Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. [1] Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible , ultraviolet , and infrared light.
[4] [5] In this sense, gamma rays, X-rays, microwaves and radio waves are also light. The primary properties of light are intensity, propagation direction, frequency or wavelength spectrum, and polarization. Its speed in vacuum, 299 792 458 m/s, is one of the fundamental constants of nature. [6]
For example, chemistry studies properties, structures, and reactions of matter (chemistry's focus on the molecular and atomic scale distinguishes it from physics). Structures are formed because particles exert electrical forces on each other, properties include physical characteristics of given substances, and reactions are bound by laws of ...
A basic distinction is between isotropic materials, which exhibit the same properties regardless of the direction of the light, and anisotropic ones, which exhibit different properties when light passes through them in different directions. The optical properties of matter can lead to a variety of interesting optical phenomena.
QED was designed to be a popular science book, written in a witty style, and containing just enough quantum-mechanical mathematics to allow the solving of very basic problems in quantum electrodynamics by an educated lay audience. It is unusual for a popular science book in the level of mathematical detail it goes into, actually allowing the ...
The use of statistical mechanics is fundamental to the concepts of quantum optics: light is described in terms of field operators for creation and annihilation of photons—i.e. in the language of quantum electrodynamics. A frequently encountered state of the light field is the coherent state, as introduced by E.C. George Sudarshan in 1960.
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
Visulization of flux through differential area and solid angle. As always ^ is the unit normal to the incident surface A, = ^, and ^ is a unit vector in the direction of incident flux on the area element, θ is the angle between them.