This Years Nobel Prize for Physics...

[CJJ*]

...was won by Americans John Hall, Roy Glauber, and German Theodor Haensch, generally for contributing to a modern theory of Optics.

I've tried googling Glauber's quantum theory of optical coherence. In summary, light is often emitted such that the point sources of the light are not correlated, and so there are functions which specify the degree of correlation between a light field at different points, or different times, or both. Glauber's great insight was finding that, when QM is applied to these functions, you get exact solutions that show how light interacts with matter (interference patterns, diffraction, non-linear stuff, etc.). I'm finding even less on Hall and Haensch's work, but it appears to be a revolutionary technique regarding precision spectroscopy.

Can any physicists on this board fill-in the gaps, or fix my interpretation if it's in error? I realize this is somewhat specialized, and don't want to get too bogged down in the details, but I'd like something a little more detailed than the above summary. I know enough about QM math to, e.g., apply Schroedinger's equation to simple models, find eigenvalues/eigenfunctions, etc. Any help would be appreciated, thx:-)