Course outline: The outline can be downloaded here.
Course playlist: Here is a youtube link to the lecture recordings. Please note these recordings are not professionally done and do not meet highest standards, but they can still be helpful.
Class timings: 3:30 to 4:45 pm, Monday and Wednesday, Room: 204 SSE Complex.
A quick review (1 lecture):
What is light? difference between geometric, physical and quantum optics, quantum description of polarization, Bloch sphere, interferometry with a single photon, states and operators, Maxwell’s equations, Fermat’s principle
Planck’s radiation and quantization of cavity radiation (1 lecture): Density of modes, Rayleigh-Jeans model, Planck’s upgrade, Bose-Einstein distribution, quantization of energy
Absorption and emission of radiation from a classical viewpoint (2 lectures): Einstein’s rate equations, A and B coefficients, spontaneous, stimulated emission, Lorentz’s oscillator dipole model of absorption and emission, spectral lineshapes, broadening mechanisms (natural, pressure, Doppler), radiation damping. I also showed the in-class demo on spectral emissions from discharge lamps. Finally here is the first homework and here is its solution supplied by Asad Asif.
Absorption and emission of radiation from a semiclassical viewpoint (4 lectures): This module treats the atom as a two-level quantum system, we start with an atom weakly coupled to electromagnetic radiation, deciphering the role of the electric dipole operator recovering an estimate for Einstein’s A and B coefficients, followed by the strong coupling regime that gives us Rabi oscillations. We also discussed the role of off-resonance, description in terms of Bloch sphere, role of damping. Finally, we derived and solved the optical Bloch equations, showing key results as we went along. We also touched upon saturation broadening. Here is the pdf of a Mathematica notebook that shows the evolution of coherences and populations derived from the optical Bloch equations.