scope:

This book surveys recent theoretical and experimental studies of optical properties of low-dimensional materials. As an extended version of Optical Properties of Low-Dimensional Materials (Volume 1, published in 1995 by World Scientific), Volume 2 covers a wide range of interesting low-dimensional materials including both inorganic and organic systems, such as disordered polymers, deformable molecular crystals, dilute magnetic semiconductors, SiGe/Si short-period superlattices, GaAs quantum wires, semiconductor microcavities, and photonic crystals. There are excellent review articles by promising researchers in each field. All the materials introduced in this book yield new optical phenomena originating from their mesoscopic and low-dimensional electronic characters and electron-lattice couplings, which offer a new research field of materials science as well as condensed-matter and optical physics. Volumes 1 and 2 are interrelated but can be read independently. They are pitched at the level of graduate students and are useful to both students and scientists.