# Optics


Optics that studies the behavior and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behavior of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Although, since light is an electromagnetic wave, other forms of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves exhibit similar properties.

• Supplemental Modules (Components)
• Geometric Optics (Tatum)
This “book” is not intended to be a vast, definitive treatment of everything that is known about geometric optics. It covers, rather, the geometric optics of first-year students, whom it will either help or confuse yet further, though I hope the former. The part of geometric optics that often causes the most difficulty, particularly in getting the right answer for homework or examination problems, is the vexing matter of sign conventions in lens and mirror calculations.
• Physical Optics (Tatum)
Physical optics, or wave optics, is the branch of optics that studies interference, diffraction, polarization, and other phenomena for which the ray approximation of geometric optics is not valid.
• Optics (Konijnenberg, Adam, and Urbach)
This book treats optics at the level of students in the later stage of their bachelor or the beginning of their master. It is assumed that the student is familiar with Maxwell’s equations. Although the book takes account of the fact that optics is part of electromagnetism, special emphasis is put on the usefulness of approximate models of optics, their hierarchy and limits of validity. Approximate models such as geometrical optics and paraxial geometrical optics are treated extensively.

Optics is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.