Laser Physics: from Principles to Applications for Materials Science

Laser physics sits at the intersection of quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and condensed matter, and this graduate course treats lasers not as black-box tools but as engineered systems whose gain media, resonator geometries, and pulse dynamics dictate what they can do to a material. You'll work through the chain from light-matter interaction and optical amplification up to semiconductor gain and ultrashort pulses, backed by lab demonstrations, a project, and a presentation on an emerging technique like ablation, thin-film deposition, or nanomachining. Coming in with undergraduate-level optics and quantum mechanics, you leave able to read a laser-processing paper and judge whether the source and parameters actually fit the materials problem.