Photonics – (M.Sc.)

Contents

The requirement will be that the students study at least 60 ECTS during the first year: at least 30 ECTS in the main courses in one of the areas, engineering, communication or diagnostics and the remaining in the main courses of the other areas. During the second year, the student will complete a 30 ECTS diploma project and study 30 ECTS other (optional) courses of the programme or possibly of other programmes offered by Lund University.

Innovation will be actively present throughout our programme. Our goal is to provide an education close to the industrial needs within photonics. Sustainable development will be naturally tackled in the diagnostics area (combustion and environmental monitoring with light).

To choose the Diploma project, the students will benefit from contacts with the Lund Laser Centre and the Department of Electrical and Information Technology, and with local industrial partners (Sony-Ericsson, Anoto, and spin-off companies like Opsis, GasOptics, SpectraCure). We will try to implement some of the projects in the students´ home countries through our contacts, for example in China (via Dr. Gabriel Somesfalean). We will also use our European contacts to propose projects in another European country.

We describe below the content of each programme area, including a list of main and related courses in that area.

Engineering

This area gives a deep knowledge in optics and laser techniques. Starting with fundamental optics and optical design with a ray tracing program, it continues with the physics of lasers, optical fibres and networks, and advanced laser/optical systems. Through laboratory exercises and small projects, it should give the students a solid education in engineering optics, with an opening towards research like quantum optics and information, ultrafast optics and new photonics materials.

The first course is intended to allow students with different backgrounds to obtain the basic knowledge in Optics necessary to follow the programme. It can be skipped if the equivalent knowledge has been obtained elsewhere. Four courses are based on the same book "Fundamentals of Photonics", by Saleh & Tech, second edition, Wiley Interscience, 2007.

The students will use throughout a modern non-sequential ray-tracing programme FRED [4] frequently used in industry for small projects.

Communication

This specialisation covers both the theory and application of communication with microwaves and optical light. It includes electromagnetic wave propagation in materials and fibres. A basic knowledge in digital communication systems is also provided. Communication is often described using the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) seven layer model. The layers are Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Data Link and Physical. Our programme will introduce these different concepts, focusing, however, mainly on the bottom part of the model, i.e. the physical transport of the information.

Our idea is that a student interested in this area will take both engineering and communication specialisations, thus receiving two complementary aspects of
modern communication technology. The courses will be mainly given at the Department of Electrical and Information Technology, except for Photonics and optical communication.

Diagnostics

This specialisation covers applications of photonics to different areas ranging from
environment and combustion to quantum engineering and medicine. These applications use information from the interaction between light and matter (spectroscopy). The Divisions of Atomic Physics and Combustion Physics are actively performing research in this area, which is expanding on the work market.

The first course gives an orientation going from basic spectroscopy to many kinds of
applications. Courses more specific to a given application (e.g. medicine optics and
combustion diagnostics) are also included.