Скачать книгу

in Harlow, UK (later Nortel Networks), home of optical fibre communications. I would especially like to acknowledge the help and support of my colleagues, Dr Ken Snowdon and Mr Gordon Henshall during this creative period. Ultimately, the seed for this text was created by a series of Optical Engineering lectures delivered at Nortel's manufacturing site in Paignton, UK. In this enterprise, I was greatly encouraged by the facility's Chief Technologist, Dr Adrian Janssen.

      In later years, I have worked at the Centre for Advanced Instrumentation at Durham University, involved in a range of Astronomical and Satellite instrumentation programmes. By this time, the original seed had grown into a series of Optical Engineering graduate lectures and a wide-ranging Optical Engineering Course delivered at the European Space Agency research facility in Noordwijk, Netherlands. This book itself was conceived, during this time, with the encouragement and support of my Durham colleague, Professor Ray Sharples. For this, I am profoundly grateful. In preparing the text, I would like to thank the publishers, Wiley and, in this endeavour, for the patience and support of Mr Louis Manoharan and Ms Preethi Belkese and for the efforts of Ms Sandra Grayson in coordinating the project. Most particularly, I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the copy-editor, Ms Carol Thomas, in translating my occasionally wayward thoughts into intelligible text.

      Finally, it remains to acknowledge the contributions of those giants who have preceded the author in the great endeavour of optics. In humility, the author recognises it is their labours that populate the pages of this book. On the other hand, errors and omissions remain the sole responsibility of the author. The petty done, the vast undone…

      This book is accompanied by a companion website:

      www.wiley.com/go/Rolt/opt-eng-sci

      The website includes:

       Problem Solutions

       Spreadsheet tools

      Scan this QR code to visit the companion website.

      1.1 Geometrical Optics – Ray and Wave Optics

      Geometrical optics models light entirely in terms of infinitesimally narrow beams of light or rays. It would be useful, at this point, to provide a more complete conceptual description of a ray. Excluding, for the purposes of this discussion, quantum effects, light may be satisfactorily described as an electromagnetic wave. These waves propagate through free space (vacuum) or some optical medium such as water and glass and are described by a wave equation, as derived from Maxwell's equations:

      (1.1)

      E is a scalar representation of the local electric field; c is the velocity of light in free space, and n is the refractive index of the medium.

      Of course, in reality, the local electric field is a vector quantity and the scalar theory presented here is a useful initial simplification. Breakdown of this approximation will be considered later when we consider

Скачать книгу