Related papers: Images in Christmas Balls
When a beam of light is reflected by a smooth surface its behavior deviates from geometrical optics predictions. Such deviations are quantified by the so-called spatial and angular Goos-Haenchen (GH) and Imbert-Fedorov (IF) shifts of the…
We consider the Dirichlet problem for semilinear elliptic equations on a bounded domain which is diffeomorphic to a ball and investigate bifurcation from a given (trivial) branch of solutions, where the radius of the ball serves as…
Geometric phases are ubiquitous in physics; they act as memories of the transformation of a physical system. In optics, the most prominent examples are the Pancharatnam-Berry phase and the spin-redirection phase. Recent technological…
In this work are reviewed several aspects of gravitational lensing produced by astrophysical bodies that strongly curve the spacetime in their vicinity. When an object with a photon sphere (e.g. a black hole) is interposed between a source…
Retroreflectors are optical devices that reverse the direction of incident beams of light. Here we present a collection of billiard type retroreflectors consisting of four objects; three of them are asymptotically perfect retroreflectors,…
This paper is concerned with the Floating Body Problem of S. Ulam: the existence of objects other than the sphere, which can float in a liquid in any orientation. Despite recent results of F. Wegner pointing towards an affirmative answer, a…
Gravitational lensing of luminous matter that surrounds a black hole or some other sufficiently compact object produces an infinite sequence of images. Besides the direct (or primary) image, it comprises demagnified and deformed replicas of…
The problem of the reflectance of a photon by a metallic mirror whose position is treated quantum mechanically is considered. The interaction between the metallic surface and the light is treated classically. It is shown that the…
We motivate then formulate a novel variant of the near-field reflector problem and call it the near-field reflector problem with spatial restrictions. Let $O$ be an anisotropic point source of light and assume that we are given a bounded…
We report a unified representation of the spatial and angular Goos-Hanchen and Imbert-Fedorov shifts that occur when a light beam reflects from a plane interface. We thus reveal the dual nature of spatial and angular shifts in optical beam…
A new analytical characterization of balls in the Euclidean space $\RR^m$ is obtained. Unlike previous results of this kind, using either harmonic functions or solutions to the modified Helmholtz equation, the present one is based on…
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…
We consider the inverse refractor and the inverse reflector problem. The task is to design a free-form lens or a free-form mirror that, when illuminated by a point light source, produces a given illumination pattern on a target. Both…
The refraction of light by dispersion-free dielectric media can be modeled using well-localized macroscopic wave packets, enabling a description in terms of pseudo-particles. This approach is often used in thought experiments to illustrate…
We describe a novel phenomenon occurring when a polarized Gaussian beam of light is observed in a Cartesian reference frame whose axes are not parallel to the direction of propagation of the beam. Such phenomenon amounts to an intriguing…
A number of physical processes show some form of bifurcation or periodic splintering of a single distribution into two new ones. Recently, it has been noted that cavity searches for interactions between photons and exotic fields may also…
The visual appearance of a moving object in special relativity can be constructed in a straightforward manner when representing the surface of the object, or at least a wire frame model of it, as a point cloud. The apparent position of each…
A Platonic surface is a Riemann surface that underlies a regular map and so we can consider its vertices, edge-centres and face-centres. A symmetry (anticonformal involution) of the surface will fix a number of simple closed curves which we…
In this paper, we study the problem of reproducing the world lighting from a single image of an object covered with random specular microfacets on the surface. We show that such reflectors can be interpreted as a randomized mapping from the…
The differential cross-section for the reflection of light beams off rigid bodies obtained by the rotation of a generic derivable convex function is calculated. The calculation is developed using elementary notions of calculus and is…