Illustrated Physics
physics, drawn
Concept

Caustic — where it appears

The surface on which neighbouring rays pile up, where the ray picture predicts an infinite intensity and therefore fails. It is the bright cusp in a cup of coffee and the network of lines on a swimming pool floor, and it marks where a wave description has to take over.

Named by 8 essays across 4 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A sphere does not have a focus. Parallel rays reflected off a spherical mirror. Rays striking further from the axis cross it nearer the mirror, so there is no single point where all of them meet — the blur is spherical aberration, and a perfect sphere has it inherently.

The mirror that cannot focus, and the shape that can

A perfect sphere does not bring parallel light to a point. The blur is not a manufacturing defect — it is what the shape does, and the shape is used anyway, for a reason worth knowing.

optics · Imaging Stationary, and not always shortest. Three mirrors through the same point, with the same source and the same detector, and the length of the reflected path against where on the mirror the ray strikes. The actual ray is the one at the centre in all three, because the tangent there is horizontal and the two angles are equal whatever the curvature. Its path is a minimum at 0.6× the ellipse's curvature, every path equal at 1× the ellipse's curvature, a maximum at 1.6× the ellipse's curvature. On the most curved mirror every path the light did not take is shorter than the one it did, so the principle cannot be stated as least time and survive; it has to be stated as stationary time, and the difference is not a technicality.

The path that takes the longest time

Light is said to take the quickest route. Put a source and a detector in front of a mirror curved a little more than the ellipse through them, and the route it takes is slower than every route beside it — by construction, not by exception. The principle was never about least; it was about stationary, and the difference is where optics stops being geometry.

optics · Fermat A lens with no focal length. Where a ray crosses the axis, against how far off the axis it passed the deflecting body, for 1 solar mass of radius 1 solar radius. A glass lens deflects a ray by an angle proportional to its distance off axis, which is precisely the condition for every ray to arrive at one point — the flat dashed line. Gravity deflects by 4GM/c²b, which grows smaller further out, so the crossing distance goes as b² and each ray has its own focus. The grazing ray crosses at 548 astronomical units and a ray passing at 12 radii crosses at 78857; the square law is verified on the drawn curve to 1.5e-16. So there is no image plane at all, only a half-line of foci beginning at the first of those and running outward for ever. Anything placed on that line sees not an image but a ring, and moving along it does not refocus anything — it selects which rays are being seen.

The lens with no focal length

A glass lens bends a ray by an angle proportional to how far off the axis it passes, which is precisely the condition for every ray to arrive at one point. Gravity bends by an angle that falls with distance off the axis, so every ray has its own focus and there is no image plane anywhere — only a half-line of foci, beginning 548 astronomical units from the Sun and running outward for ever.

astrophysics · Light deflection A caustic, by rays and by waves. The brightness across a fold caustic, computed two ways. Geometric optics gives the rising curve: on the illuminated side two rays arrive at every point and the intensity goes as the inverse square root of the distance from the caustic, so it becomes infinite exactly at it; on the other side no ray arrives at all and the intensity is zero. The wave answer is the squared Airy function, and it disagrees in three ways that are all observable. It is finite, peaking at 1.0188 in the scaled variable rather than at the caustic itself, so the brightest line is displaced onto the bright side. It oscillates, with maxima at -1.02, -3.25, -4.82, -6.16 — those are the supernumerary fringes, and they are not interference between two separate objects but between the two rays the caustic joins. And it leaks: on the dark side, where geometry forbids any light, the Airy function decays exponentially rather than stopping, which is the same mathematics as tunnelling and is why the edge of a shadow is soft before diffraction from any aperture is considered. The two curves agree far from the caustic, which is where the ray picture is a good approximation and where they have been matched here.

