Related papers: Mathematical retroreflectors
We introduce a new dynamical system that we call "tiling billiards," where trajectories refract through planar tilings. This system is motivated by a recent discovery of physical substances with negative indices of refraction. We…
Within classical optics, one may add microscopic "roughness" to a macroscopically flat mirror so that parallel rays of a given angle are reflected at different outgoing angles. Taking the limit (as the roughness becomes increasingly…
We study the problem of arithmetic billiards from a new perspective. We first raise a similar problem about reflecting lights inside grids. For the solution to this problem, we will give three proofs. Next, we consider a similar problem in…
We construct semi-infinite billiard domains which reverse the direction of most incoming particles. We prove that almost all particles will leave the open billiard domain after a finite number of reflections. Moreover, with high probability…
A spherical periscope in multi-dimensional space is a system of two ideal mirrors that reflect the rays emanating from a fixed point to the rays coming back to the same point, and a reversed periscope is a system of two mirrors that reflect…
This work is related to billiards and their applications in geometric optics. It is known that perfectly invisible bodies with mirror surface do not exist. It is natural to search for bodies that are, in a sense, close to invisible. We…
A light beam changes direction as it enters a liquid at an angle from another medium, such as air. Should the liquid contain molecules that lack mirror symmetry, then it has been predicted by Fresnel that the light beam will not only change…
This paper considers some open questions related to the inverse problem of pure point diffraction, in particular, what types of objects may diffract, and which of these may exhibit the same diffraction. Some diverse objects with the same…
We design lenses composed of a combination of standard freeform refracting surface and flat metasurface refracting an arbitrary incident field into a collimated beam with a fixed direction. In the near-field case, we study the existence of…
When an oscillating line source is placed in front of a special mirror consisting of an array of flat uniformly spaced ferrite rods, half of the image disappeared at some frequency. We believe that this comes from the coupling to photonic…
Compact objects with a light sphere such as black holes and wormholes can reflect light rays like a mirror. This gravitational lensing phenomenon is called retrolensing and it is an interesting tool to survey dark and compact objects with a…
This paper investigates the dynamics of optical billiards, a generalization of classic billiards, where light rays travel within a refractive medium and reflect elastically at the boundary. Inspired by studies of acoustic modes in rapidly…
In this letter, we show that a perfect lens can be employed to make multiple objects appear like only one in the far field, leading to a new concept of illusion optics. Numerical simulations are performed to verify the functionalities for…
In recent works, the idea of time-reversed laser oscillation has been proposed and demonstrated to realize a two-channel coherent perfect absorber [Y.D. Chong et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 053901 (2010); W.Wan et al., Science 331, 889…
Backflow is a counter-intuitive phenomenon in which a forward propagating quantum particle propagates locally backwards. The actual counter-propagation property associated with this delicate interference phenomenon has not been observed to…
A dynamical system is said to be reversible if, given an output, the input can always be recovered in a well-posed manner. Nevertheless, we argue that reversible systems that have a time-reversal symmetry, such as the Nonlinear…
We introduce a new type of lens that focuses a plane wave into a spherical one, where light comes from all directions. Our method also suggests the design of ideal optical tweezers or, in the reverse direction, photo-detection of nearly all…
We design freeform lenses refracting an arbitrarily given incident field into a given fixed direction. In the near field case, we study the existence of lenses refracting a given bright object into a predefined image. We also analyze the…
An ancient optics problem of Ptolemy, studied later by Alhazen, is discussed. This problem deals with reflection of light in spherical mirrors. Mathematically this reduces to the solution of a quartic equation, which we solve and analyze…
Imposing start from the beginning that the incidence and the reflection of a ray t on an arbitrarily orientated mirror take place at the same point in space and at the same zero time in all involved reference frames in relative motion, we…