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    Difraction of Light

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    Amber Zahid

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    Difraction of Light

    Uploaded by

    Amber Zahid
    6 views60 pages

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    © © All Rights Reserved

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    6 views60 pages

    Difraction of Light

    Uploaded by

    Amber Zahid

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    You are on page 1of 60

    We might expect the peaks to occur where the sine function

    reaches the value  1.


    Grating Spectrographs
    Diffraction gratings are widely used to measure the spectrum of light
    emitted by a source, a process called spectroscopy or spectrometry.
    Light incident on a grating of known spacing is dispersed into a
    spectrum. The angles of deviation of the maxima are then measured,
    and Eq.

    is used to compute the wavelength. With a grating that has many


    slits, very sharp maxima are produced, and the angle of deviation
    (and hence the wavelength) can be measured very precisely.
    schematic diagram of a
    diffraction-grating spectrograph for use in
    astronomy. Note that the light does not
    strike the grating normal to its surface, so
    the intensity maxima are given by a somewhat
    different expression.
    In the case of electromagnetic waves, the wave induces an oscillating
    electric dipole moment in each scatterer. These dipoles act like little
    antennas, emitting scattered waves. The resulting interference pattern
    is the superposition of all these scattered waves. The situation is
    different from that with a diffraction grating, in which the waves from
    all the slits are emitted in phase (for a plane wave at normal
    incidence). Here the scattered waves are not all in phase because their
    distances from the source are different. To compute the interference
    pattern, we have to consider the total path differences for the scattered
    waves, including the distances from source to scatterer and from
    scatterer to observer.
    (1)
    Strong reflection (constructive interference) occurs at angles such
    that the incident and scattered angles are equal and Eq. (1) is
    satisfied. Since sin  can never be greater than 1, Eq. (1) says that to
    have constructive interference the quantity m must be less than 2d
    and so  must be less than 2d/m. For example, the value of d in an
    NaCl crystal is only 0.282 nm. Hence to have the mth-order,
    maximum present in the diffraction pattern,  must be less than
    2(0.282 nm) /m; that is,   0.564 nm for m = 1,   0.282 nm for
    m= 2,   0.188 nm for m = 3, and so on. These are all x-ray
    wavelengths, which is why x rays are used for studying crystal
    structure.

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