System Components | Basic Physics for IIT JAM PDF Download

An optical system consists of a succession of elements, which may include lenses, mirrors, light sources, detectors, projection screens, reflecting prisms, dispersing devices, filters and thin films, and fibre-optics bundles. 

Lenses
All optical systems have an aperture stop somewhere in the system to limit the diameter of the beams of light passing through the system from an object point. By analogy with the human eye, this limiting aperture stop is called the iris of the system, its images in the object and image spaces being called the entrance pupil and exit pupil, respectively. In most photographic lenses the iris is inside the objective, and it is often adjustable in diameter to control the image illumination and the depth of field. In telescope and microscope systems the cylindrical mount of the objective lens is generally the limiting aperture or iris of the system; its image, formed behind the eyepiece where the observer’s eye must be located to see the whole area being observed, called the field, is then the exit pupil.
The pupils of a lens system can be regarded as the common bases of oblique beams passing through the system from all points in an extended object. In most systems, however, the mounts of some of the lens elements cut into the oblique beams and prevent the beams from being perfectly circular, and the pupils are then not fully filled with light. This effect is known as vignetting and leads to a reduction in illumination in the outer parts of the field of view.
A common feature of many optical systems is a relay lens, which may be introduced to invert an image or to extend the length of the system, as in a military periscope. An example of the use of a relay lens is found in the common rifle sight shown diagrammatically in Figure 6. Here the front lens A is the objective, forming an inverted image of the target on the cross wire or reticle at B. The light then proceeds to the relay lens C, which forms a second image, now erect, at D. Beyond this image is the eyepiece E to render the light parallel so that the image may be seen sharply by the observer. Unfortunately, the oblique beam from the objective will usually miss the relay lens, and so a field lens must be inserted at or near the first image B to bend the oblique beams around and redirect them toward the relay lens. The power of the field lens is chosen so that it will form an image of the objective lens aperture on the relay lens aperture. The iris and entrance pupil of this system coincide at the objective; there is an internal pupil at the relay lens, and the exit pupil lies beyond the eyepiece as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: Operating principle of the telescopic rifle sight (see text). 

Mirrors
Mirrors are frequently used in optical systems. Plane mirrors may be employed to bend a beam of light in another direction, either for convenience or to yield an image reversed left for right if required. Curved mirrors, concave and convex, may be used in place of lenses as image-forming elements in reflecting telescopes. All of the world’s largest telescopes and many small ones are of the reflecting type. Such telescopes use a concave mirror to produce the main image, a small secondary mirror often being added to magnify the image and to place it in a convenient position for observation or photography. Telescope mirrors are commonly made parabolic or hyperbolic in section to correct the aberrations of the image. Originally telescope mirrors were made from polished “speculum metal,” an alloy of copper and tin, but in 1856 Justus von Liebig, a German chemist, invented a process for forming a mirror-like layer of silver on polished glass, which was applied to telescope mirrors by the German astronomer C.A. von Steinheil. Today most mirrors are made of glass, coated with either a chemically deposited silver layer or more often one made by depositing vaporized aluminum on the surface. The aluminum surface is as highly reflective as silver and does not tarnish as readily.
A large astronomical mirror presents many problems to the optical engineer, mainly because even a distortion of a few microns of the mirror under its own weight will cause an intolerable blurring of the image. Though many schemes for supporting a mirror without strain have been tried, including one to support it on a bag of compressed air, the problem of completely eliminating mirror distortion remains unsolved. A metal mirror, if well ribbed on the back, may be lighter than a glass mirror and therefore easier to handle, but most metals are slightly flexible and require just as careful support as glass mirrors. Since temperature changes can also cause serious distortion in a mirror, astronomers try to hold observatory temperatures as constant as possible.

Light sources
Many types of optical instruments form images by natural light, but some, such as microscopes and projectors, require a source of artificial light. Tungsten filament lamps are the most common, but if a very bright source is required, a carbon or xenon arc is employed. For some applications, mercury or other gas discharge tubes are used; a laser beam is often employed in scientific applications. Laser light is brilliant, monochromatic, collimated (the rays are parallel), and coherent (the waves are all in step with each other), any or all of these properties being of value in particular cases.

Detectors
The image formed by an optical system is usually received by the eye, which is a remarkably adaptable and sensitive detector of radiation within the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. A photographic film, another widely used detector, has the advantage of yielding a permanent record of events. Since about 1925 many types of electrical detectors of radiation, both within the visible region and beyond it, have been developed. These include photoelectric cells of various kinds in which either a voltage or a resistance is modified by light falling on the device. Many new types of detectors are sensitive far into the infrared spectrum and are used to detect the heat radiated by a flame or other hot object. A number of image intensifiers and converters, particularly for X-ray or infrared radiation, which have appeared since World War II, embody a radiation detector at one end of a vacuum tube and an electron lens inside the tube to relay the image on to a phosphor screen at the other end. This arrangement produces a visible picture that may be observed by eye or photographed to make a permanent record.
Television camera tubes detect real images by electronic scanning, the picture on the viewing tube being a replica of the image in the original camera. The combined application of electronics and optics has become common. An extreme example of electro-optics appears in some space cameras, in which the film is exposed, processed, and then scanned by a tiny point of light; the light passing through the film is picked up by a photocell and transmitted to Earth by radio, where it is made to control the brightness of another point of light scanning a second piece of film in exact synchronism with the scanning spot in the camera. The whole system thus produces a picture on Earth that is an exact replica of the picture photographed in space a few minutes earlier.

