An educational website on interferometry

The present work describes a website designed for remote teaching of optical measurements using lasers. It enables senior undergraduate and postgraduate students to learn theoretical aspects of the subject and also have a means to perform experiments for better understanding of the application at hand. At this stage of web development, optical methods considered are those based on refractive index changes in the material medium. The website is specially designed in order to provide remote access of expensive lasers, cameras, and other laboratory instruments by employing a commercially available web browser. The web suite integrates remote experiments, hands-on experiments and life-like optical images generated by using numerical simulation techniques based on Open Foam software package. The remote experiments are real time experiments running in the physical laboratory but can be accessed remotely from anywhere in the world and at any time. Numerical simulation of problems enhances learning, visualization of problems and interpretation of results. In the present work hand-on experimental results are discussed with respect to simulated results. A reasonable amount of resource material, specifically theoretical background of interferometry is available on the website along with computer programs image processing and analysis of results obtained in an experiment.