9450962 Murnane We propose to develop a new laboratory course within the Physics Department at Washington State University, titled "Applications of Optics." This course, which will complement two other upper-division laboratory courses, will give students a broad background in experimental optics. Its goal will be to acquaint students with the real-world consequences of fundamental optical phenomena, and to expose the students to applications of optics in physics, chemistry, and engineering. The laboratory will be based on a femtosecond laser facility, which will enable us to translate recent results from our research lab at WSU into the undergraduate curriculum, where it will be used to better illustrate concepts of coherence, dispersion, nonlinear optics and fundamentals of quantum mechanics. For these applications we will develop a completely novel set of experiments with femtosecond lasers for undergraduate laboratories.
