The historical development of mesooptics

This paper reports in detail the history of scientific and methodological research carried out at the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems, JINR, in 1982–1996, with the goal of developing the mesooptical Fourier transform microscope for straight-line tracks of charged particles with a small angle of dip. The international priority and reliability of the results obtained indicate that the mesooptics group at JINR LNP laid the necessary and sufficient theoretical and experimental foundation for further scientific research on mesooptics. It is pointed out that even before the advent of mesooptics the search for fundamentally new techniques for the processing of three-dimensional track information without the traditional algorithm of partitioning the particle track into components was carried at JINR LNP. Investigations based on the use of the integral pattern of the initial image are described in detail. It is shown that only mesooptics has made it possible to completely avoid depth scanning without any loss of information on the z coordinate and the particle track dip angle θ z .