physical optics
Sign in to saveAlso known as wave optics
branch of optics that studies interference, diffraction, polarization
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- optics
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- topic's main category
- Category:Physical optics
- Commons category
- Wave mechanics
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
via Wikidata · CC0
~3 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Physical optics is used to explain effects such as diffraction In physics, physical optics, or wave optics, is the branch of optics that studies interference, diffraction, polarization, and other phenomena for which the ray approximation of geometric optics is not valid. This usage tends not to include effects such as quantum noise in optical communication, which is studied in the sub-branch of coherence theory.
Principle
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “physical optics” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.