The purpose of the Course is to give a fresh look on the Optics, and on material properties important for propagation and control of light.
The goal of the Course is to review the material of the core CREOL courses. Typically this Course is taught during Summer semester, right before the Fall Qualifier Exam, and it reviews also the Exam problems of previous years.
It means the outlook of the teacher, not necessarily the same one, who taught these subjects as the core Courses.
Pre-requisites: Graduate Standing or Consent of Instructor
Particular topics may vary, but all of them include:
- Polarization of light. Basic question: how many experiments of polarizational measurements should be done to know all the available information (4, the number of components of Stokes vector, including zeroth component for total intensity).
- Propagation of waves in anisotropic media: Fresnel equation, angle between wave vector and group velocity vector, ordinary and extraordinary waves in uniaxial crystals.
- Classic oscillator model of the dispersive response of atoms and molecules to light filed: Drude-Lorentz model. Damping and spectral broadening. Why friction model does not work for large detuning.
- Kramers-Kronig relationships between spectrally-dependent absorption and spectrally-dependent refraction. Reduction of exact quantum expressions for linear polarizability and dielectric permittivity to the model of multiple Drude-Lorentz oscillators. Notion of “oscillator strength” for individual quantum transition.
- Faraday effect: magnetic-field-induced rotation of polarization. Non-reciprocity of Faraday effect and optical isolation; to be contrasted with “sugar-solution-type” reciprocal rotation. Larmor’s theorem and Becquerel’s relationship between electronic dispersion and Verdet constant.
- Interference as a strong effect of heterodyning the weak signal. Period of interference fringes.
- Gaussian beams and parabolic wave equation. Kogelnik’s ABCD matrices. Hermit-Gaussian modes of laser resonators with spherical mirrors.
- Fraunhoffer and Fresnel diffraction. Notion of edge waves.
- Basic spectroscopic devices: Fabri-Perot and Michelson’s interferometers; diffraction gratings, including ones with blazing angle and in Littrow configuration. Fundamental thesis of spectroscopy: frequency resolution, as measured in inverse meters, equals to the inverse of the maximum Optical Path Difference (OPD) of the interfering rays.
- Doppler effect; Doppler broadening of spectral lines. Cherenkov effect.