This concise and carefully developed text offers a reader friendly guide to the basics of time-resolved spectroscopy with an emphasis on experimental implementation. The authors carefully explain and relate for the reader how measurements are connected to the core physical principles. They use the time-dependent wave packet as a building block for understanding quantum dynamics, progressively advancing to more complex topics. The topics are discussed in paired sections, one discussing the theory and the next presenting the related experimental methods. A wide range of readers including students and newcomers to the field will gain a clear and practical understanding of how to measure aspects of molecular dynamics such as wave packet motion, intramolecular vibrational relaxation, and electron-electron coupling, and how to describe such measurements mathematically.

It is very rewarding for an author to know that his book is to be translated into another language and become available to a new circle of readers. The study of the optics and spectroscopy of activated crys stals has continued to grow. The development and first remarkable successes of light scattering by impurities in crystals have occurred in the comparatively short time since my original book was sent to press. After experimental observation of the sidebands (wings) in impurity infrared absorption spectra, interest in these spectra as a source of information on the vibrations of a crystal in the neigh borhood of an impurity has increased significantly. Therefore, in addition to making minor corrections, r have supplemented the section on the effect of anharmonicity (section25) and written two new sections and another Appendix on infrared ab sorption, scattering of light by an impurity center in a crystal, and the adiabatic approximation, respectively. The bibliography has received several dozen new entries, but it nevertheless does not pretend to be complete. r hope that the American edition is useful and in some de gree corresponds to the general deepening of our physical under standing of solids.

Philosophy of physics title by highly regarded author, fully revised for this paperback edition.

New edition of biochemistry textbook which introduces principles and techniques used in undergraduate practical classes.