Geometric optics

It is called “geometric” optics because the images can be characterized using geometric
constructions, such as ray diagrams. We have seen that visible light is an electromagnetic wave;
however, its wave nature becomes evident only when light interacts with objects with dimensions
comparable to the wavelength (about 500 nm for visible light). Therefore, the laws of geometric
optics only apply to light interacting with objects much larger than the wavelength of the light.
When light falls on an object
o The object allows the light to pass through it.
o The object may absorb the light and stop it from passing through it.
o It may scatter the light.
o It may reflect the light incident on it.
When light is incident on a surface, a part of it is reflected from the surface. The remaining part is
absorbed if the surface is opaque or it is partly transmitted and partly absorbed if the surface is
transparent.
We see the objects around us due to reflection. The objects around us that do not emit their own
light are seen when the light from a source is reflected from them. Different surfaces reflect light
to different extents.
Geometry of specular reflection (Reflection from a shiny surface)
When a wave reaches the interface between two different media, typically some of the
wave will bounce back into the original medium. This process is known as reflection. A familiar
example of reflection is optical reflection in mirrors, where light waves reflect off a smooth
surface. Another familiar example of reflection comes from water waves; as the waves travel they
reflect off objects that are floating in the water, and also reflect off the walls of the container
holding the water. Most of us are familiar with the concept of echoes, which are the reflections of
sound waves. Any kind of wave can undergo reflection.
To change the motion of a material object, we use a force. Is
there any way to exert a force on a beam of light? Experiments
show that electric and magnetic fields do not deflect light beams,
so apparently light has no electric charge. Light also has no
mass, so until the twentieth century it was believed to be
immune to gravity as well. Einstein predicted that light beams
would be very slightly deflected by strong gravitational fields,
and he was proved correct by observations of rays of starlight
that came close to the sun, but obviously that’s not what makes
mirrors and lenses work!
Whenever you look into a mirror or squint at sunlight glinting off
a lake, you are seeing a reflection. When you look at the text in
a book, you are actually seeing the light that is reflected from it. Large telescopes use reflections
to form images of stars and other astronomical objects. In fact, the only way we can see an object
that does not itself emit light is if that object reflects light.
. Where a ray of light encounters the surface of a mirror, or the interface between the
transparent medium in which it (the light) is traveling and another transparent medium, the ray
makes an abrupt change in direction, after which, it travels along a new straight line path. In the
geometric optics model of light, we see light emitted by sources of light because the light enters
our eyes.
When light incidents on a surface part is reflected, part is refracted and part is absorbed.
How much will be reflected depends on : 1) incident angle: if light comes from air to water
perpendicularly then 4.5% is reflected. 2) nature of mediums: if light comes from air to glass then
80% is reflected. For black surface maximum absorption occurs and for white surface minimum
absorption occurs.
In specular reflection, the reflected rays are parallel to each other. In diffuse reflection, light is
reflected in random directions. With diffuse reflection, your eye sees reflected light at all angles.
With specular reflection (from a mirror), your eye must be in the correct position.
If we investigate how light is reflected by a mirror, we will find that the process is
horrifically complex, but the final result is surprisingly simple. What actually happens is that the
light is made of electric and magnetic fields, and these fields accelerate the electrons in the
mirror. Energy from the light beam is momentarily transformed into extra kinetic energy of the
electrons, but because the electrons are accelerating they re-radiate more light, converting their
kinetic energy back into light energy. We might expect this to result in a very chaotic situation, but
 amazingly enough, the electrons move together to produce a new, reflected beam of light, which
obeys two simple rules:
Laws of reflection
1) The incident ray, the reflected ray and
the normal at the point of incidence all
lie on the same plane.
What does plane mean? plane is a
flat surface just like a sheet of paper
or a table surface. So which plane are
they talking about. Here this is a
common confusion. Is it the mirror?
that's right. it's not the mirror. In fact
the first law doesn't even talk about
the mirror. It's this flat surface that is
perpendicular to the mirror and as you
can see the incident ray the reflected
ray and the normal are all lying on this
flat surface which is our plane here.
2) The angle of incidence is equal to
angle of reflection

