On the Ninetieth Birthday of Sergei Glebovich Rautian

The second day of our conference (18 December) coincided with the ninetieth birthday of Sergei Glebovich Rautian (1928–2009), a world-renowned scientist; corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS); foremost expert in optics, spectroscopy, laser physics and physical kinetics; and one of the founders of nonlinear laser spectroscopy. Some of his many scientific achievements are directly related to the subject matter of the conference: developed by Rautian and his pupils, probe field spectroscopy in three-level systems (in particular in lambda systems) became basic to ultrahigh-resolution spectroscopy, which in particular contains the coherent population trapping (CPT) effect, important for frequency standards based on ultracold atoms.