Introduction to general relativity in a setting with comparatively strong gravitational fields. This has become possible thanks to precision observations of binary pulsars. In such a star system, two highly compact neutron stars orbit each other. At least one of them is a pulsar – an astronomical object that emits a tight beam of radiowaves. These beams strike the Earth at very regular intervals, similarly to the way that the rotating beam of a lighthouse means that an observer sees the lighthouse blink, and can be observed as a highly regular series of pulses. General relativity predicts specific deviations from the regularity of these
Laser beam profiler field, i.e., in a distance from the beam waist which is much larger than the Rayleigh length. This definition yields a divergence half-angle. (Sometimes, full angles are used in the literature; these are twice as large.) For a diffraction-limited Gaussian beam, the beam divergence is λ/(πw), where λ is the wavelength (in the medium) and w the beam radius (radius with 1/e intensity) at the beam waist. A large beam divergence for a given beam radius corresponds to poor beam quality. A low beam divergence can be important for applications such as pointing or free-space optical communications. Beams with very