*Hecht presents current, detailed, and comprehensive coverage of optics. *Extremely accurate and precise, this text has been a market standard for over a decade. *From advances with lenses and lasers to telescopes and fibers, the Third Edition treats all of the significant advances of which todays students should be aware. *As with previous editions, Optics, Third Edition by Eugene Hecht employs a good balance of theory and instrumentation, and provides students a classical background with historical anecdotes and citations. *At the request of Second Edition users, Hecht has added new problems that are designed primarily to develop students needed analytic skills. *Chapter 2 has been revised to make material clearer and provide broader foundation for whats to come. A more complete, low-level, discussion of Superposition Principle and new introductory section on Phasors and the Addition of Waves better prepares students for early qualitative discussions of both scattering and QED. *Chapter 3 contains a new section Averaging Harmonic Functions.
Committed to integrating quantum mechanical ideas into basic discussion, the text qualitatively considers Photons and Photon Counting early on. *Chapter 4, The Propagation of Light, now begins with Rayleigh Scattering that leads to a more realistic discussion of the transmission of light, reflection, and refraction all from a scattering perspective. *An early introduction to coherence in the Interference Chapter, section 9.2.1 (Temporal and Spatial Coherence) and the ideas of coherence are immediately carried into discussion of Youngs Experiments. To underscore the quantum mechanical texture of interference, many optical interference photos are now accompanied by equivalent material particle fringe patterns. *Complete solutions to many problems found at the back of the text are an invaluable study aide for students.