FAQ

This website contains an eclectic compilation of intuitive explanations and elaborations to some of the common questions, problems, and issues that an optical engineering student may have encountered during their study. Most of the calculations and derivations presented here can be done and arrived at from scratch. It has been my experience that understanding the way to get to the answer is most often the best way to understand the answer itself.

I aim to continuously add new content to this website. If you have an optical problem, an apparent paradox, or a practical engineering issue that you are interested in seeing an answer to, or better yet, if you have an intuitive answer to an interesting problem that you like to see posted, please send it to me at chyang@caltech.edu. Your contribution will be duly acknowledged.

Topics:

Poisson statistics (pdf)
Shot noise (pdf)
Shot noise in relation to heterodyne detection (pdf)
Time domain Optical Coherence Tomography (TDOCT) versus Fourier domain Optical Coherence Tomography (FDOCT) (pdf)

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