Introduction.
This focus issue of Optics Express is concerned with coherent optical interactions in condensed matter. This field has shown tremendous growth over the past few years - a phenomenon at least partly due to the remarkable progress in ultrafast lasers and measurement techniques which has been a prerequisite to observing coherent transient phenomena on the short time scales required in condensed matter systems. There are many kinds of coherence which can be generated by short optical pulses in solids, including electronic interband and intraband coherence, and coherent phonon fields. The four papers in this issue investigate various aspects of these phenomena.
Norris
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