ENGLISH

Ray Optics, Fermat's Principle and Applications to General Relativity (2000)(en)(236s)

By Volker Perlick

Book information

Publisher
Springer
Year
2000
ISBN
9783540668985, 3540668985
Open Library ID
OL9063206M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
16 MB (16412612 bytes)
Edition
1
Pages
221\221
Library
mexmat
Time added
2009-07-20 03:45:11
Физика;Теория относительности и альтернативные тео

Description

This book is about the mathematical theory of light propagation in media on general-relativistic spacetimes. The first part discusses the transition from Maxwell's equations to ray optics. The second part establishes a general mathematical framework for treating ray optics as a theory in its own right, making extensive use of the Hamiltonian formalism. This part also includes a detailed discussion of variational principles (i.e., various versions of Fermat's principle) for light rays in general-relativistic media. Some applications, e.g. to gravitational lensing, are worked out. The reader is assumed to have some basic knowledge of general relativity and some familiarity with differential geometry. Some of the results are published here for the first time, e.g. a general-relativistic version of Fermat's principle for light rays in a medium that has to satisfy some regularity condition only.

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