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The principal ray or chief ray (sometimes known as the b ray) in an optical system is the meridional ray that starts at an edge of an object and passes through the center of the aperture stop. [ 5 ] [ 8 ] [ 7 ] The distance between the chief ray (or an extension of it for a virtual image) and the optical axis at an image location defines the ...
Gamma rays, at the high-frequency end of the spectrum, have the highest photon energies and the shortest wavelengths—much smaller than an atomic nucleus. Gamma rays, X-rays, and extreme ultraviolet rays are called ionizing radiation because their high photon energy is able to ionize atoms, causing chemical reactions. Longer-wavelength ...
Focusing X-rays with glancing reflection. When dealing with a beam that is nearly parallel to a surface, it is sometimes more useful to refer to the angle between the beam and the surface tangent, rather than that between the beam and the surface normal. The 90-degree complement to the angle of incidence is called the grazing angle or glancing ...
The shape of a Gaussian beam of a given wavelength λ is governed solely by one parameter, the beam waist w 0. This is a measure of the beam size at the point of its focus (z = 0 in the above equations) where the beam width w(z) (as defined above) is the smallest (and likewise where the intensity on-axis (r = 0) is the largest). From this ...
Geometrical optics, or ray optics, is a model of optics that describes light propagation in terms of rays. The ray in geometrical optics is an abstraction useful for approximating the paths along which light propagates under certain circumstances. The simplifying assumptions of geometrical optics include that light rays:
Ray (graph theory), an infinite sequence of vertices such that each vertex appears at most once in the sequence and each two consecutive vertices in the sequence are the two endpoints of an edge in the graph; Ray (optics), an idealized narrow beam of light; Ray (quantum theory), an equivalence class of state-vectors representing the same state
When a beam of light crosses the boundary between a vacuum and another medium, or between two different media, the wavelength of the light changes, but the frequency remains constant. If the beam of light is not orthogonal (or rather normal) to the boundary, the change in wavelength results in a change in the direction of the beam.
Beam divergence usually refers to a beam of circular cross section, but not necessarily so. A beam may, for example, have an elliptical cross section, in which case the orientation of the beam divergence must be specified, for example with respect to the major or minor axis of the elliptical cross section.