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Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by moralestapia on Sunday August 08, 2021 @08:49PM (#28111616)
>The usual square law still applies.

Would that still be true for a light (or w/e) beam that is perfectly collimated?

Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by petschge on Sunday August 08, 2021 @08:53PM (#28111643)
Every finite width beam will have some divergence.
Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by moralestapia on Sunday August 08, 2021 @10:26PM (#28112135)
Is that a law or something?

I was thinking of a hypothetical case.

Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by petschge on Sunday August 08, 2021 @10:36PM (#28112196)
Yes, the so called diffraction limit. Has a lot of applications in optics.
Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by moralestapia on Sunday August 08, 2021 @11:21PM (#28112435)
>"Diffraction refers to various phenomena that occur when a wave encounters an obstacle or opening."

>In a vacuum.

Read more.

Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by petschge on Sunday August 08, 2021 @11:30PM (#28112488)
May I refer you to https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-no... ? Pay particular attention to the last paragraph:

> Achieving a truly collimated beam where the divergence is 0 is not possible, but achieving an approximately collimated beam by either minimizing the divergence or maximizing the distance between the point of observation and the nearest beam waist is possible.

Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by moralestapia on Monday August 09, 2021 @06:12AM (#28114737)
You confuse theory w/ practice.
Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by petschge on Monday August 09, 2021 @10:15AM (#28117111)
The diffraction limit is a well supported theoretical limit that is caused by the wave nature of light. There is ways to get around it in the near field (up to a few ten wavelength away from the source). But in the far field you can not get a perfectly divergence-free finite-width beam. [1] Nor can you focus a beam to a beam waist smaller than about the wavelength.

In practice the situation is even worse and you can't even get the performance that a perfect Gaussian beam would allow. We often express the performance of real beams by a thing called M^2 or beam quality parameter [2]. In some sense is measures how much wider the beam is than it needs to be, and this number is never less than one.

[1] Btw such a beam would have infinite brilliance. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_squared

Re:Imaging Cygnus a at 8.45 GHz with ATA by moralestapia on Monday August 09, 2021 @11:05AM (#28117841)
>The diffraction limit is a well supported theoretical limit that is caused by the wave nature of light.

That's not written in stone yet, it's a good approximation but still falls down under specific conditions.