The fringes below the rainbow

Geometric optics puts the whole rainbow at one angle and predicts an infinite brightness there. What is seen instead is a peak displaced inside that angle, followed by a train of pink and green arcs — and their spacing is a measurement of the raindrops, because a caustic's structure is set by the wavelength to the two-thirds power over the drop radius to the two-thirds.

optics · Diffraction The deviation that has a bottom. The angle by which a 60° and a 90° ice prism bends a ray, against the angle at which the ray arrives, for an index of 1.31. Each curve is traced ray by ray through both faces and stops where it stops: outside the plotted range the ray meets the second face beyond the critical angle and never leaves. Both curves have a minimum, and the minimum is the point of the figure twice over. Its value — 21.84° for the 60° prism and 45.73° for the 90° prism — is where the sky puts a halo. And its flatness is why there is a halo at all: near a minimum the deviation changes only in second order, so a wide band of orientations all deliver light to nearly the same angle, and a cloud of randomly tumbling crystals piles up a bright ring there while sending the rest of the light nowhere in particular. The passage at the minimum comes out symmetric — in at 40.92°, out at 40.92° — which was found by searching the traced curve rather than assumed. The window of incidence that gets through at all is 76.5° wide for the 60° prism against 32.2° for the 90° one, a factor of 2.4, and that is why one of the two halos is common and the other is rare.

The ring at twenty-two degrees

A halo round the sun is a caustic in orientation rather than in space. Most of the ice crystals in a cirrus cloud send light nowhere in particular; the ones near minimum deviation all send it to nearly the same angle, because a minimum is flat — and the angle they pick has a red inner edge, which is the reverse of a rainbow.

optics · Dispersion The boundary of everywhere a given speed can reach. Trajectories at one speed and five launch angles, with the curve that bounds all of them. The boundary is not one of the trajectories and is not the 45° launch: it is the envelope of the whole family, the locus of points where two neighbouring launches cross. Distances are in units of v²/g, so the greatest range is one and the greatest height a half, and the envelope is the parabola y = ½ − x²/2 joining them. Two things about it are worth having. Its focus is the launch point exactly — every point on it is as far from the gun as from the line y = v²/g — so the safety parabola is a conic with the same focus as the trajectories themselves. And a boundary made of crossings of neighbouring members of a family is a caustic: the same construction that makes the rainbow's edge bright, drawn here with cannon shells instead of light rays.

Everywhere a throw can reach

Fix the speed and let the angle be anything. The trajectories fill a region, and the region has an edge — a curve that is not one of the trajectories, that touches each of them exactly once, and that turns out to be the same kind of object as the bright rim of a rainbow.

mechanics · Projectile A bend of 5 mm, and where the field has to give up. The transverse profile of the guided mode, with the core shaded and the radius at which a bend of 5 millimetres would require the field to outrun the cladding marked. Inside the core the field is a cosine; outside it decays, and the decay is what keeps the mode together. Bending the guide imposes a rigid rotation, so the field a distance x from the axis must travel faster in proportion to x — and past 13.5 micrometres it would have to travel faster than the cladding permits. There the field can no longer be evanescent, and what is there radiates away. The amount there is 1.63e-2 of the peak, which is why the loss is negligible until the caustic moves in, and then is not.

The mode that will not turn a corner

Bend a waveguide and the field has to go round with it, which means the part furthest from the centre has to travel faster. Past a certain distance it would have to travel faster than the surrounding medium allows, and everything out there radiates away — which is why bend loss is exponential in the radius and arrives all at once.

waves · Guided waves The action at one instant, drawn as a map. Trajectories leaving one point at the same moment, at launch speeds 0.6, 1 and sixteen directions each, in a uniform field pulling downward, drawn up to time 1. Behind them, dashed, are the level curves of the action at that instant, regarded as a function of where a trajectory ends. They are circles, and their common centre is neither the launch point nor anywhere the particles have reached: it is 0.500 above the launch point, while the whole swarm has fallen by the same 0.500. Every arriving velocity points straight out from that centre, so every trajectory crosses the level curves at right angles, and the arriving momentum equals the gradient of the action to one part in ten thousand. The action integrated along each path agrees with the map's value at its end.

The action that knows where every path ends

The action is usually a number attached to one path. Treat it instead as a function of where the true path ends, and a single function of position and time holds every trajectory at once — its slope is the momentum, its rate of change is the energy, and its level curves are wavefronts, drawn about a point that sits above the source while everything falls.

mechanics · Least action

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Stationary phaseWavefrontEnvelopeFocal lengthFocusImagingTotal internal reflectionVariational principleActionAiry functionAspheric surfaceAttenuation

All concepts