The Light Fantastic: A Modern Introduction to Classical and Quantum Optics

By Ian R. Kenyon

Book Overview

This book presents a thorough and self-contained introduction to modern optics, covering in full the three components ray optics, wave optics, and quantum optics. The text covers all that would be needed over a comprehensive course in optics at the advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate level. Digital cameras, LCD screens, aircraft laser gyroscopes, and the optical fibre-based internet illustrate the penetration of optics in twenty-first century life: these and many more modern applications are presented from first principles.The self-contained material allows the selection of specific themes grouped in the following way: Paraxial ray optics with matrix methods and aberrations. Interference, coherence and interferometers. Diffraction, spectrometers and Gaussian beams. Fourier optics, holography and information processing. Maxwell's theory; scattering, absorption and dispersion in bulk materials; interface behaviour. Quantum phenomena, wave-particle duality, uncertainty principle; Schroedinger analysis of spectra, photon properties. Laser principles, He:Ne to MQW lasers, applications. Detectors: photodiodes, photomultipliers, image intensifiers; response, noise and linearlty; CCDs. Fibre optics, from monomode fibre analysis to dense wavelength division multiplexing; fibre sensors. Photon-atom interactions, optical pumping, cooling and clocks. Second quantization, photon correlations, SPDC, entanglement, tests of quantum mechanics.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0198566468
• ISBN13: 9780198566465
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 654 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 9.6" x 7.5"