ECE 513: Fund of Optics & Photonics - fall

Prerequisite: ECE 335

Introduction to optics and photonics. Optics is the study of light in its simplest form by treating light as rays. On the other hand, photonics treats light as an ensemble of photons. This course provides the fundamentals needed for optical engineering and optical system design, and the principles to model optical systems with varying degrees of fidelity. This course will discuss the duality of light, its generation and detection mechanism, and describe the physical principles that determine how rays behave at various interfaces. Natural optical phenomena such as rainbows and mirages, and classical optical systems such as prisms, telescopes, and cameras, will be analyzed throughout the course. Linear systems will be introduced to analyze more complex optical systems.