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Quantum physics is considered as one of the most remarkable discoveries of contemporary physics grown during previous century and gradually manifested to the scientific world such as inventions of laser, the transistor, the electron…
One of the most puzzling consequences of interpreting quantum mechanics in terms of concepts borrowed from classical physics, is the so-called wave-particle duality. Usually, wave-particle duality is illustrated in terms of complementarity…
Light propagation is viewed as a process involving mutual creation of electric and magnetic fields. This viewpoint is used to argue that the conventional retarded solutions to electromagnetic wave equations (whose source is a current…
Light beams offer many degrees of freedom to be explored in discrete and continuous domains. In addition to the possibility of entangling photons in these many degrees of freedom, it makes light a very useful and versatile tool for quantum…
Over the past year and a half we have developed an innovative approach to the teaching of `Physical Science', a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. The new approach uses popular…
Energy concepts are fundamental across the sciences, yet these concepts can be fragmented along disciplinary boundaries, rather than integrated into a coherent whole. To teach physics effectively to biology students, we need to understand…
The year 2015 was the International Year of Light. It marked, however, also the 20th anniversary of the first observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in atomic vapors by Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle. This discovery can…
These lecture notes emerged from a contribution to the "Les Houches Summer School, Session CVII - Current Trends in Atomic Physics, July 2016". It is meant to serve students as a guide to a selection of topics that are currently at the…
Polarization is one of light's most versatile degrees of freedom for both classical and quantum applications. The ability to measure light's state of polarization and changes therein is thus essential; this is the science of polarimetry. It…
Recent progresses of electronics, essentially due to its miniaturization, are opening new fields that were just dreamed of, notably in astronomy. At start in paragraph 3, we introduce the time variation of images expressing the dual nature…
Imaging technologies such as dynamic viewpoint generation are engineered for incoherent radiation using the traditional light field, and for coherent radiation using electromagnetic field theory. We present a model of coherent image…
We study light propagation in the picture of semi-classical space-time that emerges in canonical quantum gravity in the loop representation. In such picture, where space-time exhibits a polymer-like structure at microscales, it is natural…
Traditional textbook explanations of the Compton effect treat the photon electron interaction as a particle collision. This explanation is a pedagogical disaster, implying that sometimes interactions are particle-like whereas quantum…
Textbooks play a fundamental role in teaching and learning in school science classrooms. In this paper we investigate the presentation of the nature of the electromagnetic field in a dozen of the world's most popular introductory university…
Continuing professional development for teachers in the physical sciences is crucial to maintaining high-quality instruction, especially when addressing modern physics. Nevertheless, the teaching of these topics often relies on theoretical…
This chapter derives the properties of light from the properties of processing, including its ability to be both a wave and a particle, to respond to objects it doesn't physically touch, to take all paths to a destination, to choose a route…
These notes, intended to be self contained and tutorial, present a direct, macroscopic approach to quantizing light inside a linear-response dielectric material when both spectral dispersion and spatial nonuniformity are present, but the…
A few decades ago, quantum optics stood out as a new domain of physics by exhibiting states of light with no classical equivalent. The first investigations concerned single photons, squeezed states, twin beams and EPR states, that involve…
Quantum mechanics of photons is derived from the theory of representations of the Poincar\'e group developed by Wigner. This theory places helicity as the most fundamental property; angular momentum and polarization are secondary…
Most introductory quantum physics instructors would agree that transitioning students from classical to quantum thinking is an important learning goal, but may disagree on whether or how this can be accomplished. Although (and perhaps…