This chapter is the introduction to this book, its motivation and its design and how it can be applied to the design of undergraduate and graduate courses on quantum optics and superconducting quantum circuits.
Scope and aims of this book Quantum optics is one of the liveliest fields in physics at present. While it has been a dominant research field for at least two decades, with much graduate activity, in the past few years it has started to impact the undergraduate curriculum. This book developed from courses we have taught to final year undergraduates and beginning graduate students at Imperial College London and City University of New York. There are plenty of good research monographs in this field, but we felt that there was a genuine need for a straightforward account for senior undergraduates and beginning postgraduates, which stresses basic concepts. This is a field which attracts the brightest students at present, in part because of the extraordinary progress in the field (e.g. the implementation of teleportation, quantum cryptography, Schrödinger cat states, Bell violations of local realism and the like). We hope that this book provides an accessible introduction to this exciting subject. Our aim was to write an elementary book on the essentials of quantum optics directed to an audience of upper-level undergraduates, assumed to have suffered through a course in quantum mechanics, and for first-or second-year graduate students interested in eventually pursuing research in this area. The material we introduce is not simple, and will be a challenge for undergraduates and beginning graduate students, but we have tried to use the most straightforward approaches. Nevertheless, there are parts of the text that the reader will find more challenging than others.
Abstract This book is an introduction to the techniques of many-body quantum theory with a large number of applications to condensed matter physics. The basic idea of the book is to provide a self-contained formulation of the theoretical framework without losing mathematical rigor, while at the same time providing physical motivation and examples. The examples are taken from applications in electron systems and transport theory. On the formal side, the book covers an introduction to second quantization, many-body Green's function, finite temperature Feynman diagrams and bosonization. The applications include traditional transport theory in bulk as well as mesoscopic systems, where both the Landau-Büttiker formalism and recent developments in correlated transport phenomena in mesoscopic systems and nano-structures are covered. Other topics include interacting electron gases, plasmons, electron-phonon interactions, superconductivity and a final chapter on one-dimensional systems where a detailed treatment of Luttinger liquid theory and bosonization techniques is given. Having grown out of a set of lecture notes, and containing many pedagogical exercises, this book is designed as a textbook for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course, and is also well suited for self-study.