Wiki / Lenses / Concave lens

Concave lens

Diverges rays with a negative thin-lens focal length.

Open in the canvas →

Click the concave lens to see its live specs and try its parameters — this mini canvas can't be moved, deleted, or added to.

In the real world

A concave (diverging) lens obeys the exact same thin-lens equation as a convex one — the only difference is the sign of f. A negative focal length always produces a negative image distance for a real object, which means a concave lens can never form a real image on its own: the rays always appear to diverge from a virtual, upright, reduced image on the same side as the object.

1f=1do+1di,f<0\frac{1}{f} = \frac{1}{d_o} + \frac{1}{d_i}, \qquad f < 0
The thin-lens equation with a negative focal length — the defining property of a diverging lens.

Concave lenses correct myopia (short-sightedness) in eyeglasses, and paired with a convex lens they make a compact Galilean telescope or beam expander — see the telescope page.

In OpticalSetup

This is literally the same component as the convex lens — same paraxial ray-transfer relation u' = u − h/f, same registry entry under the hood — just defaulting to a negative focal length. Setting a positive focal length on this element makes it behave exactly like a convex lens, and vice versa: the sign of f is the only thing that determines converging versus diverging behavior anywhere in OpticalSetup.

Simplified vs. reality

Same caveats as the convex lens: exact paraxial optics with no spherical or chromatic aberration, and no modeled lens thickness.

Related components

Further reading