Overview — Optical Glass: An Engineered Material

Abstract

In the field of optics, the components utilized in imaging systems are mostly manufactured from glass. A faithful geometric and colour image of an object is generated by using the property of refraction. These imaging systems require combinations of various optical glass types in order to achieve this goal. Lens systems are designed to produce images that are either diminished in size, e.g. in photography, television, and cinema technology, or enlarged in size, as in astronomy, telescopy, and microscopy; or the images are projected. Ernst Abbe developed the modern basis of computing lens systems whereby the requirements for refractive index and dispersion, which is the dependence of the refractive index on wavelength, are specified. Optical glass types are then chosen which meet these required values.KeywordsRefractive IndexChalcogenide GlassLens SystemGradient IndexMicrolens ArrayThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.