Potma’s book is an extraordinary and comprehensive addition to the genre of nonlinear optical microscopy textbooks. It fills a lacuna found in other textbooks by providing a clear, logical development from the fundamentals to the advanced topics. There is a consistent framework: light propagation, signal generation in the specimen, light detection and image analysis.
I appreciate the high pedagogical value of the text with a detailed mathematical description involving step-wise derivations of the equations and clear descriptions of the physical phenomena. The text is augmented with well-designed figures, many in color; and double-sided Feynman diagrams (Mukamel, Shen); many worked numerical examples; bibliographies; appendices and an index.
The broad treatment of the nonlinear phenomena begins with scalar treatment of the fields and progresses to vector fields (Braat and Török). Potma explains the advantages and limitations of the various techniques of nonlinear microscopy. His mathematical analysis is developed with his explanation of approximations and over what range they are valid. The progression from the classical models, to the semiclassical models, to perturbation expansions, to quantization of the electromagnetic field is clearly developed.
Review by Barry R. Masters, Fellow of AAAS, Optica, and SPIE.
The opinions expressed in the book review section are those of the reviewer and do not necessarily reflect those of OPN or its publisher, Optica (formerly OSA).