Advanced Optics Textbook

An interactive open textbook on optics for undergraduate students in physics, electrical engineering, and related fields.

Overview¶

This textbook covers advanced topics in optics while maintaining accessibility for students with a basic understanding of physics and optics concepts. The text focuses on practical applications and approximate theories that provide insights into optical phenomena without requiring extensive quantum mechanics knowledge. The content is presented in a way that emphasizes understanding physical phenomena through simplified models, making complex concepts more approachable while maintaining scientific rigor.

Key Features and Contents¶

The textbook combines comprehensive coverage with interactive elements in its digital version, all freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Beginning with Basic Electromagnetic and Wave Optics, the text builds a strong foundation in Maxwell’s equations, wave equations, and their special solutions, including plane waves and electric dipole fields. Time-harmonic fields are thoroughly explored, along with Fresnel coefficients and evanescent waves.

Moving into Geometrical Optics, students learn about ray-based light propagation, exploring Fermat’s Principle, paraxial theory, and the application of ray matrices to thick lens analysis. The Optical Instruments section brings theory into practice, examining everyday devices from pinhole cameras to modern imaging systems, microscopes, and telescopes.

The text then delves into Polarization, covering various types of light polarization and their manipulation through Jones matrices and vectors. The Interference and Coherence chapter explores time and spatial coherence, wave superposition, and their applications in stellar interferometry. Scalar Diffraction Optics follows, examining diffraction theory, interference patterns, and the fundamental limits of optical resolution.

The final chapter on Lasers ties together many previously discussed concepts, exploring laser properties, optical resonators, and stimulated emission through Einstein’s theory. Throughout the text, each chapter includes carefully crafted practice problems, with more challenging exercises marked with an asterisk (*).

Contributions and Acknowledgments¶

This repository is a fork of the Interactive Textbook (Konijnenberg et al. (2024)) developed at TU Delft. We acknowledge and thank the original authors for their foundational work, which has made this adaptation possible. The original textbook has evolved through valuable feedback from numerous students and teaching assistants over the years. The current authors maintain responsibility for any remaining errors while welcoming continued constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement.

License¶

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.