The book "Nonlinear optics" by Robert W. Boyd is excellent. One can find essentially everything about nonlinear optics in this book. While this book is not written particularly for chemists (as the nonlinear media is not always consist of molecules), majority of the concepts and treatments are beneficial to chemists. The treatment is a combination … Continue reading Book recommendation #6 – nonlinear optics

Since I am going to join Prof. Shaul Mukamel group soon, I recently read his book  "Principles of nonlinear optical spectroscopy" again. This is an excellent book for nonlinear spectroscopy in molecules. Although I do think it is a little bit technical in the sense that it goes into the third-order dipole response functions w.r.t. the … Continue reading Book recommendation 5 – nonlinear spectroscopy

The book "Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals" by Feynman and Hibbs gives an excellent introduction to the path-integral view of quantum mechanics. This formulation of quantum mechanics, albeit conceptually equivalent to many other formulations, provides a unique perspective to solve problems. One example is that it builds a natural connection to statistical mechanics. And also … Continue reading Book Recommendation 4 – path integral view of quantum mechanics

I gave a talk at the ACS National meeting at Boston about our work on "Quantifying early time decoherence dynamics through fluctuations" in the information theory session honoring Prof. Levine.  Got excellent questions and comments from students and Prof. Nitzan!

Decoherence is a process where a pure quantum mechanical system (described by a wavefunction) reduces to a statistical mixture of states (described by a density matrix). It is of great relevance for a wide variety of problems in Chemistry and Physics such as quantum-classical transition, relaxation, energy and electron transfer, quantum information and computation. The … Continue reading Book Recommendation #3

We submitted a manuscript titled "optical properties of laser-dressed matter". In it, we introduce a generalized theory for the optical properties of matter driven far from equilibrium by light (i.e. laser-dressed matter), and use it to reveal some striking phenomena of the optical absorption properties of semiconductors driven by non-resonant light. Check it out!