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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 size of ...
Optical materials with varying indexes of refraction are called gradient-index (GRIN) materials. Such materials are used to make gradient-index optics. [42] For light rays travelling from a material with a high index of refraction to a material with a low index of refraction, Snell's law predicts that there is no θ 2 when θ 1 is large. In ...
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:
Simple ray diagram showing typical chief and marginal rays. In most areas of optics, and especially in microscopy, the numerical aperture of an optical system such as an objective lens is defined by
The second plane used in the analysis is the sagittal plane, defined as the plane orthogonal to the tangential plane and containing the chief ray before refraction (so along the original chief ray direction). This plane intersects the optical axis at the entrance pupil of the optical system. This plane is not a tangential plane so is a skew ...
The ray can be formed by any waves, such as optical, acoustic, microwave, and X-ray. In the figure below, the line representing a ray makes an angle θ with the normal (dotted line). The angle of incidence at which light is first totally internally reflected is known as the critical angle.
Optical radiation is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths between 100 nm and 1 mm. [1] [2] This range includes visible light, infrared light, and part of the ultraviolet spectrum. [3] Optical radiation is non-ionizing, [4] and can be focused with lenses and manipulated by other optical elements.
In physics, physical optics, or wave optics, is the branch of optics that studies interference, diffraction, polarization, and other phenomena for which the ray approximation of geometric optics is not valid. This usage tends not to include effects such as quantum noise in optical communication, which is studied in the sub-branch of coherence ...