cs.CVSep 19, 2026

Exact Quotients of Fresnel-Kummer Surfaces and Certified Biaxial Refraction

Authors: Tanush Shaska

Abstract

The Fresnel wave surface governs the propagation of light in a transparent biaxial crystal. It is a special Kummer quartic, and we identify it exactly. Over the complex numbers the wave surface of a crystal is the Kummer surface of the Jacobian of an explicit genus-two curve branched at the signed square roots of the three principal permittivities. This Jacobian is isogenous, by an isogeny with kernel of order four, to a product of two elliptic curves. One elliptic curve carries the three permittivities, and the other carries the optic-axis angle. The physical family is Zariski dense in the locus of genus-two curves with an extra involution, and its automorphism strata are explicit. The identification instantiates a task-aware quotient, which identifies parameters that differ by a nuisance transformation and carries invariant coordinates and explicit strata. For biaxial crystals, two ratios of the permittivities form a complete invariant of the wave surface up to rotation and rescaling, and the four real nodes are given in closed form. At an interface the candidate transmitted waves are the roots of a quartic of exact degree four. Its real-root count, root order, and repeated-root events are decided by exact algebraic predicates, and along the generic single-node encounters of the paper its discriminant vanishes to second order. Floating-point solvers drop forward transmitted modes near the optic axes, and the certified solver does not. On exact equivalence classes, learned models on quotient coordinates are invariant and more accurate than models on raw tensors, while learned root-count predicates fail near the optic axes.

Figures & tables

Explore similar work

Oct 8, 2026

Learning qBIC Resonances across Metasurface Families in Dielectric Fourier Space

Bound states in the continuum (BIC) metasurfaces are typically described by geometry-specific parameters, hindering cross-geometry comparison, while ultranarrow qBIC features are easily diluted in full-spectrum learning. Here, 2015 samples from seven dielectric metasurface families are mapped to a shared reciprocal-lattice grid, where two frozen low-order Fourier channels capture resonance shifts with mean within-branch R2R^2 values of 0.871-0.999. Field-level analysis of two representative branches further confirms that these shifts are consistent with the Maxwell-Fourier perturbation picture. A five-channel K-space backbone models the broadband spectrum, while a local complex K-space expert parameterizes the qBIC resonance through a differentiable Fano layer. The expert reduces resonance-position mean absolute error (MAE) from 3.2 to 0.95 nm and the resonance-depth error by 14-fold on a geometry-blocked test set. The same coordinate supports spectrum-to-structure reconstruction.
Mar 19, 2026

RR-equivalence on Cubic Surfaces I: Existing Cases with Non-Trivial Universal Equivalence

Let VV be a smooth cubic surface over a pp-adic field kk with good reduction. Swinnerton-Dyer (1981) proved that RR-equivalence is trivial on V(k)V(k) except perhaps if VV is one of three special types--those whose RR-equivalence he could not bound by proving the universal (admissible) equivalence is trivial. We consider all surfaces VV currently known to have non-trivial universal equivalence. Beyond being intractable to Swinnerton-Dyer's approach, we observe that if these surfaces also had non-trivial RR-equivalence, they would contradict Colliot-Thélène and Sansuc's conjecture regarding the kk-rationality of universal torsors for geometrically rational surfaces. By devising new methods to study RR-equivalence, we prove that for 2-adic surfaces with all-Eckardt reductions (the third special type, which contains every existing case of non-trivial universal equivalence), RR-equivalence is trivial or of exponent 2. For the explicit cases, we confirm triviality: the diagonal cubic X3+Y3+Z3+ζ3T3=0X^3+Y^3+Z^3+ζ_3 T^3=0 over Q2(ζ3)\mathbb{Q}_2(ζ_3)--answering a long-standing question of Manin's (Cubic Forms, 1972)--and the cubic with universal equivalence of exponent 2 (Kanevsky, 1982). This is the first in a series of works derived from a year of interactions with generative AI models such as AlphaEvolve and Gemini 3 Deep Think, with the latter proving many of our lemmas. We disclose the timeline and nature of their use towards this paper, and describe our broader AI-assisted research program in a companion report (in preparation).
May 11, 2026

BathyFacto: Refraction-Aware Two-Media Neural Radiance Fields for Bathymetry

Through-water photogrammetry from UAV imagery enables shallow-water bathymetry, but refraction at the air--water interface violates the straight-ray assumption of Structure-from-Motion and causes systematic depth bias. We present BathyFacto, a refraction-aware two-media extension of Nerfacto in Nerfstudio for metrically consistent underwater point clouds on simulated data. BathyFacto uses a shared hash-grid density field with a medium-conditioned color head and traces each camera ray as two segments: a straight air segment to a planar water surface and a refracted water segment computed using Snell's law and known refractive indices. A single proposal-network sampler operates on a virtual straight ray, while a kinked density wrapper corrects water-segment positions before density evaluation. Our pipeline converts photogrammetric reconstructions to Nerfstudio format, estimates the water plane from boundary markers, provides per-pixel medium masks, and supports refraction-corrected point-cloud export with reversible transforms to world and global frames. On a simulated scene with ground truth, BathyFacto achieves a Cloud-to-Mesh signed median deviation of −0.001-0.001,m and 85.7,% completeness at 0.2,m tolerance in the absolute global frame without rigid-body alignment. This compares with +1.370+1.370,m / 11.6,% for Nerfacto and +1.409+1.409,m / 9.9,% for BathyFacto without refraction. Even after a naive refractive-index depth correction, both baselines remain offset by approximately 0.4,m. Unlike a refraction-corrected Multi-View Stereo reference, which is reliable mainly for near-nadir views, BathyFacto recovers consistent geometry across the full range of camera incidence angles.