Book Description

The following is a text taught to engineering and applied science students at the NYU Tandon (Polytechnic) School of Engineering in 2017 and 2018. The course met for four hours a week during one fourteen week semester. Unlike other texts in Modern Optics this text is intended to be used by students in both engineering and applied science at a junior or senior level, and to support specialized interdisciplinary applied optics courses given at a graduate level, such as Bio-Optics. By introducing it in the junior year students with interest arrive fresh from their introductory physics courses. The course emphasizes fundamentals starting with Maxwell's equations, which is where the introductory physics sequence ends, and applies these fundamentals to current interests in applied science and technology. Appropriate to the level of the course, the mathematics represents Maxwell's Equations in their integral form. Where advanced math was added (e.g. Fourier Transform), the students were introduced to this as if taught in an applied math course.Take-home Experiments: There are also take-home laboratory experiment assignments dispersed within the text, and requiring a small inventory of parts (e.g. transmission diffraction grating, red laser pointer, aspheric lens, 1" diameter acrylic sphere, and dye solution). With these parts and common things found around a typical home, 9 experiments are assigned to support the concepts taught in the course. One of these involves turning a Smart phone into a microscope. Another turns a Smart phone into a spectrometer, and a third uses the phone as a photometer.Applications: Some of the many applications discussed are Optical Tweezers, Holographic Diffraction Grating, Demystifying the structure of DNA from Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction image (Photo 51), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), nano-plasmonics, Fabry-Perot resonator, Whispering Gallery Mode sensor, LASER, Confocal microscope, and Super high-resolution microscopy (STED).