Wave surface - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia

In mathematics, Fresnel's wave surface, found by Augustin-Jean Fresnel in 1821, is a quartic surface describing the propagation of light in an optically biaxial crystal. Wave surfaces are special cases of tetrahedroids which are in turn special cases of Kummer surfaces.

In projective coordinates (w:x:y:z) the wave surface is given by

a 2 x 2 x 2 + y 2 + z 2 − a 2 w 2 + b 2 y 2 x 2 + y 2 + z 2 − b 2 w 2 + c 2 z 2 x 2 + y 2 + z 2 − c 2 w 2 = 0

References

Wave surface Wikipedia

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