Remarkable developments in the spectroscopy field regarding ultrashort pulse generation have led to the possibility of producing light pulses ranging from 50 to5 fs and frequency tunable from the near infrared to the ultraviolet range. Such pulses enable us to follow the coupling of vibrational motion to the electronic transitions in molecules and

Research involving the chemical physics of the inert or rare gases continues unabated. This small volume is meant to deal with advances that have occurred in three selected areas over the past decade. It forms a natural outgrowth of earlier reviews and volumes that have dealt almost exclusively with pure rare-gas solids. Originally, a single chapter was envisaged to cover the topic of alloys and impurities in solid rare gases. However, over the past ten years this single chapter spawned many offshoots and eventually the project became too large for a single volume. Thus the present book contains only a small subset of possbile topics involving rare-gas solids intentionally doped with impurities. Chapter 1 gives a brief overview of current research devoted to the rare gases. This is followed by a comprehensive, self-contained chapter dealing with the most recent developments in the area of interatomic inter actions. Chapter 3 is concerned with the lattice dynamics of rare-gas solids doped with an impurity which is either another rare-gas or a small molecule. The final chapter deals with the spectroscopy of vibrating and rotating di atomic impurities in rare-gas solids. The birth of this volume was not without its labour pains. I should like to take this opportunity to thank the various people who have at one time or another been involved throughout its gestation period. Clearly, many important topics are omitted from this volume.

This book summarizes several years of research carried out by a collaboration of many groups on ultrafast photochemical reactions. It emphasizes the analysis and characterization of the nuclear dynamics within molecular systems in various environments induced by optical excitations and the study of the resulting molecular dynamics by further interaction with an optical field.

The meeting was a forum on the 'state of the art' of the fundamental aspects and the applications of Coherent Antistokes Raman Scattering (CARS) and related nonlinear optic techniques.This volume contains the works of outstanding scientists from the most distinguished research centers of universities, public and private institutions in Europe and other countries, who work on the theory and application of nonlinear laser spectroscopic techniques to the study of gas combustion kinetics, noninterfering flame temperature measurements, high temperature reactors, plasmas and the exciton and vibrational dynamics in condensed phases.

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the Fifteenth International Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena held at the Asilomar Conference Grounds, Pacifc Grove, CA, USA, from July 31 – August 4, 2006. The Ultrafast P- nomena conferences are held every two years and provide a forum for disc- sion of the latest results in ultrafast optics and their applications in science and engineering. These meetings bring together researchers spanning several felds of science and engineering to discuss and debate the latest advances in ult- fast science. This unique forum provides a conduit for the greater dissemi- tion of the latest advances using ultrashort coherent pulses of light. More than 280 papers were presented. Signifcant progress in creating ever shorter pulses of light was reported in the attosecond range, with new applications in high harmonic generation and frequency comb metrology. Multidimensional sp- troscopy is rapidly evolving to provide new insights into quantum coherence and interactions in complex systems. Improvements in time resolved electron and x-ray diffraction provide better atomic scale perspectives on structural dynamics. These examples are but a small subset of the collected works ga- ered in this volume, which provides a valuable synopsis of the recent advances and impact of ultrafast technology in illuminating fundamental processes in physics, chemistry, and biology. There were 323 attendees at the meeting, more than one third of which were graduate and postdoctoral students. Increased s- dent attendance energized the proceedings.