Quantum Optics: An Introduction (Oxford Master Series in Physics)

As an undergraduate electrical engineer, I found this book to be a a welcoming introduction to quantum optics. It prefaced complex concepts with a brief review of fundamental concepts to set a solid stage for each topic. Thoughtful and well-written, this is one of the best textbooks I've read--went hand in hand with semiconductor physics studies.

Fox does a great job explaining a complex and dense field from an intuitive and experimental standpoint. I read this book after one term of 1-D introductory Q.M. and everything made sense. The experiments and set-ups described throughout the book are a great tool and were particularly handy since I was using the book to get ready for a summer internship in a Quantum Optics group. The only downside is that the book is quite lacking from a theoretical standpoint. If you are a bit more comfortable with Q.M., say at the level of Shankar, Liboff, or Sakuri, try Knight instead. Nonetheless, this is a great book.

Easy to understand, despite having no Quantum Mechanics background. It had a very clear language for such a complex topic.

At last we have a text that provides a comprehensive introduction to quantum optics for the beginner - both theory and experiment - and one which takes you through many of the most recent concepts and potential applications in computation, cryptography and teleportation etc.A feature of this text is the clear explanations and carefully explained jargon - it's NOT just mostly a collection of math like some other supposedly introductory texts.If you want to find out what quantum optics is all about - this is a great book to start with.

This review is not of the book itself, which I have not yet read. It's about the Kindle edition for the iPad. This seems to have been prepared as an afterthought.It has terrible formatting, with huge spaces in between words and/or symbols. Also, the text seems to have been scanned, and the scanning is so poor that it is almost illegible. This is especially important since this book is filled with mathematical equations, which demand very crisp reproduction. A great disservice to an author who seems to have written an excellent book. It proves that authors need to be vigilant, holding the publisher's feet to the fire.It's possible that the Kindle edition for Kindle readers doesn't have these problems. It would have been so much better to sell the PDF, though I suspect they don't do that because of copyright concerns as PDF can be shared.

This is really a very fun book. It strikes a remarkable balance between trying to hit the main points of the quantum theory of light (and atom-light interactions) and actual experiments to test the theory.Frankly, this is one of the first real books that I have read in my education thus far that gets into the actual details of experiments designed to test the principles of quantum mechanics in general. It is very exciting to finally see some of the remarkable ideas of quantum theory able to be tested with actual experiments in the lab, and this book really gives the reader a strong sense of how the real modern experiments were carried out.As another incredible 'reward,' the chapters on quantum cryptography, quantum computing, and bell's theorem, are simply just incredible. You really feel that you have a solid grasp of the fundaments of how quantum computing works, how bell's theorem has been tested, etc.I really wish this book had been introduced to me earlier in my self-study of quantum physics. It really feels like my 'reward' after long intense study of the fundaments of quantum theory from other books (but most of which failed to convincingly describe actual experiments that could be carried out in the lab).It is important to keep reading through the book and as needed go back to some of the more trickier points. Some of the introductory chapters became dense and somewhat advanced for an undergraduate level. With some occasional external reading (eg chapters in optics book by Hecht),these materials became more understandable. some of it needs to be bypassed on an initial read so the reader doesn't get discouraged and quit reading.

The book is directed to undergrads, and that seems like a fair description. It is perhaps a bit elementary for more advanced students and probably would not be described as encyclopedic. Still, it is quite useful and the presentation seems very clear and easy to understand.