Optically Polarized Atoms: Understanding Light–Atom Interactions , Marcis Auzinsh, Dmitry Budker, and Simon M. Rochester, New York, 2010. $79.95 (376 pp.). ISBN 978-0-19-956512-2
The teaching of atomic structure has undergone something of a metamorphosis in the past decade or so. Traditionally, the subject would be served to third- or fourth-year undergraduate students in a one-semester course—sometimes with a laboratory component as added seasoning—as a means to exercise their recently acquired quantum mechanics skills. The course usually relied on such texts as E. U. Condon and G. H. Shortley’s classic The Theory of Atomic Spectra (Cambridge University Press, 1935) or B. H. Bransden and C. J. Joachain’s compendious Physics of Atoms and Molecules (Benjamin Cummings, 2nd edition, 2003). And the syllabus could be summarized as “one, two, many”: hydrogen first, then helium, followed by multielectron atoms, and rounded off with fine structure and the Zeeman effect.
However, with...
