Recent content by einfall

Andy, Sorry for the delay responding, your response is very much appreciated and I have Goodman's Fourier Optics sitting on my desk now as a result. I'll be even less-vague now (!) — the micron-scale particle is illuminated by a microscope lamp, and also by a 640nm diode laser. The...

Thanks very much for your response - you're right, my previous question was quite unclear. I have a micron-scale particle under lamp illumination which is also scattering laser light. I want to compute what the scattered field and particle "look like" with a specific numerical aperture under...

What you just described is probably fine for a foothold on Jackson, which was the standard ED text in final-year undergrad. Green function approaches, spherical vector harmonic expansions of plane waves, tensor analysis especially for the QFT groundwork... These are about as tough as it gets...

*its

I have a question about observing a field of radiated light (and it's source) through a microscope, specifically vis magnification and the scale of the final image observed (the field, and also the source). I have a slice of field intensity at the plane of a microscope's numerical aperture...

The k-vector for the transmitted wave is the entity I need to quantify, yes — but I specifically need the angle that k-vector forms with the interface (rather than the normal, which is the angle that falls out of standard Snell/Fresnel expressions). Despite being irked by ignoring the...

Thanks so much for trying to bludgeon this into my head... I'm afraid I'm still quite confused. Please forgive me in advance... The incident k_i is at a real angle, say 70 degrees, to a TIR interface. If it's a glass prism (n_1 ≈ 1.52) and an aqueous medium (n_1 ≈ 1.33) this gives θ_t =...

Yes, I'm pretty sure this is the θ' I'm talking about and I think we're on the same wavelength(/vector... ohh, puns). But when you say: Please tell me if I'm interpreting this incorrectly, but is this a more physically rigorous way of implying that the real component of the angle θ'...

I certainly take your point. I should clarify - my question relates specifically to the "complement" of an complex angle of refraction, and its physical interpretation in the context of total internal reflection. In this case, the complement I mean to obtain is the one with physical...

Thanks for your tentative confirmation. In what way would it depend on the intended use of that "complement"? Surely it's a geometrically well-defined complex number? n.b. In every use of this "complement" θ (let's call it θ'), it's called as cos(θ') so the implicit infinity of periodic...

Snell's Law - complex angle of refraction (need "complement") I'm tying myself in knots trying to calculate something I think should be very simple. I'm writing/debugging some code at the moment, and I simply don't know if this silly problem is the source of the major errors I'm currently...