Introduction to Photonics

Hello and welcome to this course. This is Introduction to Photonics. I will start the lecture today by just giving you a little bit of background as to how to this course was conceptualized in the first place. You go through a certain level of optics in, as part of your high school education, where

you learn about the basic laws of reflection, refraction and based on that you, you cover a few topics. And then when you come to college, you are typically experiencing more advance courses such as optical communications, photonic integrated circuits, optical sensors and bio-photonics and so on. And what we thought is that we actually need a bridge between the two because certain level

of fundamentals that are taught in the high school level is not enough to clearly appreciate the kind of concepts that you are encountering at the advance level courses. So, we decided to float this course as sort of a bridge between the two and, and of course this course has been now offered for several years to several sets of students where we

have clearly had an opportunity to look at the finer aspects of the course and, you know, try to patch them up. Now before we move on, let me ask you this question. Why are you in this course? Why, you know photonics? What are the typical things that you use light for? At that point if some of the students present here can participate, I would appreciate it.

What do we use light for? Sure, that is a very, very good example. Optical communications is clearly one reason why, in certain ways we can say it is one reason why we have all these wireless communication at this level because what you do when you have your mobile phone? You take a mobile phone and do a phone call is you are trying to use electromagnetic waves