User talk:Mwregehr

Gaussian beam - response
Hi, thanks for the interest and invitation. I haven't been able to do much with wikipedia lately, but yes, in principle I could help enhance the article. The specifics need to be discussed on the article's talk page so that everyone concerned can be involved in deciding the eventual content, so I will try to post something there fairly soon, so check that page again. By normalization, I assume you mean that the u_nm functions should have their power |u|^2 integrated over x and y (or just x for the separate x or y function) at any z equal to 1. The form given there based on the q parameter makes it difficult (without doing a bit of algebra) to see whether it corresponds to the forms in my reference books, but I'll work on it sometime. I think a much more transparent equation should be included in which the amplitude and phase factors in the expression are clearly identifiable, even if using the complex q is more elegant in some respect, so I would replace that equation (or at least add the more readable one). And when I have time I could ADD some more useful explanation concerning the Gouy phase, but removing the current misleading/confusing text got me to waste a bunch of time reading an esoteric paper and arguing with someone over philosophy, so I gave up on that! Cheers, Interferometrist (talk) 12:35, 16 August 2011 (UTC)