序言 This book is primarily intended to accompany an undergraduate coursein atomic physics. It covers the core material and a selection of moreadvanced topics that illustrate current research in this field. The firstsix chapters describe the basic principles of atomic structure, startingin Chapter 1 with a review of the classical ideas. Inevitably the dis-cussion of the structure of hydrogen and helium in these early chaptershas considerable overlap with introductory quantum mechanics courses,but an understanding of these simple systems provides the basis for thetreatment of more complex atoms in later chapters. Chapter 7 on theinteraction of radiation with atoms marks the transition between theearlier chapters on structure and the second half of the book which cov-ers laser spectroscopy, laser cooling, Bose-Einstein condensation of di-lute atomic vapours, matter-wave interferometry and ion trapping. Theexciting new developments in laser cooling and trapping of atoms andBose-Einstein condensation led to Nobel prizes in 1997 and 2001, respec-tively. Some of the other selected topics show the incredible precisionthat has been achieved by measurements in atomic physics experiments.This theme is taken up in the final chapter that looks at quantum infor-mation processing from an atomic physics perspective; the techniquesdeveloped for precision measurements on atoms and ions give exquisitecontrol over these quantum systems and enable elegant new ideas fromquantum computation to be implemented.
The book assumes a knowledge of quantum mechanics equivalent to anintroductory university course, e.g. the solution of the SchrSdinger equa-tion in three dimensions and perturbation theory. This initial knowledgewill be reinforced by many examples in this book; topics generally re-garded as difficult at the undergraduate level are explained in some de-tail, e.g. degenerate perturbation theory. The hierarchical structure ofatoms is well described by perturbation theory since the different layersof structure within atoms have considerably different energies associatedwith them, and this is reflected in the names of the gross, fine and hyper-fine structures. In the early chapters of this book, atomic physics mayappear to be simply applied quantum mechanics, i.e. we write down theHamiltonian for a given interaction and solve the SchrSdinger equationwith suitable approximations. I hope that the study of the more ad-vanced material in the later chapters will lead to a more mature anddeeper understanding of atomic physics. Throughout this book the ex-perimental basis of atomic physics is emphasised and it is hoped that the reader will gain some factual knowledge of atomic spectra.