Questions tagged [optics]
Optics is the study of light, and its interaction with matter. It includes topics such as imaging systems, fiber optics, lasers, quantum optics, and more.
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Do laser filaments propagate in a straight line over long distances?
In so-called filament propagation, a powerful laser beam can propagate through a medium without diffraction. This occurs because the beam focuses itself through non-linear optical effects. Self-...
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Is there a relationship between thickness of matter and luminance?
I'm searching for a relationship between thickness of matter and luminance.
I'm a tribologist and I'm doing friction and wear experiments. During these experiments I'm illuminating the surface and ...
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Kirchhoff's law for glass and transparent crystals; how exactly do hot transparent materials produce so much visible thermal radiation?
Together, the current answers to Is the visible light spectrum from "red-hot glass" at least close to Blackbody Radiation? explain that while we can not necessarily call a heated sample of ...
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Time lag between observed electrical field and polarity of light?
I was listening to the Feynman lectures on physics Vol. 3, Ch.2 the other day, and he was talking about the relationship between light polarity and the electric field of light as it is transmitting ...
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How much can you focus sunlight?
According to this, the size of the focal spot of sunlight through a lens is f/110, where f is the focal length. A 61" fresnel lens with 86 cm focal length then has a spot which is 7.8mm high, ...
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What is aperture of a lens?
I read that aperture of a lens is the surface from which refraction takes place and it is represented by the diameter of the lens.
So, by saying that the aperture refers to the surface from which ...
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Refocusing light field images via Fourier Slice Photograph theorem
I am trying to refocus images from a microlens array light field using Ren Ng's Fourier Slice photograph theorem found in his thesis chapter 5, equation 5.7, which is available at https://stanford.edu/...
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What causes a double peak for a single wavelength when using an optical spectrometer system?
I am doing an experiment to determine the Rydberg constant for the Balmer series using an optical spectrometer system (consisting of a monochromator with a photomultiplier detector and pulse counting ...
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Spot size for objective (not infinity corrected)
A fundamental axiom of imaging in optics is the resolving power of the lens system, which is directly related to the smallest possible spot a lens can form. For an ideal lens with a numerical aperture ...
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Infinity Corrected Microscope vs. $4f$ imaging system
This questions concerns three types of microscope systems and the differences between them. Let me lay out my understanding of these three types of systems. I am imagining imaging with a camera so ...
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Poynting vector flux in a tube (geometrical optics)
Let's consider the following tube (defined as the solid described by two arbitrary surfaces dA1 and dA2, and by all the rays which connect their boundaries):
I read in a textbook that, because of ...
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Maintaining phase relationships and other general principles of interferometry
I have a few confusions with some basic principles of interferometry.
Bob Campbell's So you want to do VLBI writes:
Phase relationships among all points on the wavefront will be
preserved ...
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What kind of light coherence is required for an image
If
1- Optically speaking, an image point (or pixel) is a light interference pattern
2- interference patterns require phase coherence
then
3- the source of the image point must emit coherent light
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Focusing of a cylindrical mirror in X-ray optics
Focusing cylindrical mirror are sometimes used to squeeze a photon beam in one direction. They can be vertically focusing or horizontally focusing, and such mirrors are typically used in X-Ray optics ...
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How to measure width of a very narrow spectral peak without expensive instruments?
Lasers typically have very narrow peaks in their spectrum, much narrower than 1 nm. It would require quite a high-resolution spectrometer to measure such a peak precisely. But if I simply need to find ...
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