Lectures

Spring 2002

Professor C. D. Cantrell, UT-Dallas

Prof. Cantrell's lecture slides can be downloaded to your computer. In order to view or print them, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader software.

Please note that, unless otherwise noted on the slide, these lecture slides are copyright (c) 1997-2004 by C. D. Cantrell. All rights reserved.

1. Review of optics. Topics covered include:
• Optics and photonics markets
• Professional societies
• Refractive index
• Ray optics
• Plane waves
• Reflection coefficients at dielectric interfaces
• Imaging
• Interference
• Diffraction
2. Geometrical optics. Topics covered include:
• Transition from Maxwell's equations to ray optics; the eikonal equation
• Ray optics in media with piecewise constant refractive index
• Imaging systems
• Gaussian optics
• Thin lenses
• Thick lenses
• Optical instruments
• Geometrical theory of third-order aberrations
3. Diffraction theory. Topics covered include:
• Fresnel-Kirchhoff diffraction theory
• Bessel beams
• St.-Venant's hypothesis
• Green function for the scalar Helmholtz equation
• Kirchhoff's boundary conditions
• The Helmholtz-Kirchhoff integral theorem
• The Fresnel-Kirchhoff diffraction formula
• Application to a thin lens
• Fraunhofer diffraction
• Rectangular aperture
• Circular aperture
• Periodic structures
• Fresnel diffraction
• Imaging of an extended, coherently illuminated object
• The thin lens as an analog Fourier transformer
• Focal plane filtering and image processing
4. Diffraction theory of image formation. Topics covered include:
• The Fresnel-Kirchhoff diffraction integral
• Primary (Gauss-Seidel) aberrations
• Spherical aberration
• Astigmatism
• Curvature of field
• Distortion
• Coma
• Orthogonal expansions of the wave aberration
• Gaussian quadrature
• Lagrangian interpolation
• Legendre polynomials
• Zernike polynomials
5. Mathematica notebook containing the code used to generate the figures for the notes on the diffraction theory of image formation
6. Coherence theory. Topics covered include:
• Visibility of interference fringes
• Complex degree of coherence
• Mutual coherence function
• Mutual intensity
• Complex coherence factor
• Coherence area
• Propagation of the mutual intensity
7. Polarization of light. Topics covered include:
• States of polarization (plane polarization, circular polarization, elliptical polarization)
• Orthogonal polarizations
• Polarizers and analyzers
• The Jones vector and Jones matrix
• Partial polarization
• The coherency matrix
• The Stokes vector
• The Poincare sphere