| Abstract Note | This book is primarily intended to be used in optics teaching from undergraduate to graduate level. It is assumed that an elementary course on optics has previously been studied, but all the key concepts of wave optics and light propagation are introduced where needed, and illustrated graphically. A recurring theme is that simple building blocks such as plane and spherical waves can be summed to construct useful solutions. Fourier methods and the angular-spectrum approach are used extensively, especially to provide a unified approach to Fraunhofer and Fresnel diffraction. Particular attention is paid to analysing topics in contemporary optics—propagation, dispersion, laser beams and waveguides, apodization, tightly focused vector fields, unconventional polarization states, and light–matter interactions. Throughout the text the principles are applied through worked examples and the book is copiously illustrated with more than 240 figures. The 200 end-of-chapter exercises offer further opportunities for testing the reader’s understanding. |