Polarized Light for Scientists and Engineers

Polarized Light for Scientists and Engineers uses the format of an earlier book written by the author, Edward Collett, that was published in 1993 with the title Polarized Light: Fundmentals and Applications. Since writing the first book the field of polarized light has continued to grow. In this new book we again start with the wave equation rather than immediately going to Maxwell's electrodynamic formulation of the optical field. This approach allows undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and engineers working in the field of optics and laser, electrical and electronic engineering, astrophysics, biophysics, and material science to easily grasp the fundamentals of polarized light. Much new material appears in this book. This includes the introduction of a new polarization sphere that easily allows the visualization of polarized light propagating through any configuration of polarizers, e.g., polarization controllers. The reader will find detailed mathematical analyses and descriptions of optical depolarizers and scramblers, the Lyot solar filter, the relation of coherence to polarization, synchrotron radiation, optical isolators and circulators, the design of achromatic waveplates, and the electrodynamic formulation of the fluorescence polarization of solutions.