The eighteenth International Conference on Laser Spectroscopy was held on 24–29 June 2007 in Telluride, Colorado. In keeping with its rich tradition, ICOLS-07 was truly an international gathering with 173 delegates and 34 accompanying guests from 21 countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States).

This volume presents the invited talks comprising the technical program of the Conference, arranged in the general topic areas of degenerate quantum gases, quantum information and control, precision measurements, fundamental physics and applications, ultra-fast control and spectroscopy, novel spectroscopic applications, spectroscopy on the small scale, cold atoms and molecules, single atoms and quantum optics, and optical atomic clocks. The vibrant exchange of ideas provided the real strength and foundation of the Conference, especially in areas of the ever-expanding field of laser spectroscopy.

Contents:

• Probing Vortex Pair Sizes in the Berezinskii–Korsterlitz–Thouless Regime on a Two-Dimensional Lattice of Bose–Einstein Condensates (V Schweikhard et al.)
• Towards Quantum Magnetism with Ultracold Atoms in Optical Lattices (I Bloch)
• Quantum Non-Demolition Counting of Photons in a Cavity (S Haroche et al.)
• Frequency-Comb-Assisted Mid-Infrared Spectroscopy (P de Natale et al.)
• On a Variation of the Proton-Electron Mass Ratio (W Ubachs et al.)
• Quantum Interface between Light and Atomic Ensembles (H Krauter et al.)
• An Atomic Fermi Gas Near a P-Wave Feshbach Resonance (D S Jin et al.)
• Stark and Zeeman Deceleration of Neutral Atoms and Molecules (S D Hogan et al.)
• Wide-Field Cars-Microscopy (C Heinrich et al.)
• The Quantum Revolution — Towards a New Generation of Supercomputers (R Blatt)
• Bose–Einstein Condensates on Magnetic Film Microstructures (M Singh et al.)
• Ultracold Metastable Helium-4 and Helium-3 Gases (W Vassen et al.)
• and other papers