Optical reflection essence of surface-mirror imaging

Abstract

Although surface-mirror imaging is a rather old topic in optics textbooks, its optical reflection essence is still an open problem with especial significance. For example, about the chirality of plane-mirror images, some recent articles still claimed that it might be a psychological process to determine left-right or up-down symmetry between the object and its image, rather than a physical optics problem. In this paper, some experiments first show the incompleteness that the classical ray diagrams are just a kind of representationalism methods because they cannot represent the optical reflection essence of surface-mirror imaging process. Then, the optical reflection essence of surface-mirror imaging is revealed as a kind of polarization singularity of optical Mobius strip effect generated by incident light and medium interaction. Furthermore, we discover that secondary diffusion-reflection sources of all kinds of surface-mirror images exist inside glass or other media, which are formed from the chiral light partially inverted by optical Mobius strip effect. Our findings may explain reasonably or correct those historical puzzles or confused problems of surface-mirror imaging such as the chirality, half-wave loss and so on. Our theory is in well agreement with the Nobel laureate Feynman’s work on quantum interpretation of specular reflection. It is clarified based on our theory why seeing a mirror image with the secondary diffuse-reflection source is exactly the same as directly observing the corresponding object provided with the first secondary diffuse-reflecting source, without any human’s imagination. In addition, the new concept of “image barrier” is proposed and demonstrated by experiments, which determines the type of mirror images observable and the others hidden. Finally, it can be concluded that the traditional concepts of real image and virtual image are inaccurate and unnecessary, because their reflection natures are exactly the same during imaging process, and their observability is just affected by "image barrier" or other accessorial devices such as eyes and camera's convex lens, or geometric focusing properties of a concave mirror while being observed.