The Seventh Rochester Conference on Coherence and Quantum Optics was held on the campus of the University of Rochester during the four-day period June 7 - 10, 1996. More than 280 scientists from 33 countries participated. This book contains the Proceedings of the meeting. This Conference differed from the previous six in the series in having only a limited number of oral presentations, in order to avoid too many parallel sessions. Another new feature was the introduction of tutorial lectures. Most contributed papers were presented in poster sessions. The Conference was sponsored by the American Physical Society, by the Optical Society of America, by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and by the University of Rochester. We wish to express our appreciation to these organizations for their support and we especially extend our thanks to the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics for providing financial assistance to a number of speakers from Third World countries, to enable them to take part in the meeting.