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Optical cross section of a flat mirror with a given reflectivity at a particular wavelength () can be expressed by the formula = Where is the cross sectional diameter of the beam. Note that the direction of the light has to be perpendicular to the mirror surface for this formula to be valid, else the return from the mirror would no longer go ...
Subscripts 1 and 2 refer to initial and final optical media respectively. These ratios are sometimes also used, following simply from other definitions of refractive index, wave phase velocity, and the luminal speed equation:
absorption cross section and scattering cross section are both quantitatively related to the attenuation coefficient; see absorption cross section and scattering cross section for details; The attenuation coefficient is also sometimes called opacity ; see opacity (optics) .
With light scattering off of a particle, the cross section specifies the amount of optical power scattered from light of a given irradiance (power per area). Although the cross section has the same units as area, the cross section may not necessarily correspond to the actual physical size of the target given by other forms of measurement.
where Q is the efficiency factor of scattering, which is defined as the ratio of the scattering cross-section and geometrical cross-section πa 2. The term p = 4πa( n − 1)/λ has as its physical meaning the phase delay of the wave passing through the centre of the sphere, where a is the sphere radius, n is the ratio of refractive indices ...
Radar cross-section (RCS), denoted σ, also called radar signature, is a measure of how detectable an object is by radar. A larger RCS indicates that an object is more easily detected. A larger RCS indicates that an object is more easily detected.
In physics, the optical theorem is a general law of wave scattering theory, which relates the zero-angle scattering amplitude to the total cross section of the scatterer. [1] It is usually written in the form
In physics, absorption cross-section is a measure of the probability of an absorption process. More generally, the term cross-section is used in physics to quantify the probability of a certain particle-particle interaction, e.g., scattering , electromagnetic absorption , etc. (Note that light in this context is described as consisting of ...