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The Michelson interferometer is employed in many scientific experiments and became well known for its use by Michelson and Edward Morley in the famous Michelson–Morley experiment (1887) [1] in a configuration which would have detected the Earth's motion through the supposed luminiferous aether that most physicists at the time believed was the ...
[A 2] Of this experiment, Albert Einstein wrote, "If the Michelson–Morley experiment had not brought us into serious embarrassment, no one would have regarded the relativity theory as a (halfway) redemption." [A 3]: 219 Michelson–Morley type experiments have been repeated many times with steadily increasing sensitivity.
Figure 1. The light path through a Michelson interferometer.The two light rays with a common source combine at the half-silvered mirror to reach the detector. They may either interfere constructively (strengthening in intensity) if their light waves arrive in phase, or interfere destructively (weakening in intensity) if they arrive out of phase, depending on the exact distances between the ...
The Michelson spectrograph is similar to the instrument used in the Michelson–Morley experiment. Light from the source is split into two beams by a half-silvered mirror, one is reflected off a fixed mirror and one off a movable mirror, which introduces a time delay—the Fourier-transform spectrometer is just a Michelson interferometer with a ...
The Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 had suggested that the hypothetical luminiferous aether, if it existed, was completely dragged by the Earth.To test this hypothesis, Oliver Lodge in 1897 proposed that a giant ring interferometer be constructed to measure the rotation of the Earth; a similar suggestion was made by Albert Abraham Michelson in 1904.
Schematic diagram of a Michelson interferometer, configured for FTIR. In a Michelson interferometer adapted for FTIR, light from the polychromatic infrared source, approximately a black-body radiator, is collimated and directed to a beam splitter. Ideally 50% of the light is refracted towards the fixed mirror and 50% is transmitted towards the ...
The Twyman–Green interferometer, a double path interferometer, is a variant of the Michelson interferometer that is commonly used to test the precision of optical surfaces and lenses. [ 30 ] [ 31 ] Since reference and sample paths are divergent, this form of interferometer is extremely sensitive to vibration and to atmospheric turbulence in ...
Under these circumstances, the interferometric visibility is also known as the "Michelson visibility" [1] or the "fringe visibility." For this type of interference, the sum of the intensities (powers) of the two interfering waves equals the average intensity over a given time or space domain.