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    Huygens' Principle

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    Mani'sh Sh'ivhare
    Huygens' principle states that each point on a propagating wavefront can be considered a secondary source of spherical wavelets. These wavelets spread out in all directions at the speed of light. The envelope of these wavelets at a later time constitutes the new propagating wavefront. Huygens used this principle to prove the laws of reflection and refraction by constructing wavefront diagrams showing how light rays would reflect or refract according to the principle. He showed that the angles of incidence and reflection are equal, and that refraction follows Snell's law relating the angles of incidence and refraction to the refractive indices of the materials.

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    Huygens' Principle

    Uploaded by

    Mani'sh Sh'ivhare
    499 views5 pages
    Huygens' principle states that each point on a propagating wavefront can be considered a secondary source of spherical wavelets. These wavelets spread out in all directions at the speed of light. The envelope of these wavelets at a later time constitutes the new propagating wavefront. Huygens used this principle to prove the laws of reflection and refraction by constructing wavefront diagrams showing how light rays would reflect or refract according to the principle. He showed that the angles of incidence and reflection are equal, and that refraction follows Snell's law relating the angles of incidence and refraction to the refractive indices of the materials.

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    Huygens' principle states that each point on a propagating wavefront can be considered a secondary source of spherical wavelets. These wavelets spread out in all directions at the speed of light. The envelope of these wavelets at a later time constitutes the new propagating wavefront. Huygens used this principle to prove the laws of reflection and refraction by constructing wavefront diagrams showing how light rays would reflect or refract according to the principle. He showed that the angles of incidence and reflection are equal, and that refraction follows Snell's law relating the angles of incidence and refraction to the refractive indices of the materials.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    499 views5 pages

    Huygens' Principle

    Uploaded by

    Mani'sh Sh'ivhare
    Huygens' principle states that each point on a propagating wavefront can be considered a secondary source of spherical wavelets. These wavelets spread out in all directions at the speed of light. The envelope of these wavelets at a later time constitutes the new propagating wavefront. Huygens used this principle to prove the laws of reflection and refraction by constructing wavefront diagrams showing how light rays would reflect or refract according to the principle. He showed that the angles of incidence and reflection are equal, and that refraction follows Snell's law relating the angles of incidence and refraction to the refractive indices of the materials.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
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    Huygens' Principle

    The Dutch physicist Christian Huygens


    imagined each point of a propagating
    disturbance as capable of originating new
    pulses that contributed to the disturbance an
    instant later. To show how his model of light
    propagation implied the laws of geometrical
    optics, he formulated a principle which says
    that each point on the leading surface of a
    wave disturbance may be regarded as a
    secondary source of spherical waves, which
    themselves progress with the speed of light
    in the medium and whose envelope at later
    times constitutes the new wavefront. Notice
    that the new wavefront is tangent to each
    wavelet at a single point. According to
    Huygens, the remainder of each wavelet is to
    be disregarded in the application of the
    principle. In so disregarding the effectiveness of
    the overlapping wavelets, Huygens avoided the
    possibility of diffraction of the light into the
    region of geometric shadow. Huygens also
    ignored the wavefront formed by the back half
    of the wavelets, since these wavefronts implied
    a light disturbance traveling in the opposite
    direction. Despite weaknesses in this model,
    remedied later by Fresnel and others, Huygens
    was able to apply his principle to prove the laws
    of both refection and refraction.
    Law of Reflection from Huygens' Principle

    The figure illustrates Huygens' construction for


    a narrow, parallel beam of light to prove the law
    of reflection. Huygens' principle must be
    modified to accommodate the case in which a
    wavefront, such as AC, encounters a plane
    interface, such as XY, at an angle. Here the
    angle of incidence of the rays AD, BE,
    and CFrelative to the perpendicular PD is i.
    Since points along the plane wavefront do not
    arrive at the interface simultaneously,
    allowance is made for these differences in
    constructing the wavelets that determine the
    reflected wavefront. If the interface XY were not
    present, the Huygens construction would
    produce the wavefront GI at the instance
    ray CF reached the interface at I. The intrusion
    of the reflecting surface, however, means that
    during the same time interval required for
    ray CF to progress from F to I, ray BE has
    progressed from E to J and then a distance
    equivalent to JH after reflection. Thus a wavelet
    of radius JH centered at J is drawn above the
    reflecting surface. Similarly, a wavelet of
    radius DG is drawn centered at D to represent
    the propagation after reflection of the lower part
    of the beam. The new wavefront, which must
    now be tangent to these wavelets at
    points M and N, and include the point I, is
    shown as KI in the figure. A representative
    reflected ray is DL, shown perpendicular to the
    reflected wavefront. The normal PD drawn for
    this ray is used to define angles of incidence
    and reflection for the beam. The construction
    clearly shows the equivalence between the
    angles of incidence and reflection.

    Law of Refraction using Huygens'


    Principle
    Similarly, we can use a Huygens construction to
    illustrate the law of refraction.
    Here we must take into account a different
    speed of light in the upper and lower media. If
    the speed of light in vacuum is c, we express
    the speed in the upper medium by the ratio c/ni,
    where ni is the refractive index. Similarly, the
    speed of light in the lower medium is c/nt. The
    points D, E and F on the incident wavefront
    arrive at points D, J and I of the plane
    interface XY at different times. In the absence
    of the refracting surface, the wavefront GI is
    formed at the instant ray DFreaches I. During
    the progress of ray CF from Fto I in time t,
    however, the ray AD has entered the lower
    medium, where the speed is different. Thus if
    the distance DG is vit, a wavelet of radius vtt is
    constructed with center at D. The
    radius DM can also be expressed as

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