Optical engineering is a young discipline with a long history. Its development represents the process of human civilization. Its theoretical basis-optics, as the main subject of physics, has gone through a long and tortuous development road, casting geometric optics, wave optics, quantum optics and nonlinear optics, revealing the law of light generation and propagation and its interaction with matter.
In the early days, based on geometric optics and wave optics, people's visual ability was broadened, and an optical instrument industry with telescopes, microscopes, cameras, spectrometers and interferometers as typical products was established. These technologies and industries still play an important role today.
In the middle of last century, the theory and technology of holography and optical information processing based on Fourier optics came into being. Especially when the first laser came out in the early 1960s, a light source with high brightness and high temporal and spatial coherence was realized, making photons not only a coherent carrier of information, but also an effective carrier of energy.
With the rise of laser technology and optoelectronic technology, optical engineering has developed into an optics-oriented discipline, which closely intersects and interpenetrates with information science, energy science, material science, life science, space science, precision machinery and manufacturing, computer science, microelectronics technology and other disciplines.
It includes laser technology, optical communication, optical storage and recording, optical information processing, photoelectric display, holographic and three-dimensional imaging film and integrated optics, optoelectronics and photonics technology, laser material processing and processing, low light level and infrared thermal imaging technology, photoelectric measurement, fiber optics, modern optics and photoelectric instruments and devices, optical remote sensing technology, integrated optical engineering technology and many other important emerging branches.
These branches not only make a qualitative leap in optical engineering, but also promote the establishment of an unprecedented modern optical industry and optoelectronic industry with a rapidly expanding scale.