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A meridional ray or tangential ray is a ray that is confined to the plane containing the system's optical axis and the object point from which the ray originated. [4] This plane is called meridional plane or tangential plane. A skew ray is a ray that does not propagate in a plane that contains both the object point and the optical axis ...
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]
In Euclidean geometry two rays with a common endpoint form an angle. [14] The definition of a ray depends upon the notion of betweenness for points on a line. It follows that rays exist only for geometries for which this notion exists, typically Euclidean geometry or affine geometry over an ordered field.
The normal ray is the outward-pointing ray perpendicular to the surface of an optical medium at a given point. [2] In reflection of light, the angle of incidence and the angle of reflection are respectively the angle between the normal and the incident ray (on the plane of incidence) and the angle between the normal and the reflected ray.
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
In geometry, a half-space is either of the two parts into which a plane divides the three-dimensional Euclidean space. [1] 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.
In Euclidean geometry, an angle or plane angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the sides of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle. [1] Two intersecting curves may also define an angle, which is the angle of the rays lying tangent to the respective curves at their point of intersection.
Thus Fresnel showed, even for anisotropic media, that the ray path given by Huygens' construction is the path of least time between successive positions of a plane or diverging wavefront, that the ray velocities are the radii of the secondary "wave surface" after unit time, and that a stationary traversal time accounts for the direction of ...