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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 ...
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:
Bottom: The formation of a real image using a concave mirror. In both diagrams, f is the focal point, O is the object, and I is the image. Solid blue lines indicate light rays. It can be seen that the image is formed by actual light rays and thus can form a visible image on a screen placed at the position of the image.
A ray tracing diagram for a converging lens. A device that produces converging or diverging light rays due to refraction is known as a lens. Lenses are characterized by their focal length: a converging lens has positive focal length, while a diverging lens has negative focal length. Smaller focal length indicates that the lens has a stronger ...
Fermat's principle is most familiar, however, in the case of visible light: it is the link between geometrical optics, which describes certain optical phenomena in terms of rays, and the wave theory of light, which explains the same phenomena on the hypothesis that light consists of waves.
In both diagrams, f is the focal point, O is the object, and I is the virtual image, shown in grey. Solid blue lines indicate (real) light rays and dashed blue lines indicate backward extension of the real rays. In optics, the image of an object is defined as the collection of focus points of light rays coming from the object.
Reflection of light is either specular (mirror-like) or diffuse (retaining the energy, but losing the image) depending on the nature of the interface.In specular reflection the phase of the reflected waves depends on the choice of the origin of coordinates, but the relative phase between s and p (TE and TM) polarizations is fixed by the properties of the media and of the interface between them.
A Feynman diagram (box diagram) for photon–photon scattering: one photon scatters from the transient vacuum charge fluctuations of the other. Two-photon physics, also called gamma–gamma physics, is a branch of particle physics that describes the interactions between two photons. Normally, beams of light pass through each other unperturbed.