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Physical optics is also the name of an approximation commonly used in optics, electrical engineering and applied physics. In this context, it is an intermediate method between geometric optics , which ignores wave effects, and full wave electromagnetism , which is a precise theory .
Starting in the 1990s, many telescopes have developed adaptive optics systems that partially solve the seeing problem. The best systems so far built, such as SPHERE on the ESO VLT and GPI on the Gemini telescope, achieve a Strehl ratio of 90% at a wavelength of 2.2 micrometers, but only within a very small region of the sky at a time.
The early writers discussed here treated vision more as a geometrical than as a physical, physiological, or psychological problem. The first known author of a treatise on geometrical optics was the geometer Euclid (c. 325 BC–265 BC). Euclid began his study of optics as he began his study of geometry, with a set of self-evident axioms.
Other research focuses on the phenomenology of electromagnetic waves as in singular optics, non-imaging optics, non-linear optics, statistical optics, and radiometry. Additionally, computer engineers have taken an interest in integrated optics, machine vision, and photonic computing as possible components of the "next generation" of computers. [93]
Optical phenomena encompass a broad range of events, including those caused by atmospheric optical properties, other natural occurrences, man-made effects, and interactions involving human vision (entoptic phenomena).
Vision of humans and other organisms depends on several organs such as the lens of the eye, and any vision correcting devices, which use optics to focus the image. The eyes of many animals contains a lens that focuses the light of its surroundings onto the retina of the eye. This lens is essential to producing clear images within the eye.
Although the term is used in the field of optics to describe light and other electromagnetic waves, dispersion in the same sense can apply to any sort of wave motion such as acoustic dispersion in the case of sound and seismic waves, and in gravity waves (ocean waves). Within optics, dispersion is a property of telecommunication signals along ...
In optics, aberration is a property of optical systems, such as lenses, that causes light to be spread out over some region of space rather than focused to a point. [1] Aberrations cause the image formed by a lens to be blurred or distorted, with the nature of the distortion depending on the type of aberration.