Optical Magnetometry 1st Edition

For anyone working in atomic magnetometry or studying the subject this is an excellent book. Pay close attention to chapter two.

This book presents the extensive and practical knowledge of many leaders in a wide range of topics that extend over almost every conceivable aspect of optical magnetometry. If this is your first encounter with optical magnetometry, the book’s core principles and its extensions into applications will hold your attention if you are persistent but the road between chapters is a bit bumpy. As an edited book that deals at its core with the coherency of spins in quantum states and spin dependent forces, it does fall short of maintaining coherency from chapter to chapter. So although its “Preface” describes the 20 chapters as pedagogical, those chapters are wanting as a teaching package because of a lack of coherency between chapters but excel at being sources of key concepts and examples of applications. Coherency is also lost in a mix of units as, for example, in the case of tesla per square root hertz in one chapter and gauss per square root hertz in another. Readers with experience in the field may find some surprising and gratifying revelations over the physical scale of topics from small scale microfabricated atomic magnetometers and optical magnetometry with nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond to large scale planetary and interplanetary magnetic fields. A few chapters are far too short and could do better as perhaps books themselves and those chapters include Chapter 2, Quantum noise in atomic magnetometers, and Chapter 3, Quantum noise, squeezing, and entanglement in radiofrequency optical magnetometers, and Chapter 13, Remote detection magnetometry.The book is divided into three parts and the disjointedness between the three parts, I Principles and Techniques, II Applications and III Broader Impact is unfortunate and worse than that between chapters. In particular, the title of Part III “Broader impact” seems to be a hurried poor description but the quality of the material is very good and should appeal to a wide audience. “Part III Broader impact” contains one of my favorite parts of the book, namely, Chapter 18 “Test of fundamental physics with optical magnetometers” and I suggest interested readers of that chapter check out the “Lorentz Violation Experiment” at [...] .Even with its disjointed flow and an absence of coherency between chapters, I enthusiastically recommend this book to engineers and physicist. Some aspects of this book may also appeal to [email protected]