Università Roma Tre

1. Wave propagation, diffraction and interference
- preliminaries on waves
- Fourier series and integral
- plane-wave expansions
- direct and inverse propagation formulas
- applications: gratings, diffraction-free beams, interferometers, diffractive optical elements, multilayer structures

2. Fresnel and Fraunhofer diffraction
- diffraction from circular and rectangular apertures
- light beams and paraxial optics
- gaussian beams
- applications: Fresnel lenses, collimation and focusing of laser beams, optical resonators

3. Classical theory of coherence
- statistical properties of the scattered field
- mutual intensity and degree of coherence
- intensity correlations
- cross-spectral density
- applications: Fourier spectroscopy, astronomical measurements, optical coherence tomography

4. Optical systems
- basic equations of geometrical optics
- centered optical systems
- imaging in coherent and incoherent light
- aberrations
- OTF and MTF
- applications: typical optical systems and their features, spatial filtering, optical information processing, holography

- F. GORI, "ELEMENTI DI OTTICA", ED. ACCADEMICA (1995)
- Notes provided by the teacher