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A rainbow is a captivating natural phenomenon resulting from the refraction, dispersion, and reflection of sunlight within water droplets. Traditional classroom demonstrations often focus on qualitative explanations of the formation of…
A popular demonstration experiment in optics uses a round-bottom flask filled with water to project a circular rainbow on a screen with a hole through which the flask is illuminated. We show how the vessel's wall shifts the second-order and…
The physics at the event horizon resembles the behavior of waves in moving media. Horizons are formed where the local speed of the medium exceeds the wave velocity. We use ultrashort pulses in microstructured optical fibers to demonstrate…
The recently proposed optical elements containing semitransparent wavelike films embedded into the transparent material are investigated. Such optical elements do not distort a wave transmitted through them. Novel optical elements can be…
Light traveling through a liquid crystal with disclinations perceives a geometrical background which causes lensing effects similar to the ones predicted for cosmic objects like global monopoles and cosmic strings. In this article we…
Magic Telescope may observe and reveal at horizons lights from air-shower Cherenkov reflections. The ground, the sea, the cloudy sky (below the mountain) may reflect PeVs-EeV UHECR Cherenkov lights observable by MAGIC telescopes. Even…
We propose to use transformation optics to generate a general illusion such that an arbitrary object appears to be like some other object of our choice. This is achieved by using a remote device that transforms the scattered light outside a…
We consider how transformation optics and invisibility cloaking can be used to construct models in subsets $\mathbb{R}^3$ with a varying metric, where the time-harmonic waves for a given angular wavenumber $k$, are equivalent to the waves…
Many adaptive optics systems operate by measuring the distortion of the wavefront in one wavelength range and performing the scientific observations in a second, different wavelength range. One common technique is to measure wavefront…
Glass-forming liquids have been extensively studied in recent decades, but there is still no theory that fully describes these systems, and the diversity of treatments is in itself a barrier to understanding. Here we introduce a new simple…
Scattering by infinite hexagonal ice prisms is calculated using Maxwell's equations in the discrete dipole approximation for size parameters up to x=400. Birefringence is included in the calculations. Applicability of the geometric optics…
A semiclassical analysis of an optical potential cross section is presented. The cross section considered is characterized by the appearance of an Airy-like pattern. This pattern is similar to that which is present in many cross sections,…
We extend a modal theory of diffraction by a set of parallel fibers to deal with the case of a hard boundary: that is a structure made for instance of air-holes inside a dielectric matrix. Numerical examples are given concerning some…
Many astrophysical systems can be approximated as isothermal spheres. In an isothermal sphere, the ``foreground'' objects can act as lenses on ``background'' objects in the same distribution. We study gravitational lensing by a singular…
{It is necessary to understand the dynamics of the atomic gas to use complex modeling and to carry out detailed comparisons between theoretical models and observations.}{In a companion paper, we present high resolution bidimensional…
We introduce some new experiments where light diffraction is demonstrated with simple elements: white light diffraction with a coin, construction of a diffractive lens by holography, diffraction properties in digital discs and an…
As an approximate theory that is highly regarded for its computational efficiency, geometrical optics (GO) is widely used for modeling waves in various areas of physics. However, GO fails at caustics, which significantly limits its…
We study the phenomenon of additional light waves (ALWs), observed in crystal optics: two or more electromagnetic waves with the same polarization, but different refractive index, propagate simultaneously in a isotropic medium. We show that…
Optical images of transparent three-dimensional objects can be different from a replica of the object's cross section in the image plane due to refraction at the surface or in the body of the object. Simulations of the object's image are…
Geometrical optics (GO) is widely used in studies of electromagnetic materials because of its ease of use compared to full-wave numerical simulations. Exact solutions for waves can, however, differ significantly from the GO approximation.…