Maxwell's Equations, Photons and the Density of States.- Interaction of Light with Matter.- Ensemble of Uncoupled Oscillators.- The Concept of Polaritons.- Kramers-Kronig Relations.- Crystals, Lattices, Lattice Vibrations and Phonons.- Electrons in a Periodic Crystal.- Excitons, Biexcitons and Trions.- Plasmons, Magnons and some Further Elementary Excitations.- Optical Properties of Phonons.- Optical Properties of Plasmons, Plasmon-Phonon Mixed States and of Magnons.- Optical Properties of Intrinsic Excitons in Bulk Semiconductors.- Optical Properties of Bound and Localized Excitons and of Defect States.- Optical Properties of Excitons in Structures of Reduced Dimensionality.- Excitons Under the Influence of External Fields.- From Cavity Polaritons to Photonic Crystals.- Review of the Linear Optical Properties.- High Excitation Effects and Nonlinear Optics.- The Intermediate Density Regime.- The Electron-Hole Plasma.- Stimulated Emission and Laser Processes.- Time Resolved Spectroscopy.- Optical Bistability, Optical Computing, Spintronics and Quantum Computing.- Experimental Methods.- Group Theory in Semiconductor Optics.- Semiconductor Bloch Equations.

New chapters add coverage of current topics such as cavity polaritons, photonic structures, bulk semiconductors and structures of reduced dimensionality.

The mathematics is kept as elementary as possible, sufficient for an intuitive understanding of the experimental results and techniques treated.