Light · Interference · Imaging
Waves & optics
Follow light through a raindrop, a lens, or an interferometer.
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115 experiments
Waves & optics
When Two Waves Meet
Why do passing waves leave a stable fringe pattern?
6 minWaves & optics
Draw Any Wave with Circles
How can steady rotations rebuild almost any periodic signal?
12 minWaves & optics
Light after a Narrow Slit
Why does a narrower opening spread light farther?
8 minWaves & optics
How a Lens Redirects Light
How do three principal rays locate and size an image?
7 minWaves & optics
Listen to Spacetime with Light
How can a sub-proton length change become a readable signal?
15 minWaves & optics
How One Opening Redraws a Water Wave
Why does narrowing an opening spread the transmitted wave through a wider angle?
9 minWaves & optics
Two Refractions inside a Thick Lens
What does the thin-lens model miss when thickness matters?
12 minWaves & optics
A Rainbow Only Nanometres Thick
Why does a colorless film only hundreds of nanometres thick develop flowing color?
11 minWaves & optics
How a Laser Builds inside a Cavity
Which waves return between two mirrors and keep growing?
15 minWaves & optics
Optical Boundary Explorer
How do angle, polarization, speed, and energy change together at one boundary?
11 minWaves & optics
Hall of Mirrors
Which virtual images can an observer actually see as mirrors move?
11 minWaves & optics
Mirror Engineering Challenge
Can a compact mirror network steer a beam without losing field of view?
13 minWaves & optics
Curved Mirror Observatory
How does mirror shape move the focus and change off-axis image quality?
13 minWaves & optics
Caustic Factory
How does a smooth family of rays collapse into a brilliant singular envelope?
15 minWaves & optics
Floating Image Mirascope
Where must two parabolic mirrors place a real image that can be seen but not touched?
15 minWaves & optics
Fermat Path Finder
Why does a stationary travel-time path reproduce reflection, refraction, and curved rays?
13 minWaves & optics
Underwater Vision Observatory
How can one flat water boundary move a fish, mislead a spear, compress the whole sky, and distort a camera port?
11 minWaves & optics
Window Ghost Observatory
Why is the emerging ray parallel yet displaced, and why do windows make ghost images at night?
11 minWaves & optics
N-BK7 Prism Spectrometer Observatory
How can minimum deviation turn a glass prism into a calibrated wavelength instrument?
13 minWaves & optics
Rainbow Caustic Observatory
How can one water drop create primary and secondary bows with a dark band between them?
13 minWaves & optics
Mirage & Green-Flash Observatory
How do measured air dispersion and a prescribed thermal profile bend one horizon into depressed, loomed, and multiply imaged views?
15 minWaves & optics
GRIN Geometry Observatory
How can one continuous index field relay a ray, focus every direction, or turn plane curves into great circles without a hidden interface?
15 minWaves & optics
Eclipse & Transit Shadow Observatory
How do two measured apparent disks generate sharp point-source shadow, umbra, penumbra, antumbra, eclipse contacts, and a transit light curve from one geometry?
13 minWaves & optics
Unilluminable Room
Can a mirrored room keep a finite region dark from one point source after many exact reflections?
15 minWaves & optics
Solar Concentrator & Étendue
Why can no passive concentrator squeeze every incoming direction into an arbitrarily small hot spot?
15 minWaves & optics
Illumination & Radiometry Studio
How can source size, distance, and surface angle create uniform illumination?
13 minWaves & optics
Ray Cloaking Challenge
Can an optical train route rays around an object and restore the background afterward?
15 minWaves & optics
Branched Light in Random Media
Why does weak smooth disorder focus parallel rays into branches instead of simple diffusion?
15 minWaves & optics
Gravitational Lens Telescope
How can image positions, arcs, and brightness reveal an invisible lens mass?
17 minWaves & optics
Thin Lens Imaging Bench
How do three principal rays locate every real and virtual thin-lens image?
11 minWaves & optics
Thick Lens Designer
What does the thin-lens approximation miss when curvature and thickness are both adjustable?
17 minWaves & optics
Compound Optics Workbench
How can one matrix predict imaging, magnification, and afocal behavior in a whole optical train?
17 minWaves & optics
Parfocal Zoom Challenge
Can moving lens groups change focal length while the image plane stays fixed?
17 minWaves & optics
Camera Obscura
How do finite-object projection, aperture footprint, diffraction, and exposure compete in a real pinhole camera?
13 minWaves & optics
Photography Optics Playground
At a fixed viewpoint, how do focal length and entrance pupil change framing, defocus, depth of field, and diffraction without changing perspective?
13 minWaves & optics
Lens Aberration Clinic
Which optical correction cures each spot-diagram signature without creating a worse one elsewhere?
17 minWaves & optics
Anamorphic & Cylindrical Optics
How can orthogonal optical power reshape one image axis without focusing the other?
15 minWaves & optics
Human Eye & Corrective Optics
Which correction returns the retinal point-spread function for each refractive error?
13 minWaves & optics
Build a Microscope
How should objective, illumination, and detector share numerical aperture to resolve a tiny object?
