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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 ...
A light ray is a line or curve that is perpendicular to the light's wavefronts (and is therefore collinear with the wave vector). A slightly more rigorous definition of a light ray follows from Fermat's principle, which states that the path taken between two points by a ray of light is the path that can be traversed in the least time. [1]
A ray with a terminus at A, with two points B and C on the right. Given a line and any point A on it, we may consider A as decomposing this line into two parts. Each such part is called a ray and the point A is called its initial point. It is also known as half-line, a one-dimensional half-space. The point A is considered to be a member of the ray.
If the space is two-dimensional, then a half-space is called a half-plane (open or closed). [2] [3] A half-space in a one-dimensional space is called a half-line [4] or ray. More generally, a half-space is either of the two parts into which a hyperplane divides an n-dimensional space. [2]
Half-line (geometry) or ray, half of a line split at an initial point Directed half-line or ray, half of a directed or oriented line split at an initial point; 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
For refraction of a plane wave at parallel incidence on one face of an anisotropic crystalline wedge (pp. 291–2), in order to find the "first ray arrived" at an observation point beyond the other face of the wedge, it suffices to treat the rays outside the crystal as normal to the wavefronts, and within the crystal to consider only the ...
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Its speed in vacuum, 299 792 458 m/s, is one of the fundamental constants of nature. [6] Like all types of electromagnetic radiation, visible light propagates by massless elementary particles called photons that represents the quanta of electromagnetic field, and can be analyzed as both waves and particles .