Graduate Courses

Microfabrication and Thin Film Materials (Syllabus)

This graduate course introduces the physics, chemistry, and practical techniques behind modern micro- and nanofabrication and thin-film materials. Students learn how semiconductor and photonic devices are fabricated using processes such as lithography, thin-film deposition, plasma etching, and epitaxial growth.

Topics include:

  • Cleanroom process flow and mask design
  • Thin-film deposition (evaporation, sputtering, CVD, epitaxy)
  • Plasma etching and pattern transfer
  • Photoresists, lithography, and nanoscale patterning
  • Thin-film nucleation, growth, and materials characterization
  • Fabrication of micro- and nano-devices

Hands-on laboratory modules expose students to fabrication workflows and device processing techniques used in modern semiconductor research.

Quantum Optics and Nanophotonics (Weekly Schedule)
(Co-developed with Prof. Ravi Uppu)

This advanced optics course explores the quantum and nanoscale properties of light and its interaction with materials. Topics include quantum states of light, single-photon sources, nanophotonic structures, and emerging quantum optical technologies.

Undergraduate Courses

Introduction to Optics (Syllabus)

Light is central to technologies ranging from fiber-optic communications and lasers to cameras, microscopes, sensors, integrated photonics, and emerging nanophotonic devices. This course develops the physics needed to understand and ultimately design these optical systems.

We begin with how light propagates and interacts with matter, then explore lenses and imaging, polarization, interference, diffraction, Fourier optics, coherence, and lasers. We finish with an introduction to modern nanophotonics: optical waveguides, photonic crystals, metamaterials, and other structures.

Along the way, you will see how the same fundamental ideas appear across electrical and computer engineering, physics, chemistry, and biological imaging. A computational optics project gives you an opportunity to model an optical system using techniques such as ABCD matrices, thin-film transfer matrices, numerical diffraction, or electromagnetic simulation.

If you want to understand how we generate, manipulate, guide, detect, and image with light, from conventional lenses to structures smaller than a wavelength, this course provides the foundation.