Airy Disk - Comparison To Gaussian Beam Focus

Comparison To Gaussian Beam Focus

A circular laser beam with uniform intensity profile, focused by a lens, will form an Airy pattern at the focal plane of the lens. The intensity at the center of the focus will be where is the total power of the beam, is the area of the beam ( is the beam diameter), is the wavelength, and is the focal length of the lens.

A Gaussian beam with diameter of D focused through an aperture of diameter D will have a focal profile that is nearly Gaussian, and the intensity at the center of the focus will be 0.924 times .

Read more about this topic:  Airy Disk

Famous quotes containing the words comparison to, comparison, beam and/or focus:

    It is very important not to become hard. The artist must always have one skin too few in comparison to other people, so you feel the slightest wind.
    Shusha Guppy (b. 1938)

    The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: “his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.”
    Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

    What do we plant when we plant the tree?
    We plant the ship that will cross the sea,
    We plant the mast to carry the sails,
    We plant the planks to withstand the gales—
    The keel, the keelson, and beam and knee—
    We plant the ship when we plant the tree.
    Henry Abbey (1842–1911)

    Carlyle is not a seer, but a brave looker-on and reviewer; not the most free and catholic observer of men and events, for they are likely to find him preoccupied, but unexpectedly free and catholic when they fall within the focus of his lens.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)