Past exam of the mathematics course of the year 2 of the natural sciences course of the University of Cambridge / 2022 / Paper 1 / 9 / a / Solution

The Fermat principle makes the optical path length stationary. For a graph $y=\xi (x)$ the variational integrand isThe Euler-Lagrange equation isUse the chain rule $dn(x,\xi (x))/dx=n_x+n_y{\xi }^{\prime }$ and differentiate ${\xi }^{\prime }/\sqrt{1+{\xi }^{\prime 2}}$ to obtainMultiplying through and combining the $n_y$ terms gives the required second-order ordinary differential equation with no derivatives in denominators:All partial derivatives of the refractive index are evaluated along the ray.