Thompson was intrigued and stimulated and developed a major interest in light and optics ( his other main interest being electromagnetism ).

Although modern quantum optics tells us that there also is a semi-classical explanation of the photoelectric effect — the emission of electrons from metallic surfaces subjected to electromagnetic radiation — the photon was historically ( although not strictly necessarily ) used to explain certain observations.

Greek philosophy on optics broke down into two opposing theories on how vision worked, the " intro-mission theory " and the " emission theory ".

One of the earliest of these was Al-Kindi ( c. 801 – 73 ) who wrote on the merits of Aristotelian and Euclidean ideas of optics, favouring the emission theory since it could better quantify optical phenomenon.

He rejected the " emission theory " of Ptolemaic optics with its rays being emitted by the eye, and instead put forward the idea that light reflected in all directions in straight lines from all points of the objects being viewed and then entered the eye, although he was unable to explain the correct mechanism of how the eye captured the rays.

At the beginning of the 11th Century, the Arabic scientist Alhazen wrote the first comprehensive treatise on optics ; describing refraction, reflection, and the operation of a pinhole lens via rays of light traveling from the point of emission to the eye.

The use of field emission sources in electron optical instruments has involved the development of appropriate theories of charged particle optics, and the development of related modeling.

As in all neodymium-doped laser crystals, the lasing action of Nd: YVO < sub > 4 </ sub > is due to its content of neodymium ions, which may be excited by visible or infrared light, and undergo an electronic transition resulting in emission of coherent infrared light at a lower frequency, usually at 1064 nm ( other transitions in Nd are available, and can be selected for by external optics ).

The intensity ratio method has the advantage that polluted optics has little effect on the measurement as it compares ratios between emission lines.

The emission lines are equally affected by ' dirty ' surfaces or optics.

Another possibility, raised in an essay by the Swedish fantasy writer and editor Rickard Berghorn, is that the name Alhazred was influenced by references to two historical authors whose names were Latinized as Alhazen: Alhazen ben Josef, who translated Ptolemy into Arabic ; and Abu ' Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, who wrote about optics, mathematics and physics.

In physics and optics, the Abbe number, also known as the V-number or constringence of a transparent material, is a measure of the material's dispersion ( variation of refractive index with wavelength ) in relation to the refractive index, with high values of V indicating low dispersion ( low chromatic aberration ).

An optical aberration is a departure of the performance of an optical system from the predictions of paraxial optics.

While " distortion " can include arbitrary deformation of an image, the most pronounced modes of distortion produced by conventional imaging optics is " barrel distortion ", in which the center of the image is magnified more than the perimeter ( figure 7a ).

Minsk has a digital metropolitan network ; waiting lists for telephones are long ; fixed line penetration is improving although rural areas continue to be undeserved ; intercity-Belarus has developed fibre-optic backbone system presently serving at least 13 major cities ( 1998 ); Belarus's fibre optics form synchronous digital hierarchy rings through other countries ' systems ; an inadequate analogue system remains operational.

In radio communications, for example, bandwidth is the frequency range occupied by a modulated carrier wave, whereas in optics it is the width of an individual spectral line or the entire spectral range.

Laser spectroscopy is used as a tool for studying phenomena with energy in the range of visible light, for example, to study non-linear optics and forbidden transitions in media.

Rendering is practically exclusively concerned with the particle aspect of light physics — known as geometric optics.

In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field ( DOF ) is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image.

Huygens ' principle when applied to an aperture simply says that the far-field diffraction pattern is the spatial Fourier transform of the aperture shape, and this is a direct by-product of using the parallel-rays approximation, which is identical to doing a plane wave decomposition of the aperture plane fields ( see Fourier optics ).

where λ is the wavelength of the light and N is the f-number ( focal length divided by diameter ) of the imaging optics.

It also gives rise to quantum optics, which is different from quantum electrodynamics in that the matter itself is modelled using quantum mechanics rather than quantum field theory.

In physics and engineering disciplines, such as optics, acoustics, and radio, frequency is usually denoted by a Latin letter f or by a Greek letter ν ( nu ).

Sometimes it is referred to as " fly-by-light " due to its use of fiber optics.

He also extended his study of optics to the human eye, and is generally considered by neuroscientists to be the first to recognize that images are projected inverted and reversed by the eye's lens onto the retina.

" Today, Astronomiae Pars Optica is generally recognized as the foundation of modern optics ( though the law of refraction is conspicuously absent ).

* In crystal optics, lambda is used to represent the period of a lattice.

This process results in an unusually mechanically simple laser optical amplifier for signals transmitted by fiber optics.

As he slowly continued analyzing Tycho's Mars observations — now available to him in their entirety — and began the slow process of tabulating the Rudolphine Tables, Kepler also picked up the investigation of the laws of optics from his lunar essay of 1600.

* Parametric process ( optics )

In optics, evanescent-wave coupling is a process by which electromagnetic waves are transmitted from one medium to another by means of the evanescent, exponentially decaying electromagnetic field.

In optics and imaging, the term " deconvolution " is specifically used to refer to the process of reversing the optical distortion that takes place in an optical microscope, electron microscope, telescope, or other imaging instrument, thus creating clearer images.

* 2003-EFILM and Panavision develop proprietary optics for the digital projection systems EFILM uses in its digital intermediate process.

Designing and manufacturing a lenticular product requires a sound knowledge of optics, binocular vision, computing, the graphic chain, and also stringency in work and precision throughout the manufacturing process.

It is accomplished electronically, with no adjustment of the camera's optics, and no optical resolution is gained in the process.

Shanxi University also hosts one key ministerial research center for humanities and social sciences ( i. e.: Center for Philosophy of Science and Technology ), three provincial research bases for humanities and social sciences, one state key laboratory of quantum optics and optical quantum devices, one key ministerial laboratory of chemical biology and molecular engineering, and one key laboratory to circulate intelligence and process Chinese information, which was co-established by the provincial and ministerial Education Department and three key provincial laboratories.

Note that Magneto-optical recording, though using optics and heat, should properly be considered a magnetic process, since the data stored on magneto-optical media is stored magnetically.

to as parametric fluorescence or parametric scattering ) is an important process in quantum optics, used especially as a source of entangled photon pairs, and of single photons.

Even with the relatively high volume of optical components manufactured using the SPDT process, this process cannot be classified as mass production, especially when compared with production of polished optics.

In contrast to other methods ( such as HPLC analysis ) FCS has no physical separation process ; instead, it achieves its spatial resolution through its optics.

Even minor variations in intensity of the beams would result in " self-focusing " in the air and glass optics in a process known as Kerr lensing.