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Radius of curvature sign convention for optical design. Radius of curvature (ROC) has specific meaning and sign convention in optical design. A spherical lens or mirror surface has a center of curvature located either along or decentered from the system local optical axis. The vertex of the lens surface is located on the local optical axis.
The sign of the weight of a tensor density, such as the weight of the determinant of the covariant metric tensor. The active and passive sign convention of current, voltage and power in electrical engineering. A sign convention used for curved mirrors assigns a positive focal length to concave mirrors and a negative focal length to convex mirrors.
For optics like convex lenses, the converging point of the light exiting the lens is on the input side of the focal plane, and is positive in optical power. For concave lenses, the focal point is on the back side of the lens, or the output side of the focal plane, and is negative in power.
For a spherically-curved mirror in air, the magnitude of the focal length is equal to the radius of curvature of the mirror divided by two. The focal length is positive for a concave mirror, and negative for a convex mirror. In the sign convention used in optical design, a concave mirror has negative radius of curvature, so
Convex mirror lets motorists see around a corner. Detail of the convex mirror in the Arnolfini Portrait. The passenger-side mirror on a car is typically a convex mirror. In some countries, these are labeled with the safety warning "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear", to warn the driver of the convex mirror's distorting effects on distance perception.
The signs are reversed for the back surface of the lens: R 2 is positive if the surface is concave, and negative if it is convex. This is an arbitrary sign convention; some authors choose different signs for the radii, which changes the equation for the focal length. For a thin lens, d is much smaller than one of the radii of curvature (either ...
Each optical element (surface, interface, mirror, or beam travel) is described by a 2 × 2 ray transfer matrix which operates on a vector describing an incoming light ray to calculate the outgoing ray. Multiplication of the successive matrices thus yields a concise ray transfer matrix describing the entire optical system.
By convention, "f / #" is treated as a single symbol, and specific values of f / # are written by replacing the number sign with the value. The two ways to increase the f-stop are to either decrease the diameter of the entrance pupil or change to a longer focal length (in the case of a zoom lens , this can be done by simply adjusting the lens).