Progress in Optics

Volume XXXV contains six review articles.The first article is a discussion on transverse light patterns in non-linear media, lasers and wide aperture interferometers. The next article deals with the detection and spectroscopic studies of single molecules in transparent solids at low temperature. The isolated spectral line of a single molecule makes it possible to perform basic quantum measurements, and allows probing in unprecedented detail of the surrounding solid matrix. The article also includes some suggestions for future research in this field.The next article reviews interferometric techniques for retrieving multispectral images with a large number of spectral channels. Special attention is paid to the theory of interferometric multispectral imaging which unifies the theories of coherence based image retrieval and spectrum recovery. Various techniques are compared, especially in terms of signal-to-noise-ratio.