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In physics, refraction is the redirection of a wave as it passes from one medium to another. The redirection can be caused by the wave's change in speed or by a change in the medium. [1] Refraction of light is the most commonly observed phenomenon, but other waves such as sound waves and water waves also experience refraction. How much a wave ...
Wave speed is a wave property, which may refer to absolute value of: phase velocity , the velocity at which a wave phase propagates at a certain frequency group velocity , the propagation velocity for the envelope of wave groups and often of wave energy, different from the phase velocity for dispersive waves
The wave velocity in one medium not only may differ from that in another, but the velocity typically varies with wavelength. As a result, the change in direction upon entering a different medium changes with the wavelength of the wave. For electromagnetic waves the speed in a medium is governed by its refractive index according to
Snell's law (also known as the Snell–Descartes law, the ibn-Sahl law, [1] and the law of refraction) is a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction, when referring to light or other waves passing through a boundary between two different isotropic media, such as water, glass, or air.
This is known as group-velocity dispersion and causes a short pulse of light to be broadened, as the different-frequency components within the pulse travel at different velocities. Group-velocity dispersion is quantified as the derivative of the reciprocal of the group velocity with respect to angular frequency , which results in group-velocity ...
where v is the speed of the wave (c in a vacuum or less in other media), f is the frequency and λ is the wavelength. As waves cross boundaries between different media, their speeds change but their frequencies remain constant. Electromagnetic waves in free space must be solutions of Maxwell's electromagnetic wave equation. Two main classes of ...
For an incident wave traveling from one medium (where the wave speed is c 1) to another medium (where the wave speed is c 2), one part of the wave will transmit into the second medium, while another part reflects back into the other direction and stays in the first medium. The amplitude of the transmitted wave and the reflected wave can be ...
In theory, the speed of sound is actually the speed of vibrations. Sound waves in solids are composed of compression waves (just as in gases and liquids) and a different type of sound wave called a shear wave, which occurs only in solids. Shear waves in solids usually travel at different speeds than compression waves, as exhibited in seismology.