Insert a centred opaque circular stop of diameter directly in the plane of the bundle. It transmits the same directions at every surviving position, but discards the surrounding annulus. Therefore
With the uniform radiance of etendue of a circular aperture and cone, the transmitted radiant flux is and the blocked fraction is . Surviving light rays retain their radiance; the stop has not concentrated them. Lossless propagation after the stop preserves the etendue of this surviving subset, not that of the original incident bundle. A stop placed elsewhere can select positions and directions together, so its physical area ratio alone need not give the transmitted radiant flux fraction.
Area-angle tradeoff 2026-10-14
When both endpoint bundles have the filled circular-cone geometry of etendue of a circular aperture and cone, conservation of etendue gives
For the same refractive index, quadrupling the area halves the sine of the cone half-angle. In the , example, an ideal output of diameter must have , so . The exact result differs from simply halving . Conversely, reducing the diameter to requires a complete forward hemisphere, , as a limiting case.
Figure 1.
Equal etendue: four times the spatial area exchanges for one quarter of the directional area
. The circles are cross-sections of the four-dimensional phase space: spatial disks in and direction disks in . Scales agree within each row. The displayed transformation preserves their product volume; it is a schematic of endpoint bundles, not a claim that a particular optical lens exactly realizes the transformation at every angle. Details.
Equal bounding area and solid angle do not alone prove equal etendue: an actual output can have unoccupied directions or position-direction correlations. The filled-cone equation is an exact model of the specified bundles and a capacity constraint on an optical instrument, not a guarantee of an aberration-free implementation.