This book represents the lecture notes for the course I gave at the
Imperial College London for three years in a row between 2001 and
2004. I have edited the notes to make them more suitable for
publication, but at the same time I have tried to change as little as
possible in order to stay close to the spirit and style of the lectures
which were an optional course for third and fourth year physics
undergraduate studies. The course consisted of 26 lectures and three
extra special topic lectures. The extra topics were intended to cover
very recent advances in and applications of quantum optics. I
focused on experiments on Rabi oscillations in cavity QED, on the
achievement of atomic Bose-Einstein condensation and on
quantum teleportation. These recent advancements — some of which
have resulted in several recent Nobel prizes — show that quantum
optics is a very exciting and important subject to learn.