High-power lasers are used to cut and weld materials by focusing the laser beam to a very small spot. This is like using a magnifying lens to focus the sun's light to a small spot that can burn things. As an engineer, you have designed a laser cutting device in which the material to be cut is placed 5.0 cm behind the lens. You have selected a high-power laser with a wavelength of 1.06 μm. Your calculations indicate that the laser must be focused to a 5.0-μm-diameter spot in order to have sufficient power to make the cut. What is the minimum diameter of the lens you must install?

An object is 60 cm from a screen. What are the radii of a symmetric converging plastic lens (i.e., two equally curved surfaces) that will form an image on the screen twice the height of the object?

CALC A wildlife photographer with a 200-mm-focal-length telephoto lens on his camera is taking a picture of a rhinoceros that is 100 m away. Suddenly, the rhino starts charging straight toward the photographer at a speed of 5.0 m/s. What is the speed, in μm/s, image of the of the rhinoceros? Is the image moving toward or away from the lens?

Some electro-optic materials can change their index of refraction in response to an applied voltage. Suppose a plano-convex lens (flat on one side, a 15.0 cm radius of curvature on the other), made from a material whose normal index of refraction is 1.500, is creating an image of an object that is 50.0 cm from the lens. By how much would the index of refraction need to be increased to move the image 5.0 cm closer to the lens?

Consider a lens having index of refraction n₂ and surfaces with radii R₁ and R₂. The lens is immersed in a fluid that has index of refraction n₁. A symmetric converging glass lens (i.e., two equally curved surfaces) has two surfaces with radii of 40 cm. Find the focal length of this lens in air and the focal length of this lens in water.

FIGURE CP35.50 shows a lens combination in which the lens separation is less than the focal length of the converging lens. The procedure for combination lenses is to let the image of the first lens be the object for the second lens, but in this case the image of the first lens—shown as a dot—is on the far side of the second lens. This is called a virtual object, a point that light rays are converging toward but never reach. The top half of Figure CP35.50 shows that the converging rays are refracted again by the diverging lens and come to a focus farther to the right. The procedure for combination lenses will continue to work if we use a negative object distance for a virtual object. Equation 35.1 defined the effective focal length f_eff of a lens combination, but we didn't discuss how it is used. Although an actual ray refracts twice, once at each lens, we can extend the output rays leftward to where they need to bend only once in a plane called the principal plane. The principal plane is similar to the lens plane of a single lens, where a single bend occurs, but the principal plane generally does not coincide with the physical lens; it's just a mathematical plane in space. The effective focal length is measured from the principal plane, so parallel input rays are focused at distance f_eff beyond the principal plane. Find the positions of the principal planes for lens separations of 5 cm and 10 cm. Give your answers as distances to the left of the diverging lens.

What is the power of a lens with a focal length of 25 mm?

A scientist needs to focus a helium-neon laser beam (⋋ = 633 nm) to a 10-μm-diameter spot 8.0 cm behind a lens. What minimum diameter must the lens have?

The lens shown in FIGURE CP35.49 is called an achromatic doublet, meaning that it has no chromatic aberration. The left side is flat, and all other surfaces have radii of curvature R. Because of dispersion, either lens alone would focus red rays and blue rays at different points. Define ∆n₁ and ∆n₂ as n_blue - n_red for the two lenses. What value of the ratio ∆n₁ / ∆n₂ makes f_blue = f_red for the two-lens system? That is, the two-lens system does not exhibit chromatic aberration.