Fundamentals and Basic Optical Instruments

Daniel Malacara Hernández

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781498720748
• eBook ISBN: 9781351646284
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Fundamentals and Basic Optical Instruments includes thirteen chapters providing an introductory guide to the basics of optical engineering, instrumentation, and design. Topics include basic geometric optics, basic wave optics, and basic photon and quantum optics. Paraxial ray tracing, aberrations and optical design, and prisms and refractive optical components are included. Polarization and polarizing optical devices are covered, as well as optical instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, and spectrometers.

1

Basic Ray Optics

1.1.Introduction

1.2.Gaussian Optics à la Maxwell

1.3.The Eikonal Function and Its Antecedents

1.4.Ray Tracing and Its Generalization

1.5.The Paraxial Approximation and Its Uses

1.6.The Huygens’ Principle and Developments

1.7.The Aberrations, Seidel, and Otherwise

The Classical Third-Order Aberration Equations • Aberrations of the Fifth Order

References

Orestes Stavroudis and Maximino Avendaño-Alejo

1.1Introduction

Geometrical optics is a peculiar science. It consists of the physics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thinly disguised by the mathematics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its contemporary applications are almost entirely in optical design which, like all good engineering, remains more of an art even after the advent of the modern computer. This brief chapter is intended to convey the basic formulas as well as the flavor of geometrical optics and optical design in a concise and compact form. We have attempted to arrange the subject matter logically, although not necessarily in historical order.

The basic elements of geometrical optics are rays and wavefronts: neither exist, except as mathematical abstractions. A ray can be thought of as a beam of light with an infinitesimal diameter. However, to make a ray experimentally by passing light through a very small aperture causes diffraction to rear its ugly head and the light spreads out over a large solid angle. The result is not a physical approximation to a ray but a distribution of light in which the small aperture is a point source. A wavefront is defined as a surface of constant phase to which definite properties can be attributed, such as principal directions, principal curvatures, cusps, and other singularities. But, like the ray, the wavefront cannot be observed. Its existence can only be inferred circumstantially with interferometric methods.

However, there is in geometrical optics an object that is observable and measurable: the caustic surface [1]. It can be defined in distinct but equivalent ways:

•As the envelope of an orthotom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• 1 Basic Ray Optics
• 2 Basic Wave Optics
• 3 Basic Photon and Quantum Optics
• 4 Ray Tracing
• 5 Optical Design and Aberrations
• 6 Prisms and Refractive Optical Components
• 7 Reflective Optical Components
• 8 Diffractive Elements
• 9 Polarization and Polarizing Optical Devices
• 10 Polarization and Polarizing Optical Devices
• 11 Telescopes
• 12 Microscopes
• 13 Spectrometers
• Index