of Mie scattering | p. 209 |
| The Poisson sum formula | p. 209 |
| Basic tools of CAM theory | p. 210 |
| Impenetrable sphere | p. 211 |
| Structure of the wave function | p. 211 |
| Diffraction as tunneling | p. 213 |
| Near-critical scattering | p. 216 |
| The rainbow | p. 219 |
| The Debye expansion | p. 219 |
| The primary rainbow | p. 221 |
| Mie resonances and ripple fluctuations | p. 224 |
| Mie resonances | p. 224 |
| Ripple fluctuations | p. 225 |
| Light tunneling in clouds | p. 227 |
| The glory | p. 230 |
| Observations and early theories | p. 230 |
| Van De Hulst's theory | p. 233 |
| CAM theory: background contributions | p. 234 |
| CAM theory: Mie resonance contributions | p. 237 |
| Further applications and conclusions | p. 241 |
| Further applications | p. 241 |
| Conclusions | p. 244 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 245 |
| References | p. 245 |
| The influence of Young's interference experiment on the development of statistical optics | p. 251 |
| Introduction | p. 253 |
| Early history | p. 253 |
| Towards modern theories | p. 260 |
| Unification of the theories of polarization and coherence | p. 264 |
| Acknowledgement | p. 271 |
| References | p. 271 |
| Planck, photon statistics, and Bose-Einstein condensation | p. 275 |
| Introduction | p. 277 |
| Planck's black-body radiation law | p. 279 |
| Some ironical historical details concerning Planck | p. 279 |
| Thermodynamic background leading to the radiation law | p. 283 |
| Planck's introduction of the quantum of action | p. 287 |
| Planck's derivation of the blackbody radiation law | p. 290 |
| Some comments on the Planck derivation | p. 295 |
| Einstein's fluctuation argument | p. 296 |
| Einstein's A and B coefficients | p. 297 |
| Bose-Einstein condensation | p. 299 |
| Average condensate particle number | p. 301 |
| Fluctuations in the number of particles in the condensate | p. 304 |
| The quantum theory of the laser | p. 304 |
| Bose-Einstein condensation: laser phase-transition analogy | p. 310 |
| Condensate master equation | p. 310 |
| Low-temperature approximation | p. 312 |
| Quasithermal approximation for non-condensate occupations | p. 315 |
| Squeezing, noise reduction and BEC fluctuations | p. 317 |
| Hybrid approach to condensate fluctuations | p. 321 |
| Acknowledgements | p. 325 |
| Mean condensate particle number and its variance for weakly interacting BEC | p. 325 |
| References | p. 327 |
| Author index for Volume 50 | p. 331 |
| Subject index for Volume 50 | p. 343 |
| Contents of previous volumes | p. 347 |
| Cumulative index - Volumes 1-50 | p. 359 |
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