March 10, 2008
(past)
4:30 p.m.
to 5:30 p.m.
Bahen Building, Room 1160, 40 St. George Street
Prof. Roy Glauber
speaker details
Prof. Roy Glauber
The understandings we associate with quantum theory began a
little over a hundred years ago with the discovery that light is
divided into quanta that behave in some contexts like particles. When
elementary particles were presently discovered to share the wave-like
properties of light, the stage was set for the development of quantum
mechanics. It was not until 1927 however, when the mathematics
developed to describe the new theory was applied to the electromagnetic
field, that we finally had a self-consistent theory of light quanta.
The many detailed verifications of the theory that followed, were
mainly confined to radiation processes involving only one or two light
quanta. The theory of multi-quantum phenomena began to expand rapidly
in the 1950s, and has been greatly accelerated by the development of
the laser. We shall review the quantum theoretical meaning of optical
coherence and discuss its relation to the statistical distributions of
light quanta and to recent observations of the behavior of individual
quanta.