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Snell's law (also known as the Snell–Descartes law, the ibn-Sahl law, [ 1] and the law of refraction) is a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction, when referring to light or other waves passing through a boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water, glass, or air.
It is often referred to as Beer's law. In physics, the Bouguer–Lambert law is an empirical law which relates the extinction or attenuation of light to the properties of the material through which the light is travelling. It had its first use in astronomical extinction. The fundamental law of extinction (the process is linear in the intensity ...
Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. [ 1] Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Light is a type of electromagnetic radiation, and other forms of ...
Lambert's cosine law. In optics, Lambert's cosine law says that the radiant intensity or luminous intensity observed from an ideal diffusely reflecting surface or ideal diffuse radiator is directly proportional to the cosine of the angle θ between the observer's line of sight and the surface normal; I = I0 cos θ. [ 1][ 2] The law is also ...
Etendue or étendue ( / ˌeɪtɒnˈduː /; French pronunciation: [etɑ̃dy]) is a property of light in an optical system, which characterizes how "spread out" the light is in area and angle. It corresponds to the beam parameter product (BPP) in Gaussian beam optics. Other names for etendue include acceptance, throughput, light grasp, light ...
Optical path length. 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. It is calculated by taking the product of the geometric ...
An optical instrument is said to be diffraction-limited if it has reached this limit of resolution performance. Other factors may affect an optical system's performance, such as lens imperfections or aberrations, but these are caused by errors in the manufacture or calculation of a lens, whereas the diffraction limit is the maximum resolution ...
The numerical aperture with respect to a point P depends on the half-angle, θ1, of the maximum cone of light that can enter or exit the lens and the ambient index of refraction. As a pencil of light goes through a flat plane of glass, its half-angle changes to θ2. Due to Snell's law, the numerical aperture remains the same: NA = n1 sin θ1 ...