Preface

Abstract

Extract Well, it has been quite an adventure so far. It was my good fortune to be drawn into the theory of ultrafast spectroscopy early in the femtosecond era, due in large part to the prior influence of Rick Heller’s wave-packet descriptions of continuous-wave spectroscopies (thank you, Laurie!); Bob Silbey’s coaching during the 1980’s, when multi-pulse optical-phase-controlled picosecond measurements were first under consideration; and the pleasure and long-term benefit of collaboration with Norbert Scherer, Stuart Rice, Graham Fleming, and other co-workers at Chicago. At that stage, one had to find one’s own way, and for me that way started with ordinary time-dependent perturbation theory as I’d learned it in Bob Harris’s (personally life-changing) quantum mechanics classes at Berkeley, coupled with a desire to illuminate the dynamics underlying optical measurements in terms of the evolving nuclear wave packets that accompany each molecular electronic state. It hadn’t occurred to me to write this book, or any other, but in 2011 I was in a bit of a hiatus that came at the end of a multi-year group-reading project with co-workers at Oregon on L&L’s Electrodynamics of Continuous Media. At Bob Mazo’s suggestion, Sonke Adlung from Oxford University Press called sometime that year and asked if I might like to write a book. It happened that I was running a fever at the time and said, “Sure!”