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The ability of a lens to resolve detail is usually determined by the quality of the lens, but is ultimately limited by diffraction.Light coming from a point source in the object diffracts through the lens aperture such that it forms a diffraction pattern in the image, which has a central spot and surrounding bright rings, separated by dark nulls; this pattern is known as an Airy pattern, and ...
The spectral resolution of a spectrograph, or, more generally, of a frequency spectrum, is a measure of its ability to resolve features in the electromagnetic spectrum.It is usually denoted by , and is closely related to the resolving power of the spectrograph, defined as =, where is the smallest difference in wavelengths that can be distinguished at a wavelength of .
In optics, any optical instrument or system – a microscope, telescope, or camera – has a principal limit to its resolution due to the physics of diffraction. An optical instrument is said to be diffraction-limited if it has reached this limit of resolution performance.
Often there is a trade-off between the temporal resolution of a measurement and its spatial resolution, due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.In some contexts, such as particle physics, this trade-off can be attributed to the finite speed of light and the fact that it takes a certain period of time for the photons carrying information to reach the observer.
Angular resolution describes the ability of any image-forming device such as an optical or radio telescope, a microscope, a camera, or an eye, to distinguish small details of an object, thereby making it a major determinant of image resolution.
The vector projection (also known as the vector component or vector resolution) of a vector a on (or onto) a nonzero vector b is the orthogonal projection of a onto a straight line parallel to b. The projection of a onto b is often written as proj b a {\displaystyle \operatorname {proj} _{\mathbf {b} }\mathbf {a} } or a ∥ b .
In laser physics, numerical aperture is defined slightly differently. Laser beams spread out as they propagate, but slowly. Laser beams spread out as they propagate, but slowly. Far away from the narrowest part of the beam, the spread is roughly linear with distance—the laser beam forms a cone of light in the "far field".
FWHM is applied to such phenomena as the duration of pulse waveforms and the spectral width of sources used for optical communications and the resolution of spectrometers. The convention of "width" meaning "half maximum" is also widely used in signal processing to define bandwidth as "width of frequency range where less than half the signal's ...