13 minWaves & optics
Build a Telescope
How do aperture, optical layout, and obstruction determine what a telescope can resolve?
13 minWaves & optics
Binocular Prism Lab
How do four reflections erect a field, and why can a lossless roof still degrade its image?
17 minWaves & optics
Telecentric Metrology Camera
Can a blurred image still keep the right size—and when does clipping break that promise?
15 minWaves & optics
Tilt-Shift & Scheimpflug Studio
How does tilting the lens rotate the plane of focus and reshape depth of field?
15 minWaves & optics
Pupils, Stops & Vignetting
Which stop limits aperture, which limits field, and where do their pupils appear?
17 minWaves & optics
Projector Optics Lab
Why can a wider light source fail to brighten the screen, and why does a tilted screen lose focus as well as become trapezoidal?
17 minWaves & optics
Smartphone Camera Module
How do real folding, autofocus, diffraction, pixels and lens-shift stabilization compete inside a thin camera module?
17 minWaves & optics
VR Headset Optics
Why can stereo depth move while optical focus stays fixed, and why does a small eye shift erase the display corners?
15 minWaves & optics
Ghost Image, Pepper’s Ghost & HUD
Where is a half-mirror virtual image, why does a bright background wash it out, and when does the finite mirror clip it?
13 minWaves & optics
Light-Field Camera & Display
Can the same recorded rays bring near and far objects into focus—and what detail do angular views cost?
15 minWaves & optics
Coherent Wave Composer
How do phasors, wavefronts, and detector intensity tell the same superposition story?
11 minWaves & optics
Young Double-Slit Bench
How do slit width, separation, phase, and coherence jointly shape one fringe pattern?
11 minWaves & optics
Thin-Film Color Studio
How do physical layer thickness, angle and polarization turn one spectrum into a reflected colour?
13 minWaves & optics
Interference Surface Metrology
How can fringe geometry reveal thickness, curvature, and tiny surface defects?
13 minWaves & optics
Michelson Precision Lab
How can counting fringes measure displacement, wavelength, and refractive index?
13 minWaves & optics
LIGO Interferometer
How does a power-recycled kilometer-scale interferometer turn strain into a dark-port signal?
17 minWaves & optics
Mach–Zehnder Sensor
Can two detector outputs tell an index change from absorption and polarization tagging?
17 minWaves & optics
Fabry–Pérot Passive Cavity
Why can two reflective mirrors transmit all light, and how do loss and lifetime change the resonance?
17 minWaves & optics
Sagnac Gyroscope
Why does rotation create a nonreciprocal phase between counterpropagating beams?
17 minWaves & optics
Division-of-Wavefront Interferometers
How do different virtual-source constructions change phase, overlap, and usable fringe area?
17 minWaves & optics
Low-Coherence Interferometry & OCT
How does a short coherence gate turn reflected light into a depth-resolved image?
15 minWaves & optics
Stellar Interferometer
How can visibility versus baseline reveal a star too small for either telescope to resolve?
15 minWaves & optics
Speckle Lab
How does random coherent phase create structured grains with predictable statistics?
15 minWaves & optics
Holography Studio
How can an intensity-only plate preserve enough phase information to reconstruct a three-dimensional wavefront?
17 minWaves & optics
Moiré & Fringe Metrology
How can coarse fringe motion amplify and recover tiny displacement or surface shape?
15 minWaves & optics
Huygens–Fresnel Propagation Lab
How does a field evolve continuously from near-field wavelets to a far-field diffraction pattern?
13 minWaves & optics
Aperture Diffraction Studio
How does drawing a new aperture rewrite its entire far-field intensity pattern?
13 minWaves & optics
Crystal Diffraction & Reciprocal Space
How can reciprocal-space spots and rings reveal an unknown real-space lattice?
17 minWaves & optics
Diffraction-Grating Spectrometer
How do groove count, blaze, slit width, and order overlap set spectral resolution?
13 minWaves & optics
Diffractive Lens Workshop
How do zone placement and phase quantization trade focal efficiency against chromatic behavior?
17 minWaves & optics
Talbot Carpet
Why does a periodic grating reproduce shifted and multiplied copies of itself during propagation?
15 minWaves & optics
Optical Fourier Processor
How does moving one filter in a Fourier plane rewrite edges, blur, and repeated texture in an image?
17 minWaves & optics
Abbe Resolution Lab
Which spatial frequencies must enter the pupil before two points or grating lines become resolvable?
13 minWaves & optics
PSF–OTF–MTF Imaging Lab
How do pupil shape and wavefront error become blur, contrast loss, and an image transfer curve?
17 minWaves & optics
Phase Microscopy Lab
How can pupil manipulation turn an invisible phase object into visible intensity contrast?
15 minWaves & optics
Schlieren Flow Viewer
Which optical cutoff makes temperature, density, and shock gradients visible?
15 minWaves & optics
Pupil Engineering & Coronagraph
How can masks and apodizers suppress a star without erasing a nearby planet?
15 minWaves & optics
Phase Retrieval Challenge
Can intensity-only measurements recover a complex field despite ambiguity and noise?
15 minWaves & optics
Coded-Aperture Camera
How can a patterned shadow encode a scene without a conventional lens?
