Optics - Optics and information theory

optics

Table of Contents

Introduction
Geometrical optics
- General considerations
  - The optical image
  - Historical background
    - Light rays, waves, and wavelets
    - The pinhole camera
    - Resolution and the Airy disk
    - The Rayleigh limit
- Reflection and refraction
  - Reflection
  - The law of refraction
  - Dispersion
  - Total internal reflection
- Ray-tracing methods
  - Graphical ray tracing
  - Trigonometrical ray tracing
- Paraxial, or first-order, imagery
  - Magnification: the optical invariant
  - The Gauss theory of lenses
  - The thin lens
  - Chromatic aberration
  - Longitudinal magnification
  - Image of a tilted plane
- Optical systems
  - System components
    - Lenses
    - Mirrors
    - Light sources
    - Detectors
    - Projection screens
    - Reflecting prisms
    - Dispersing devices
    - Filters and thin films
    - Fibre-optics bundles
  - Nonclassical imaging systems
- Lens aberrations
  - Seidel sums
  - Spherical aberration
  - Coma
  - Astigmatism
  - Petzval curvature
  - Distortion
- Image brightness
  - General relations
  - Distribution of illumination over an image
  - Visual brightness
Optics and information theory
- General observations
  - Temporal frequency response
  - Nonlinear optical systems
- Image formation
  - Impulse response
  - Transfer function
- Partially coherent light
  - Development and examples of the theory
  - The mutual coherence function
- Optical processing
  - Coherent optical systems
  - Filtering
- Holography
  - Theory
  - Applications
    - Image-forming
    - Non-image-forming
    - Optical elements
- Nonlinear optics

References & Edit History Related Topics

Images & Videos

Are invisibility cloaks possible in reality?

Understand how a pinhole focuses light and why lenses are better than pinholes

$Figure 1: The law of refraction. Plane light wave at position AA′ in medium of index n and BB′ in medium of index n′ (see text).$ $Figure 2: Relationships between refractive indices and dispersive powers of several representative optical glasses and plastics.$

The hair-thin fibres used in fibre optics.

$Figure 3: Graphic refraction procedures (see text).$

Figure 4: Trigonometrical ray tracing (see text).

Figure 6: Operating principle of the telescopic rifle sight (see text).

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optics summary

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A new era in optics commenced in the early 1950s following the impact of certain branches of electrical engineering—most notably communication and information theory. This impetus was sustained by the development of the laser in the 1960s. The initial tie between optics and communication theory came because of the numerous analogies that exist between the two subjects and because of the similar mathematical techniques employed to formally describe the behaviour of electrical circuits and optical systems. A topic of considerable concern since the invention of the lens as an optical imaging device has always been the description of the optical ...(100 of 17246 words)

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