The two angles can be defined either with respect to the normal, like angles B and C in
the figure, or with respect to the reflecting surface, like angles A and D. There is a convention of
several hundred years’ standing that one measures the angles with respect to the normal, but the
rule about equal angles can logically be stated either as B=C or as A=D.
The phenomenon of reflection occurs only at the boundary between two media, just like the
change in the speed of light that passes from one medium to another. As we have seen in chapter
20, this is the way all waves behave.
Diffused Reflection (reflection from a rough surface)
Most people are surprised by the fact that light can be reflected back from a less dense medium.
For instance, if you are diving and you look up at the surface of the water, you will see a reflection
of yourself.
We expect to see reflections off a smooth surface. However, light strikes different parts of a rough
surface at different angles, and it is reflected in many different directions ("diffused"). Diffused light
is what allows us to see a sheet of paper from any angle. Many objects, such as people, clothing,
leaves, and walls, have rough surfaces and can be seen from all sides. A mirror, on the other
hand, has a smooth surface (compared with the wavelength of light) and reflects light at specific
angles. When the moon reflects off the surface of a lake, a combination of these effects takes
place.
 The law of reflection is illustrated in Figure 25.2.1, which also shows how the angles are
measured relative to the perpendicular to the surface at the point where the light ray strikes. We
expect to see reflections from smooth surfaces, but Figure 25.2.2 illustrates how a rough surface
reflects light. Since the light strikes different parts of the surface at different angles, it is reflected in
many different directions, or diffused.

When we first discussed geometric optics, we made a point of

stating that, on most surfaces, light reflects in all directions. We
called this phenomenon diffuse reflection. This behavior seems
very different from the ideas discussed above, where reflected light
waves have very well defined directions. Above, we don't
acknowledge that most materials are actually rough, not smooth. If
you zoom in on a rough surface, you'll see that it's composed of very small smooth surfaces, all of
which are misaligned. Light incident on rough surfaces reflects in mulitple, misaligned directions,
and it becomes scattered (as shown below). This is why light shining on the tree in How We See
Things, for example, reflects in all directions.

Diffused light is what allows us to see a sheet of paper from any angle, as illustrated in Figure
25.2.3a . Many objects, such as people, clothing, leaves, and walls, have rough surfaces and can
be seen from all sides. A mirror, on the other hand, has a smooth surface (compared with the
wavelength of light) and reflects light at specific angles, as illustrated in Figure 25.2.3b. When the
moon reflects from a lake, as shown in Figure 25.2.4, a combination of these effects takes place.
A mirror or a highly polished surface is an example of regular reflection. But most of the objects
around us like paper walls curtains are all examples of irregular reflectors of light because they
scatter the light. It's easy to understand the difference between regular and irregular reflection. If
we consider a parallel beam of light falling on a mirror and a surface like a paper. So let's look at
the mirror case first. So as you can see in the plane mirror the parallel beam remains parallel even
after reflection. So if you look closely you can see that all the Rays in the beam have the same
angle of incidence and following the laws of reflection. All the Rays will have the

same angle of reflection so the incident beam remains parallel even after reflection. Now let's look
at the case of irregular reflection. When a parallel beam of light falls on a surface like a paper as
you can see it gets scattered in different directions. Is this because the laws of reflection don't hold
here? No. The laws of reflection always hold the papers seem smooth. But if we look closely at a
microscopic level the paper is rough. So as you can see here the angle of incidence for the
different rays in the beam are different and so the angles of reflection will also be different and this
is how the light gets scattered in different directions so it's called scattered reflection. Another
name for this case is irregular or diffused reflection.
 When we see our reflection in a mirror, it appears that our image is actually behind the
mirror -- we see the light coming from a direction determined by the law of reflection. The angles
are such that our image appears exactly the same distance behind the mirror as we stand away
from the mirror. If the mirror is on the wall of a room, the images in it are all behind the mirror,
which can make the room seem bigger. Although these mirror images make objects appear to be
where they cannot be (like behind a solid wall), the images are not figments of our imagination.
Mirror images can be photographed and videotaped by instruments and look just as they do with
our eyes (optical instruments themselves).
In the geometric optics model of light, we see light emitted by sources of light because
the light enters our eyes. Consider for instance, a candle.

