This Field Guide provides an overview of the basic principles of laser cooling of atoms, ions, nanoparticles, and solids, including Doppler cooling, polarization gradient cooling, different sub-recoil schemes of laser cooling, forced evaporation, laser cooing with anti-Stokes fluorescence, hybrid laser cooling, and Raman and Brillouin cooling. It also covers radiation-balanced lasers and Raman lasers with heat mitigation, and considers the basic principles of optical dipole traps, magnetic traps, and magneto-optical traps.

Our understanding of the interaction of light and matter has a long history that evolved from the ancient corpuscular theory to wave theory and finally to the quantum theory. Matter is composed of charged particles, and among these particles are positively charged nuclei surrounded by electrons that are in motion. Light is an oscillating electromagnetic wave. But light is also particles (photons). The primary objective of this Field Guide is to provide the principles of light matter interaction using classical, semiclassical, and quantum theories. To this end, the guide provides the formulae...