TITLE: Light Waves: Seeing is Believing

SPEAKER: Dr. David W. Ward,

TIME: Thursday Mar. 2, 2006 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: George P. Williams, Jr. Lecture Hall, (Olin 101)

If you flip through the pages of any light, optics, or electromagnetic theory textbook, you will likely find water waves and wave like sketches or graphs posing as electromagnetic waves. Why, you might wonder, don't they just use pictures of light waves instead? Richard Feynman speaks about electromagnetic waves in his lectures on physics, "When I talk about the fields swishing through space, I have a terrible confusion between the symbols I use to describe the objects and the objects themselves. I cannot even really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves." Electromagnetic waves would not be nearly as elusive if we lived in a medium in which the propagating waves carved out their fields in the air as they zipped by. Such a medium does exist! In this talk I will describe how the propagation of terahertz frequency radiation can be imaged in ferroelectric crystals revealing the wave nature of light as you have never seen it before.

100 Olin Physical Laboratory, 7507 Reynolda Station Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC 27109-7507 Phone: (336) 758-5337, FAX: (336) 758-6142 E-mail: wfuphys@wfu.edu	Quick Links Academics Research People Colloquia Info Physics