Table of Contents

HISTORIAL SURVEY OF UNDERSTANDING OF POLARIZED LIGHT.

First Period: Early Ideas and Observations-from Bartholinus to Stokes.

Second Period: The Electromagnetic Nature of Light.

Third Period: The Coherence and Quantum Properties of Light.

PRELIMINARIES TO A CLASSICAL RADIATION FIELD THEORY.

The Basic Differential Equations and Boundary Conditions.

Invariance Transformations.

Monochromatic Plane Wave.

POLARIZATION AND THE RADIATION FIELD.

Elementary Concepts and Definitions.

Geometric Representations of Partially Polarized Light.

Statistics of the Radiation Field.

Entropy of the Radiation Field.

INTERACTION OF RADIATION WITH LINEAR MEDIA.

Jones and Mueller Polarization Transfer Matrix Methods.

Polarization Effects at Dielectric Interfaces.

Polarized Light and Symmetry Transformations.

Random Media.

APPLICATIONS TO SELECTED TOPICS.

Electromagnetic Propagation in Linear Anisotropic Media.

Optical Polarizing Components.

Measurement of Stokes Parameters.

Measurement of Jones and Mueller Polarization Matrices.

Appendices.

Indexes.

About the Author

CHRISTIAN BROSSEAU received a PhD degree in physics from Fourier University, Grenoble, France, in 1989. He was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard from 1989 to 1990 and then joined Fourier University as an associate research physicist. In 1997, he became a physics professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Brest, France. His primary research interests include the physics of heterogeneous materials and theoretical optics.