15 minWaves & optics
Computational Deblurring Lab
When does deconvolution recover detail, and when does it only amplify noise or model error?
17 minWaves & optics
Adaptive Optics Observatory
How can measured wavefront slopes drive a mirror fast enough to sharpen a turbulent star image?
15 minWaves & optics
Ptychography & Coherent Diffraction Imaging
How does overlapping illumination make a lensless amplitude-and-phase reconstruction possible?
15 minWaves & optics
Polarization State Explorer
How do intensity, ellipse shape, Jones vectors, and Stokes measurements encode the same polarization state?
13 minWaves & optics
Polarized Reflections & Sky
Why can one rotating filter darken water glare and blue sky in different directions?
13 minWaves & optics
Birefringent Crystal Lab
How does crystal orientation split one ray into ordinary and extraordinary propagation?
13 minWaves & optics
Waveplate & Poincaré Sphere Lab
How does each retarder rotate a polarization state along a precise path on the Poincaré sphere?
13 minWaves & optics
Optical Activity Polarimeter
How can a crossed analyzer determine concentration and handedness in a chiral sample?
13 minWaves & optics
Photoelastic Stress Viewer
How do colorful polarization fringes map the principal-stress difference inside a loaded object?
15 minWaves & optics
LCD Pixel Microscope
How does voltage-controlled liquid-crystal rotation become RGB brightness and viewing-angle leakage?
17 minWaves & optics
TIR Phase & Fresnel Rhomb
How can total reflection create broadband retardance even though no power is transmitted?
15 minWaves & optics
Faraday Isolator
Why does a nonreciprocal rotation transmit forward light yet reject the same light on return?
17 minWaves & optics
Electro-Optic Modulator
How does an electric field become controllable optical phase and then measurable intensity modulation?
17 minWaves & optics
Optical Fiber: Rays to Modes
When must the total-reflection ray picture be replaced by a guided-mode picture?
13 minWaves & optics
Fiber Pulse Propagation
How do dispersion and chirp broaden, compress, or reshape an ultrashort pulse in fiber?
17 minWaves & optics
Evanescent Directional Coupler
How do gap and interaction length transfer power between neighboring waveguides?
15 minWaves & optics
Microring & Whispering-Gallery Resonator
How do ring size, loss, and bus coupling create a sharp resonance dip and circulating field?
15 minWaves & optics
Photonic Crystal Band Structure
How does periodic dielectric structure create band gaps, defect states, and guided channels?
15 minWaves & optics
Boundary Wave Tunnel
How can an evanescent field cross a narrow gap and restore transmission beyond total reflection?
15 minWaves & optics
Beam Shift Microscope
How do finite beam width and polarization reveal tiny longitudinal and transverse interface shifts?
15 minWaves & optics
Gaussian Beam & Gouy Phase
How do waist, divergence, lens transformation, and Gouy phase describe one focused beam?
17 minWaves & optics
Self-Healing Beam Arena
How can Bessel and Airy beams reconstruct after an obstacle, and what energy trade-off pays for it?
15 minWaves & optics
Light in Disorder
How does increasing disorder move wave transport from scattering to diffusion and localization?
15 minWaves & optics
Optical Vortex & OAM
How does a phase singularity create a dark core, helical wavefront, and measurable orbital angular momentum?
15 minWaves & optics
Vector Beams & Optical Skyrmions
How can a spatial polarization field wrap the Poincaré sphere and acquire a topological number?
15 minWaves & optics
Photonic Nanojet & Hook
How do particle shape and index create a subwavelength jet or a sharply curved optical hook?
15 minWaves & optics
Superoscillation Designer
How can a band-limited field make a tiny hotspot while paying in sidelobes, efficiency, and field of view?
15 minWaves & optics
Surface Plasmon Resonance Lab
How does phase matching transfer prism light into a lossy surface wave that senses refractive index?
15 minWaves & optics
Negative Refraction & Superlens
How can a negative-index slab reverse refraction and recover normally lost evanescent detail?
15 minWaves & optics
Topological Photonic Edge State
Why can an edge mode cross defects and corners with much less backscattering than an ordinary guide?
15 minWaves & optics
Nonlinear Light Shapes Its Own Medium
When does optical intensity write an index profile strong enough to focus or guide the beam itself?
15 minWaves & optics
Absorption, Spontaneous & Stimulated Emission
When does resonant light cause net absorption, random emission, or coherent amplification?
13 minWaves & optics
Pumping & Population Inversion
Why is continuous inversion difficult in two levels but practical in three- and four-level schemes?
13 minWaves & optics
Laser Startup from Noise
How does spontaneous-emission noise become a saturated, mode-selected laser field above threshold?
17 minWaves & optics
Stable Resonator & Transverse Modes
Which mirror geometry produces a stable low-loss cavity dominated by the fundamental transverse mode?
17 minWaves & optics
Q-Switched Giant Pulse
How can stored inversion be released as one giant pulse instead of leaking into premature lasing?
17 minWaves & optics
Mode Locking & Frequency Comb
How does locking many longitudinal phases transform continuous output into a pulse train and frequency comb?
17 min
No experiments found.