Course Description:

- Geometrical theory of optical systems; interference, diffraction, Fourier theory, spatial filtering; coherent light, holography; electromagnetic theory of light, polarization, crystal optics; spectroscopy.

- Prerequisites: General Physics (Phys 101-102 or 105-106), and Mathematical Methods of Physics (Phys 304)

Required Reading:

• Optics, 4th Edition, by Eugene Hecht

Suggested Reading:

A very useful reference is provided by Fourier Series and Optical Transform Techniques in Contemporary Optics - An Introduction, written by Illinois Wesleyan Professor Ray Wilson:

Suggested Journal Reading includes (but is not limited to):

1) American Journal of Physics

2) Review of Scientific Instruments

3) Applied Optics

4) Journal of the Optical Society of America B, Optical Physics

Laboratory Organization

- There will only be two hours of regularly scheduled lab time per week, but your activities must extend beyond this class time in order to achieve a desirable outcome.

-The laboratory is designed to offer you the flexibility to choose the work you want most to do. That is, you may choose to pursue a set of ideas, reading about them, testing them out experimentally, and perhaps even extending them in ways that are of interest to you. You may wish to look through peer-reviewed sources (such as texts or the journals listed above), to find experiments that you would like to reproduce or apparatus to build.

Prepare For Each Lab:

Your laboratory notebook should contain thorough sections covering each of the following areas, most of which require time outside of the regularly scheduled meetings (i.e., consider these tasks to be your homework for the laboratory portion of the course):

• You are responsible for your experimental plan, and for connecting each element of your lab work to the underlying physics. You may consult refereed sources, but must cite your sources clearly and explain what you learned from them.
• Before taking data, engage in significant exploration of your equipment/apparatus. You should figure out the workings of each element, and should search for interesting physics within each element. You should try to learn about the limitations of your equipment before beginning, to ensure that these limits are incorporated into your plan. All of these efforts should be clearly recorded in your laboratory notebook.
• Clear predictive calculations serve as an important part of your experimental plan.
• Continually work to make your discussion of errors specific and "professional" - that is, make sure that your arguments are plausible. Try to estimate the magnitude and direction of skew you might expect to be associated with any sources of error you might suggest, or perform tests in order to track down the magnitudes and signs of various sources of error. Also, try to incorporate at least some numerical work on uncertainties (in order to quantify your level of confidence in your results - which you should work to make as high as possible!).
• Don't stop thinking about your work when the regularly scheduled meeting times draw to a close! A fair bit of "homework" will be needed in order for you to achieve the outcomes and level of analysis that you desire.

Lab notebooks must be left in the lab each weekend, for examination. Your lab notebooks are graded each week and are officially due every Saturday morning, by 9 am. If you choose not to do your lab work during a given week, you get a zero for that week. If you are in lab, but merely forget to turn in your notebook, there would be a strong penalty associated with that, but partial credit would be given - at the end of the term when I look back over the entire book.

Grading notes:

One Possible Schedule: