[Music] hello I am Balaji Srinivasan I am going to be the instructor for introduction to photonics many of you may have questions about this course why photonics what is photonics all about who should be taking this course and all that so let me spend a couple of minutes just explaining that why photonics first of all well photonics is considered to be one of the key drivers for the 21st century and this is supported by the fact that since 2000 more than 20 Nobel prizes have been awarded for photonics and photonics related research when you think about all the things around us that's all the applications that we use light for you can list things like optical communication you can talk about this lighting you can talk about this place you can talk about the cameras that we use in our mobile phones the energy that we are getting through for example solar energy all of this use properties of light and we continue to make tremendous progress in terms of using photonics for applications around us some of the modern day applications such as autonomous driving virtual and augmented reality you talk about structural health monitoring talk about brain imaging and of course things like gesture recognition where we are trying to break down the interface between the man and the machine so what is photonics all about well photonics in a certain sense can be think thought of similar to electronics in electronics you are trying to push electrons through circuits and similarly in photonics you are trying to have photons which are the units are quantized form of light you are trying to generate a photons you're trying to manipulate photons and you're trying to detect photons so that's what this course is all about and in fact we have three modules which are covering these aspects of photonics who are the intended audience for this course we want to essentially have people that that have high school background in terms of optics we want them to actually be able to take much more advanced courses courses like fiber-optic communication integrated optics bio photonics and so on so this particular course is actually a bridge course between what you learnt in high school to what you're going to be learning in in some of these advanced courses so hope you can join us in this exciting journey learning about light and its unlimited potential if you have any further questions about this course you may please refer to the website thank you [Music]