Every point of the flame of the candle emits rays of light in every direction.

While the preceding diagram conveys the idea in the statement preceding the diagram,
the diagram is not the complete picture. To get a more complete picture of what’s going on, what
I want you to do is to look at the diagram provided, form a picture of it in your mind, and, to the
picture in your mind, add the following embellishments:

1. First off, I need you to imagine it to be a real candle extending in three dimensions.
Our set of rays depicted as arrows whose tips are all on a circle becomes a set of rays depicted
as arrows whose tips all end on a sphere. Thus, in addition to rays going (at various angles)
upward, downward and to the sides, you’ve got rays proceeding (at various angles) away from
you and toward you.
2. Now I need you to add more rays to the picture in your mind. I included 16 rays in the
diagram. In three dimensions, you should have about 120 rays in the picture in your mind. I need
you to bump that up to infinity.
3. In the original diagram, I showed rays coming only from the tip of the flame. At this
point, we have an infinite number of rays coming from the tip of the flame. I need you to picture
that to be the case for each point of the flame, not just the tip of the flame. In the interest of
simplicity, in the picture in your mind, let the flame of the candle be an opaque solid rather than
gaseous, so that we can treat all our rays as coming from points on the surface of the flame.
Neglect any rays that are in any way directed into the flame itself (don’t include them in the
picture in your mind). Upon completion of this step, you should have, in the picture in your mind,
an infinite number of rays coming from each of the infinite number of points making up the
surface of the flame.
4. For this next part, we need to establish the setting. I’m concerned that you might be
reading this in a room in which lit candles are forbidden. If so, please relocate the candle in the
picture in your mind to the dining room table in your home, or, replace the candle with a fake
electric-powered candle such as you might see in a home around Christmastime. Now I need you
to extend each of the rays in the picture in your mind all the way out to the point where they bump
into something. Please end each ray at the point where it bumps into something. (A ray that
bumps into a non-shiny surface, bounces off in all directions [diffuse reflection]. Thus, each ray
that bumps into a non-shiny surface creates an infinite set of rays coming from the point of
impact. A ray bumping into perfectly shiny surfaces continues as a single ray in one particular,
new, direction [specular reflection]. To avoid clutter, let’s omit all the reflected rays from the
picture in your mind.)
If you have carried out steps 1-4 above, then you have the picture, in your mind, of the
geometric optics model of the light given off by a light-emitting object. When you are in a room
with a candle such as the one we have been discussing, you can tell where it is (in what direction
and how far away—you might not be able to give very accurate values, but you can tell where it
is) by looking at it. When you look at it, an infinite number of rays, from each part of the surface of
the flame, are entering your eyes. What is amazing is how few rays you need to determine
where, for instance, the tip of the flame is. Of the infinite number of rays available to you, you only
need two! Consider what you can find out from a single ray entering your eye:

From just one of the infinite number of rays, you can deduce the direction that the tip of
the flame is in, relative to you. In other words, you can say that the tip of the flame lies
somewhere on the line segment that both contains the ray that enters your eye, and, that ends at
the location of your eye.
 There is only one point in space that is both “somewhere back along line 1” and
“somewhere back along line 2.” That one point is, of course, the point where the two lines cross.
The eyebrain system is an amazing system. When you look at something, your eye-brain system
automatically carries out the “trace back and find the intersection” process to determine how far
away that something is. Again, you might not be able to tell me how many centimeters away the
candle, for instance, is, but you must know how far away it is because you would know about how
hard to throw something to hit the candle.
This business of tracing rays back to see where they come from is known as ray tracing
and is what geometric optics is all about.
At this point I want to return our attention to the candle to provide you with a little bit
more insight into the practice of ray tracing. Suppose that when you were determining the
location of the tip of the flame of the candle, you already had some additional information about
the candle. For instance, assume: You know that the rays are coming from the upper extremity of
the candle; you know that the bottom of the candle is on the plane of the surface of your dining
room table; and you know that the candle is vertical. We’ll also assume that the candle is so
skinny that we are not interested in its horizontal extent in space, so, we can think of it as a
skinny line segment with a top (the tip of the candle) and a bottom, the point on the candle that is
at table level. The intersection of the plane of the table surface with the plane of the two rays is a
line, and, based on the information we have, the bottom of the candle is on that line.

