This volume contains the lectures and communications presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop (NATO ARW 900857) which was held May 5-10, 1991 at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. A scientific commitee made up of P.P. Lambropoulos (USC & Crete), P.8. Corkum (NRC, Ottawa), and H. B. vL. van den Heuvell (FOM, Amsterdam) guided the organizers, A.D. Bandrauk (Sherbrooke) and S.C. Wallace (Toronto) in preparing a programme which would cover the latest advances in the field of atom and molecule laser interactions. Since the last meeting held in July 1987 on "Atomic and Molecular Processes with Short Intense Laser Pulses", NATO ASI vol 1718 (Plenum Press 1988), considerable progress has been made in understanding high intensity effects on atoms and the concomitant coherence effects. After four years, the emphasis is now shifting more to molecules. The present volume represents therefore this trend with four sections covering the main interests of research endeavours in this area: i) Atoms in Intense Laser-Fields ii) Molecules in Intense Laser Fields iii) Atomic Coherences iv) Molecular Coherences The experience developed over the years in multiphoton atomic processes has been very useful and is the main source of our understanding of similar processes in molecules. Thus ATI (above threshold ionization) has been found to occur in molecules as well as a new phenomenon, ATD (above-threshold dissociation). Laser-induced avoided crossings of molecular electronic surfaces is also now entering the current language of high intensity molecular processes.

This text presents the major advances in both intense laser fields phenomena and laser control of photochemical reactions - highlighting experimental and theoretical research on the interaction of simple molecules with intense laser fields. The book introduces new concepts such as above-threshold ionization (ATI), above-threshold dissociation (ATD), laser-induced avoided crossings, and coherent control.

This book contains the lectures delivered at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on the "Intersubband Transistions in Quantum Wells" held in Cargese, France, between the t 9 h and the 14th of September 1991. The urge for this Workshop was justified by the impressive growth of work dealing with this subject during the last two or three years. Indeed, thanks to recent progresses of epitaxial growth techniques, such as Molecular Beam Epitaxy, it is now possible to realize semiconductor layers ( e.g. GaAs) with thicknesses controlled within one atomic layer, sandwiched between insulating layers (e.g. AlGaAs). When the semiconducting layer is very thin, i.e. less than 15 nm, the energy of the carriers corresponding to their motion perpendicular to these layers is quantized, forming subbands of allowed energies. Because of the low effective masses in these semiconducting materials, the oscillator strengths corresponding to intersubband transitions are extremely large and quantum optical effects become giant in the 5 - 20 ~ range: photoionization, optical nonlinearities, ... Moreover, a great theoretical surprise is that - thanks to the robustness of the effective mass theory - these quantum wells are a real life materialization of our old text book one-dimensional quantum well ideal. Complex physical phenomena may then be investigated on a simple model system.

The Nato Advanced Study Institute "Phase Transitions in Liquid Crystals" was held May 2-12, 1991, in Erice, Sicily. This was the 16th conference organized by the International School of Quantum Electronics, under the auspices of the "Ettore Majorana" Centre for Scientific Culture. The subject of "Liquid Crystals" has made amazing progress since the last ISQE Course on this subject in 1985. The present Proceedings give a tutorial introduction to today's most important areas, as well as a review of current results by leading researchers. We have brought together some of the world's acknowledged experts in the field to summarize both the present state of their research and its background. Most of the lecturers attended all the lectures and devoted their spare hours to stimulating discussions. We would like to thank them all for their admirable contributions. The Institute also took advantage of a very active audience; most of the students were active researchers in the field and contributed with discussions and seminars. Some of these student seminars are also included in these Proceedings. We did not modify the original manuscripts in editing this book, but we did group them according to the following topics: 1) "Theoretical Foundations"; 2) "Thermotropic Liquid Crystals"; 3) "Ferroelectric Liquid Crystals"; 4) "Polymeric Liquid Crystals"; and 5) "Lyotropic Liquid Crystals".