Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
An optical fiber, or optical fibre, is a flexible glass or plastic fiber that can transmit light [a] from one end to the other. Such fibers find wide usage in fiber-optic communications , where they permit transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data transfer rates) than electrical cables.
An optical waveguide is a physical structure that guides electromagnetic waves in the optical spectrum.Common types of optical waveguides include optical fiber waveguides, transparent dielectric waveguides made of plastic and glass, liquid light guides, and liquid waveguides.
The optical path difference between the paths taken by two identical waves can then be used to find the phase change. Finally, using the phase change, the interference between the two waves can be calculated. Fermat's principle states that the path light takes between two points is the path that has the minimum optical path length.
Numerical aperture is commonly used in microscopy to describe the acceptance cone of an objective (and hence its light-gathering ability and resolution), and in fiber optics, in which it describes the range of angles within which light that is incident on the fiber will be transmitted along it.
For step index fiber, light entering the fiber will be guided if it makes an angle with the fiber axis that is less than the fiber's acceptance angle. A leaky ray or tunneling ray is a ray in an optical fiber that geometric optics predicts would totally reflect at the boundary between the core and the cladding , but which suffers loss due to ...
Within optics, dispersion is a property of telecommunication signals along transmission lines (such as microwaves in coaxial cable) or the pulses of light in optical fiber. In optics, one important and familiar consequence of dispersion is the change in the angle of refraction of different colors of light, [ 2 ] as seen in the spectrum produced ...
In fiber optics, polarization-maintaining optical fiber (PMF or PM fiber) is a single-mode optical fiber in which linearly polarized light, if properly launched into the fiber, maintains a linear polarization during propagation, exiting the fiber in a specific linear polarization state; there is little or no cross-coupling of optical power ...
Geometrical optics, or ray optics, is a model of optics that describes light propagation in terms of rays.The ray in geometrical optics is an abstraction useful for approximating the paths along which light propagates under certain circumstances.