Light, Imaging, Vision: An Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Course

Abstract

Students in physical and life science, and in engineering, need to know about the physics and biology of light. In the twenty-first century, it has become increasingly clear that the quantum nature of light is essential both for the latest imaging modalities and even to advance our knowledge of fundamental life processes, such as photosynthesis and human vision. But many optics courses remain rooted in classical physics, with photons as an afterthought.I'll describe a new undergraduate course, for students in several science and engineering majors, that takes students from the rudiments of probability theory to modern experimental methods like fluorescence imaging and Forster resonance energy transfer. After a digression into color vision, students then see how the Feynman principle explains the apparently wavelike phenomena associated to light, including applications like diffraction limit, subdiffraction imaging, total internal reflection and TIRF microscopy. Then we see how scientists documented the single-quantum sensitivity of the eye seven decades earlier than ‘ought’ to have been possible, and finally close with the remarkable signaling cascade that delivers such outstanding performance.A new textbook, to be published in April 2017, allows others to replicate this course.Partially supported by the United States National Science Foundation under Grant PHY-1601894.