Projection screens
The simplest screen for the projection of slides or motion pictures is, of course, a matte white surface, which may be on a hard base as in outdoor theatres or on a stretched cloth indoors. A theatre screen is often perforated to transmit sound from loudspeakers placed behind it.
Improved screen materials have been developed to increase the brightness of the picture to suit the particular shape of the auditorium. A screen covered with tiny beads tends to send the light back in the general direction of the projector, and is suitable for use at one end of a long, narrow auditorium. Another type of screen is covered with fine embossed vertical grooves; this tends to distribute the light in a horizontal band across the audience with little or no vertical spread. A real advantage of these highly reflective screens is that they tend to reflect ambient room light away from the viewer as by a mirror, so that the pictures appear almost as bright and clear by day as in a darkened room.

Reflecting prisms
Reflecting prisms are pieces of glass bounded by plane surfaces set at carefully specified angles. Some of these surfaces transmit light, some reflect light, while some serve both functions in succession. A prism is thus an assembly of plane reflectors at relatively fixed angles, which are traversed in succession by a beam of light.
The simplest prism is a triangular block of glass with two faces at right angles and one at an angle of 45°. The face at 45° deflects a beam of light through a right angle. The common Porro prism used in a pair of binoculars contains four 45° reflecting surfaces, two to reverse the beam direction in the vertical plane and two in the horizontal plane (Figure 7). These reflecting faces could be replaced by pieces of mirror mounted on a metal frame, but it is hard to hold mirrors rigidly and harder still to keep them clean. Some microscopes are equipped with a 45° deflection prism behind the eyepiece; this prism may provide two or three reflections depending on the type of image inversion or left-for-right reversal required.

Figure 7: Porro prism. 

Prisms containing a semireflecting, semitransmitting surface are known as beam splitters and as such have many uses. An important application is found in some colour television cameras, in which the light from the lens is divided by two beam splitters in succession to form red, green, and blue images on the faces of three image tubes in the camera.

Dispersing devices
There are two forms of dispersing element used to spread out the constituent colours of a beam of light into a “spectrum,” namely a prism and a grating. The prism, known to Newton, is the older; it separates the colours of the spectrum because the refractive index of the glass is lowest for red light and progressively increases through the yellow and green to the blue, where it is highest. Prism spectroscopes and spectrographs are made in a variety of forms and sizes, but in all cases the blue end of the spectrum is greatly spread out while the red end is relatively compressed.
A diffraction grating is a ruled mirror or transparent plate of glass having many thousands of fine parallel grooves to the inch. It separates the colours of the spectrum by a process of diffraction. Each groove diffracts, or scatters, light in all directions, and in the case of light of one particular wavelength, there will be one direction in which the light wave from one groove lags behind the light wave from the next groove by precisely one or more whole wavelengths. This results in a strong beam of diffracted light in that direction and darkness in all other directions. Since each spectral colour corresponds to a different wavelength, the grating spreads out the spectrum into a fan where it can be observed or photographed. The red rays are bent most and the blue rays least, the opposite of the situation with a prism.
Although a prism or grating is the essential dispersing element in a spectrograph, a fine slit and additional lenses or focussing mirrors must be used to form a sharply defined spectrum. Prism spectroscopes are, of course, limited to those wavelengths for which the prism material is transparent; a reflecting grating can be used for any wavelength that the material will reflect.

Filters and thin films
A colour filter is a sheet of transparent material that modifies a light beam by selective absorption of some colours in relation to others. A neutral filter absorbs all wavelengths equally and merely serves to reduce the intensity of a beam of light without changing its colour.
Filters may be made from sheets of coloured glass, plastic, or dyed gelatin, and in some cases glass cells filled with liquid have been used. Since World War II, another type of filter depending on the interference of light has been developed in which one or more metallic or other types of films of controlled thickness have been deposited on a glass plate, the layers being so thin as to cause selective interference of some wavelengths in relation to others and thus act as a nonabsorbing filter. In this case the rejected colours are reflected instead of being absorbed.
Polarizing filters have the property of transmitting light that vibrates in one direction while absorbing light that vibrates in a perpendicular direction. These filters are used extensively in scientific instruments. In sunglasses and when placed over a camera lens, polarizing filters reduce unwanted reflections from nonmetallic surfaces. Polarizing spectacles have been used to separate the left-eye and right-eye beams in the projection of stereoscopic pictures or movies.

Fibre-optics bundles
As noted earlier, a thin rod or fibre of glass or other transparent material transmits light by repeated internal reflections, even when the rod is somewhat curved. An ordered bundle of rods or fibres is thus capable of taking an image projected upon one end of the bundle and reproducing it at the other end. A fibre-optics bundle can be fused together into a rigid channel, or it may be left flexible, only the ends being rigidly fastened together. Because a fibre bundle is exceedingly delicate, it must be handled with care; breaking a fibre would cause a black dot to appear in the reproduced image.

Light ray passing through an optical fibre.