Geometrical optics field of general optical systems

From near-field optics to optical antennas

July 2011 Physics Today 47 In a prophetic letter to Albert Einstein on 22 April 1928, Irish scientist Edward Hutchinson Synge proposed a microscopic imaging method in which an optical field scattered from a tiny gold particle could be used as a radically new light source. The gold particle, Synge argued, would act as a local probe of some sample of interest, with the scattered light transmitted...

Geometrical aspects of first-order optical systems

We reconsider the basic properties of ray-transfer matrices for firstorder optical systems from a geometrical viewpoint. In the paraxial regime of scalar wave optics, there is a wide family of beams for which the action of a raytransfer matrix can be fully represented as a bilinear transformation on the upper complex half-plane, which is the hyperbolic plane. Alternatively, this action can be a...

Matrix Methods in Geometrical Optics

As well as the geometrical methods used for solving lens problems, and locating the size and position of images in optical systems, there is an alternate, perhaps more versatile, method involving matrix manipulation. Many of you will be familiar with the use of simple 2x2 matrices. Firstly, however, before I consider the use of matrices in optics, I will review the matrix solution of two simult...

Electromagnetic Scintillation I. Geometrical Optics

Multiphase Computations in Geometrical Optics

In this work we propose a new set of partial diierential equations (PDEs) which can be seen as a generalization of the classical eikonal and transport equations, to allow for solutions with multiple phases. The traditional geometrical optics pair of equations suuer from the fact that the class of physically relevant solutions is limited. In particular, it does not include solutions with multipl...