Taken together with the information gleaned from the rays, we can draw in the entire
(skinny) candle, on our diagram, and from the diagram, determine such things as the candle’s
height, position, and orientation (whether it is upside down [inverted] or right side up [erect]). In
adding the candle to the diagram, I am going to draw it as an arrow. Besides the fact that it is
conventional to draw objects in ray tracing diagrams as arrows, we use an arrow to represent the
candle to avoid conveying the impression that, from the limited facts we have at our disposal, we
have been able to learn more about the candle (diameter, flame height, etc) than is possible. (We
can only determine the height, position, and orientation.)
 The trace-back method for locating the tip of the candle flame works for any two rays,
from among the infinite number of rays emitted by the tip of the candle flame. All the rays come
from the same point and they all travel along different straight line paths. As such, the rays are
said to diverge from the tip of the candle flame. The trace-back method allows us to determine
the point from which the rays are diverging.
By means of lenses and mirrors, we can redirect rays of light, infinite numbers of them
at a time, in such a manner as to fool the eye-brain system that is using the trace-back method
into perceiving the point from which the rays are diverging as being someplace other than where
the object is. To do so, one simply has to redirect the rays so that they are diverging from
someplace other than their point of origin. The point, other than their point of origin, from which
the rays diverge (because of the redirection of rays by mirrors and/or lenses), is called the image
of the point on the object from which the light actually originates.
Mirror
A mirror is the most common example of specular light reflection. It usually consists of a
glass sheet in front of a metallic coating where the reflection actually occurs. Reflection also
occurs from the surface of transparent media, such as water or glass.
When light reflects off a material denser than the external medium, it undergoes a 180°
phase reversal. In contrast, a less dense, lower refractive index material will reflect light in phase.
This is an important principle in the field of thin-film optics.
Perfect mirror
A perfect mirror is a theoretical mirror that reflects light (and electromagnetic radiation in
general) perfectly, and doesn't transmit it. Domestic mirrors are not perfect mirrors as they absorb
a significant portion of the light which falls on them. Dielectric mirrors are glass or other
substrates on which one or more layers of dielectric material are deposited, to form an optical
coating. A very complex dielectric mirror can reflect up to 99.999% of the light incident upon it, for
a narrow range of wavelengths and angles. A simpler mirror may reflect 99.9% of the light, but
may cover a broader range of wavelengths.
Mirror Reflection
An image in a mirror appears as though it is behind the mirror. The two rays shown are
those that strike the mirror at just the correct angles to
be reflected into the eyes of the viewer. The image
appears to come from the direction the rays are coming
from when they enter the viewer's eyes.
Figure 25.2.5 : Our image in a mirror is behind the mirror. The
two rays shown are those that strike the mirror at just the correct angles to
be reflected into the eyes of the person. The image appears to be in the
direction the rays are coming from when they enter the eyes.

