An Introduction to Practical Laboratory Optics, J. F. James, Cambridge U. Press, 2014. $34.99 paper (196 pp.). ISBN 978-1-107-68793-6 Buy at Amazon
As someone who has been trained in a state-of-the-art ultrafast optics laboratory, I’d expect a book on practical laboratory optics to discuss how to work with expensive optical components, keep them dust free, and position them for proper use.
I’d also expect an exploration of the physics behind those optical components and how they could be used to construct experimental setups. For example, as part of my experimental-optics training, I had to construct an intensity autocorrelator; the theory of autocorrelation can be found in most nonlinear optics texts.
But particularly for those new to the field, setting up an experiment from components found in a laboratory or purchased from a retailer can be a mystifying challenge. Any book that explains the process is most welcome.
An Introduction to Practical Laboratory Optics by J. F. James is intended as a handbook for professionals and students in experimental optics. However, the focus is not what I expected. Instead of providing hands-on guidance, the book mostly describes the optics of telescopic systems, cameras, and spectrometers.
The early chapters describe lens–mirror systems, the foundation of optics. I enjoyed “Cameras and camera lenses,” which explains how the double Gauss lens and other lens systems work. It also presents the technical difficulties of architectural photography and how those difficulties are minimized with the use of “tilt-and-shift” and “rising-front” cameras.
The most interesting concept in the chapter, and one that was new to me, was the notion of a lens’s Boys points. Those points are unwanted images—reflections off the lens’s surface—and are therefore important to consider when designing optical setups. To accentuate that discussion, the author describes his personal experience designing a focal reducer that was attached to a telescope: He found Boys points from the reducer superimposed with a faint image from the primary mirror of the telescope.
In chapter 12, entitled “Practicalities,” the author gives an excellent description of when and how to clean optical elements. He describes the proper technique to clean mounted and unmounted optics but also clearly and correctly emphasizes that cleaning optical elements should be the last resort because any direct contact with optical systems can irreversibly damage them.
The book’s handling of mathematics has its positives and negatives. One plus is that the author describes optical concepts clearly and doesn’t require readers to perform rigorous mathematical derivations. The book is, therefore, ideal for people with limited mathematical background who want to learn optics.
However, the lack of more rigorous mathematics also prevents me from recommending the book as a reference source for professionals or as a handbook for students. The author does provide some mathematical derivations at the end of the book. There he describes the lens formula, Gaussian beams, the ABCD matrix, optical aberrations, and Fourier optics.
I enjoyed reading the book and learned a few new things. But most of the material can be found in many optics texts. As supplements to James’s book, I recommend three in particular—Eugene Hecht’s Optics (4th edition, Addison-Wesley, 2001), the Optical Society’s Handbook of Optics, Volume IV: Optical Properties of Materials, Nonlinear Optics, Quantum Optics (3rd edition, McGraw-Hill, 2009), and the Springer Handbook of Lasers and Optics (2nd edition, Springer, 2012). For those who seek further reading, James provides a good list of sources.
If you are interested in a book on practical laboratory optics along the lines discussed at the beginning of this review, you may want to browse the self-published ebook Laboratory Optics: A Practical Guide to Working in an Optics Lab (2014) by Peter Beyersdorf. Also, don’t ignore optical manufacturers, such as Newport Corp and Edmund Optics, which publish excellent practical tutorials on how to handle, clean, and install optical elements.
Robinson Kuis is a research associate at the Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research focuses on mid-IR supercontiuum generation, mid-IR fused-fiber devices, and laser development.
