Nonlinear Optics ― A Student's Perspective

*** Note to instructors. This book is available free of charge as an eBook on Perusall, the peer discussion forum. *** This unique textbook on nonlinear optics is written by award-winning teacher and researcher, Regents Professor Mark G. Kuzyk of Washington State University. It is ideal for a class or as a reference, and can be used for self study. Exercises are provided as material is introduced to reinforce concepts. The book's approach mirrors the author's philosophy that a firm grounding in the fundamentals will allow the student to tackle any topic. As such, many topics are left out while others are covered in depth to develop the intuition. Physics is meant to be savored, so this book should be consumed slowly with attention to the deeper meaning of the topics presented. The rest will naturally fall into place.Material not normally discussed in standard textbooks that is covered here includes the introduction of second quantization and how it can be applied to Feynman-like diagrams for calculating nonlinear susceptibilities. Dirac notation is introduced to facilitate the development of the theory with finesse. This approach provides a pictorial representation of light-matter interactions that leads to a more intuitive understanding of phenomena such as difference frequency generation, cascading and stimulated emission. An introduction to Python programming and solving simple numerical problems is briefly presented to get the student up to speed. In addition to unique problem sets that are not typically assigned in a course on nonlinear optics, a series of numerical problems are provided to both hone coding skills (the student can code in any language) and shed light on problems that have no analytical solution.Other unique topics covered are magnetic susceptibilities, nonlinear optics at negative absolute temperature, epsilon near zero materials, surface plasmons in various spatial dimensions, aperiodic nonlinear gratings to control the effective nonlinearity, nonlinear optics of single molecules, self-consistent methods for treating cascading as a local field and an in-depth derivation of optical multi-stability.This book is a total overhaul of "Lecture Notes in Nonlinear Optics: a student's perspective." Previous material is extensively augmented and rewritten for clarity and lots of new material has been added. While this newer book tries to take a student's perspective, it does not have the same raw narrative as the previous volume. Being so different in approach and content, it should be considered a new book rather than an updated edition of the previous one. If the more polished approach is not your thing, then go for the older book, which will remain available indefinitely.