Abstract.
A photon field, be it in the visible or the infrared, necessarily diverges with distance away from its source. In the domain of visible optics such divergence is routinely countered through the intervention of focusing lenses or mirrors. Such focusing, on the other hand, is less readily available in the infrared, and it becomes of some interest to acquire an intuitive, semi-quantitative feel for the image blurring which this divergence implies. The present short note, whose content, admittedly, is both highly idealized and is aimed at a merely methodological goal, seeks to provide just such an image blurring insight. It considers as its datum a circular aperture with an isotropic radiant flux incident upon it, and then tracks image spreading and the concomitant intensity decline across downstream capture planes. The anticipated blurring so confirmed should encourage similar, more incisive analyses in realistic imaging scenarios. And, while the language below exudes an aura of urgency in a specifically infrared domain, its concern implicitly extends to photonic fields at all other frenquencies.
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K.M. Case, F. de Hoffmann, G. Placzek, Introduction to the Theory of Neutron Diffusion, Vol. 1 (Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 1953) pp. 3--12
Kenneth M. Case, Paul F. Zweifel, Linear Transport Theory (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, MA, 1967) pp. 35--37
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Grzesik, J.A. Infrared image blurring with distance beyond an initial aperture plane. Eur. Phys. J. Plus 134, 512 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2019-12886-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2019-12886-4