Deformations of cylindrical and conical beams transmitted through a uniaxial crystal parallel-plane plate

Abstract

One of the most used tools in optics is ray tracing, due to the fact that is a fundamental tool for optic instruments design. In this work we analyze the successive deformations that both cylindrical and conical beams suffer when they impinge normal to a uniaxial crystal plane-parallel plate and go through the different interfaces. This is accomplished by following the path of each incident ray on the first interface. The ray tracing for the ordinary beam is the same as in isotropic media, but the extraordinary beam ray tracing is more difficult, for these rays are no longer contained in the incidence plane and their directions are different from those of the corresponding normals to the wavefront. We also analyze the loss of revolution symmetry of the beams and the image formation.

Keywords

• Materiales ópticos anisótropos
• teoría de formación de imágenes
• componentes para óptica integrada