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Alhazen's problem, also known as Alhazen's billiard problem, is a mathematical problem in geometrical optics first formulated by Ptolemy in 150 AD. [1] It is named for the 11th-century Arab mathematician Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) who presented a geometric solution in his Book of Optics.
Geometrical optics does not account for certain optical effects such as diffraction and interference, which are considered in physical optics. This simplification is useful in practice; it is an excellent approximation when the wavelength is small compared to the size of structures with which the light interacts.
In optics, optical path length (OPL, denoted Λ in equations), also known as optical length or optical distance, is the length that light needs to travel through a vacuum to create the same phase difference as it would have when traveling through a given medium.
Ray tracing uses approximate solutions to Maxwell's equations that are valid as long as the light waves propagate through and around objects whose dimensions are much greater than the light's wavelength. Ray optics or geometrical optics does not describe phenomena such as diffraction, which require wave optics theory.
Fermat's solution was a landmark in that it unified the then-known laws of geometrical optics under a variational principle or action principle, setting the precedent for the principle of least action in classical mechanics and the corresponding principles in other fields (see History of variational principles in physics). [42]
Visulization of flux through differential area and solid angle. As always ^ is the unit normal to the incident surface A, = ^, and ^ is a unit vector in the direction of incident flux on the area element, θ is the angle between them.
The geometrical optical-path length or simply geometrical path length (GPD) is the length of a segment in a given OP, i.e., the Euclidean distance integrated along a ray between any two points. [1] The mechanical length of an optical device can be reduced to less than the GPD by using folded optics .
As one example, if there is free space between the two planes, the ray transfer matrix is given by: = [], where d is the separation distance (measured along the optical axis) between the two reference planes.