Abstract
We began in Chapter 2 with a discussion of Maxwell’s equations that unified the treatment of electromagnetic phenomena. The coupled, vector differential equations are quite formidable but it is possible to solve them in a number of cases. Additionally, a number of numerical techniques have been developed that permit solving the equations in cases in which analytic solutions are not possible: for asymmetric geometries, for example. Prior to Maxwell’s work, the nature of light was a subject of controversy. Newton held that light possessed a corpuscular nature, based upon his own observations that light rays travelled in straight lines until they encountered a surface. At that point, his model broke down but he was unwilling to consider an alternative theory.
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Notes
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The attribution to Snell is another historical curiosity. Snell discovered the relationship in 1621 but never published his findings. After his death, the outline of a treatise on optics was found amongst his papers. His work only became known when it was cited in 1703 by Christiaan Huygens in his Dioptrica.
- 2.
Fresnel published his treatise Mémoire sur la diffraction de la lumière in 1818, for which he won the prize offered by the Académie des Sciences.
- 3.
Brewster published “On the laws which regulate the polarization of light by reflection from transparent bodies” in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1815.
- 4.
Vesalago published “The electrodynamics of substances with simultaneously negative values of ε and μ” in Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk in 1964. It appears in English translation in Physics Uspekhi in 1968
- 5.
Pendry and coworkers published “Magnetism from conductors and enhanced nonlinear phenomena” in the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques in 1999. Pendry, Thomas Ebbesen and Stefan Hell shared the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience in 2014 “for their transformative contributions to the field of nano-optics that have broken long-held beliefs about the limitations of the resolution limits of optical microscopy and imaging.”
- 6.
Smith, Pendry and coworkers published “Metamaterial electromagnetic cloak at microwave frequencies” in Science in 2006 and “Scattering cross-section of a transformation optics-based metamaterial cloak” in the New Journal of Physics in 2010.
- 7.
Hanbury Brown and Twiss published “Correlation between photons in two coherent beams of light” and “A test of a new type of stellar interferometer on Sirius” in Nature in 1956.
- 8.
Glauber published “Photon correlations” in the Physical Review Letters and an expanded “The quantum theory of optical coherence” in the Physical Review. Glauber was awarded half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics “”for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence.” The other half was split between John Hall and Theodor Hänsch “for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique.”
- 9.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1997 was awarded jointly to Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.”
- 10.
Wieman and Cornell and coworkers published “Observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute atomic vapor” in Science. Ketterle and coworkers published “Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas of sodium atoms” in the Physical Review Letters. The three were awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for “for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates.”
- 11.
Chou published “Optical clocks and relativity” in Science.
- 12.
Turing published “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society in 1936. The “decision problem” proposed in 1928 by the German mathematician David Hilbert asks if a machine could verify the truth of a mathematical statement solely through the use of the defining axioms.
- 13.
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published “Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?” in the Physical Review.
- 14.
Shalm et al. published “Strong loophole-free test of local realism” and Guistina et al. published “Significant-loophole-free test of Bell’s theorem with entangled photons” in the Physical Review Letters in 2015.
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© 2018 Mark A. Cunningham
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Cunningham, M.A. (2018). Light and Matter. In: Beyond Classical Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63160-8_9
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