Reversibility of light rays

The fact that specular reflection displays equal angles of
incidence and reflection means that there is a symmetry:
if the ray had come in from the right instead of the left in the figure above, the angles would have
looked exactly the same. This is not just a pointless detail about specular reflection. It’s a
manifestation of a very deep and important fact about nature, which is that the laws of physics do
not distinguish between past and future. Cannonballs and planets have trajectories that are
equally natural in reverse, and so do light rays. This type of symmetry is called time-reversal
symmetry.
Typically, time-reversal symmetry is a characteristic of any process that does not involve heat. For
instance, the planets do not experience any friction as they travel through empty space, so there is
no frictional heating. We should thus expect the time-reversed versions of their orbits to obey the
laws of physics, which they do. In contrast, a book sliding across a table does generate heat from
friction as it slows down, and it is therefore not surprising that this type of motion does not appear
to obey time-reversal symmetry. A book lying still on a flat table is never observed to
spontaneously start sliding, sucking up heat energy and transforming it into kinetic energy.
Similarly, the only situation we’ve observed so far where light does not obey time-reversal
symmetry is absorption, which involves heat. Your skin absorbs visible light from the sun and
heats up, but we never observe people’s skin to glow, converting heat energy into visible light.
People’s skin does glow in infrared light, but that doesn’t mean the situation is symmetric. Even if
you absorb infrared, you don’t emit visible light, because your skin isn’t hot enough to glow in the
visible spectrum.
These apparent heat-related asymmetries are not actual asymmetries in the laws of physics. The
interested reader may wish to learn more about this from optional chapter 16 on thermodynamics.
Example 1 : Ray tracing on a computer
A number of techniques can be used for creating artificial visual scenes in computer graphics.
Figure l shows such a scene, which was created by the brute-force technique of simply
constructing a very detailed ray diagram on a computer. This technique requires a great deal of
computation, and is therefore too slow to be used for video games and computer-animated
movies. One trick for speeding up the computation is to exploit the reversibility of light rays. If one
was to trace every ray emitted by every illuminated surface, only a tiny fraction of those would
actually end up passing into the virtual “camera,” and therefore almost all of the computational
effort would be wasted. One can instead start a ray at the camera, trace it backward in time, and
see where it would have come from. With this technique, there is no wasted effort.

The principle of least time for reflection *

We had to choose between an unwieldy explanation of reflection at
the atomic level and a simpler geometric description that was not as
fundamental. There is a third approach to describing the interaction
of light and matter which is very deep and beautiful. Emphasized by
the twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman, it is called the
principle of least time, or Fermat’s principle.
Let’s start with the motion of light that is not interacting with matter at
all. In a vacuum, a light ray moves in a straight line. This can be
rephrased as follows: of all the conceivable paths light could follow
from P to Q, the only one that is physically possible is the path that
takes the least time.
What about reflection? If light is going to go from one point to
another, being reflected on the way, the quickest path is indeed the
one with equal angles of incidence and reflection. If the starting and ending points are equally far
from the reflecting surface, o, it’s not hard to convince yourself that this is true, just based on
symmetry. There is also a tricky and simple proof, shown in figure p, for the more general case
where the points are at different distances from the surface. Not only does the principle of least
time work for light in a vacuum and light undergoing reflection, we will also see in a later chapter
that it works for the bending of light when it passes from one medium into another.
Although it is beautiful that the entire ray model of light can be reduced to one simple rule, the
principle of least time, it may seem a little spooky to speak as if the ray of light is intelligent, and
has carefully planned ahead to find the shortest route to its destination. How does it know in
advance where it’s going? What if we moved the mirror while the light was en route, so conditions
along its planned path were not what it “expected?” The answer is that the principle of least time is
really a shortcut for finding certain results of the wave model of light, which is the topic of the last
chapter of this book.
There are a couple of subtle points about the principle of least time. First, the path does not have
to be the quickest of all possible paths; it only needs to be quicker than any path that differs
infinitesimally from it. In figure p, for instance, light could get from A to B either by the reflected
path AQB or simply by going straight from A to B. Although AQB is not the shortest possible path,
it cannot be shortened by changing it infinitesimally, e.g., by moving Q a little to the right or left. On
the other hand, path APB is physically impossible, because it is possible to improve on it by
moving point P infinitesimally to the right.
It’s not quite right to call this the principle of least time. In figure q,
for example, the four physically possible paths by which a ray can
return to the center consist of two shortest-time paths and two
longest-time paths. Strictly speaking, we should refer to the
principle of least or greatest time, but most physicists omit the
niceties, and assume that other physicists understand that both
maxima and minima are possible.

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