Technology in the study of light / Chromatic aberration in lenses
Introduction
It will always be important to highlight the essential link between science and technology as fundamental tools for the generation of new technologies, and these have given us in most cases a better quality of life, and this we can observe with the generation of different types of lenses, either convex or divergent, in order to use them in different artificial optical instruments such as cameras, camcorders, telescopes, among others, likewise with these lenses we can make corrections to our natural optical systems (eyes) in relation to how to project images on our retina.
The previous described from the point of view of the physical science and its geometric optics and its conceptualization of luminous rays and wavelengths, of our visible light we have been able to know that it is conformed by the composition of several colors (primary colors), and these last ones possess wavelengths particular and characteristics to each color, this fact causes that in certain occasions some lenses present/display the well-known phenomenon like chromatic aberration, next we will observe the form to refract itself of some colors like the red, green and blue as it is shown in figure 1.
Figure 1. Color refraction in a convergent lens
In the previous figure 1, we observed the way of refracting of the indicated colors according to their respective wavelengths.
Chromatic aberration in lenses
This type of luminous phenomenon is linked to the phenomenon of refraction as we could observe in figure 1, the colors that compose the visible or white light have different speed of propagation in the materials that constitute a certain lens, this characteristic makes that these colors have different refraction indexes and with it different focal points as we could observe in figure 1.
It is important to be able to observe a compact light beam when passing through a convergent lens and visualize an edge or a small spectrum around the focus of that lens, as we can visualize below to figure 2.
Figure 2. Refracted light beam with colored edge (chromatic aberration)
This type of aberration can be corrected with the combination of lenses as we can see in the following figure 3.
Figure 3. Chromatic aberration correction through lenses
In the previous figure it is observed as using a lens denominated convex with another denominated convex plane it is possible to correct a certain chromatic aberration originated in certain lenses at the moment of refracting a light beam.
Conclusion
We continue to observe our environment and focus on any type of technological application in different areas of our development, many are the advances achieved through the generation of new materials and thus the manufacture of lenses increasingly accurate in reflecting or refracting a particular beam of light.
It is important to highlight all kinds of knowledge provided by science because through it is possible to improve any technological application, in the case of lenses is important to know the effect that have the materials components of these lenses as well as its geometric shape when treating light, because it always depends on how the wavelengths representative of each color and the same constituents of our white or visible light.
Innumerable are the applications that the field of the technologies can offer us, one of them is the manufacture of any type of simple optical instruments like the lenses or complex like optical devices like telescopes, projectors, among others and which were analyzed in a general way in previous articles.
Until another opportunity my dear and appreciated readers.
Note: The images are of my authorship, made using the Power Point application, and the animated gif was made with the Photoscape application.
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