Bose-Einstein condensation of dilute gases is an exciting new field of interdisciplinary physics. The eight chapters in this volume introduce its theoretical and experimental foundations. The authors are lucid expositors who have also made outstanding contributions to the field. They include theorists Tony Leggett, Allan Griffin and Keith Burnett, and Nobel-Prize-winning experimentalist Bill Phillips. In addition to the introductory material, there are articles treating topics at the forefront of research, such as experimental quantum phase engineering of condensates, the ?superchemistry? of interacting atomic and molecular condensates, and atom laser theory.

Bose-Einstein condensation of dilute gases is an exciting new field of interdisciplinary physics. The eight chapters in this volume introduce its theoretical and experimental foundations. The authors are lucid expositors who have also made outstanding contributions to the field. They include theorists Tony Leggett, Allan Griffin and Keith Burnett, and Nobel-Prize-winning experimentalist Bill Phillips. In addition to the introductory material, there are articles treating topics at the forefront of research, such as experimental quantum phase engineering of condensates, the “superchemistry” of interacting atomic and molecular condensates, and atom laser theory.

The Eighth Rochester Conference on Coherence and Quantum Optics was held on the campus of the University of Rochester during the period June 13-16,2001. This volume contains the proceedings of the meeting. The meeting was preceded by an affiliated conference, the International Conference on Quantum Information, with some overlapping sessions on June 13. The proceedings of the affiliated conference will be published separately by the Optical Society of America. A few papers that were presented in common plenary sessions of the two conferences will be published in both proceedings volumes. More than 268 scientists from 28 countries participated in the week long discussions and presentations. This Conference differed from the previous seven in the CQO series in several ways, the most important of which was the absence of Leonard Mandel. Professor Mandel died a few months before the conference. A special memorial symposium in his honor was held at the end of the conference. The presentations from that symposium are included in this proceedings volume. An innovation, that we believe made an important contribution to the conference, was the inclusion of a series of invited lectures chaired by CQO founder Emil Wolf, reviewing the history of the fields of coherence and quantum optics before about 1970. These were given by three prominent participants in the development of the field, C. Cohen-Tannoudji, 1. F. Clauser, and R. I. Glauber.

Quantum chaos is becoming a very wide field that ranges from experiments to theoretical physics and purely mathematical issues. In view of this grand span, Nobel Symposium 116 focused on experiments and theory, and attempted to encourage interplay between them. There was emphasis on the interdisciplinary character of the subject, involving a broad range of subjects in physics, including condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, atomic physics and elementary particle physics. The physics involved in quantum chaos has much in common with acoustics, microwaves, optics, etc., and therefore the symposium also covered aspects of wave chaos in this broader sense. The program was structured according to the following areas: manifestations of classical chaos in quantum systems; transport phenomena; quantal spectra in terms of periodic orbits; semiclassical and random matrix approaches; quantum chaos in interacting systems; chaos and tunneling; wave-dynamic chaos. This important book constitutes the proceedings of the symposium.