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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 ...
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 ...
Both arms of the interferometer were contained in a transparent solid . The light source was a Helium–neon laser. ~7 km/s Trimmer et al. [30] [31] 1973: They searched for anisotropies of the speed of light behaving as the first and third of the Legendre polynomials. They used a triangle interferometer, with one portion of the path in glass.
The coherence length can also be measured using a Michelson interferometer and is the optical path length difference of a self-interfering laser beam which corresponds to % fringe visibility, [3] where the fringe visibility is defined as
The pointwise definition may be expanded to a visibility function varying over time or space. For example, the phase difference varies as a function of space in a two-slit experiment. Alternately, the phase difference may be manually controlled by the operator, for example by adjusting a vernier knob in an interferometer.
Linnik interferometer (microscopy) LUPI variant of Michelson; Lummer–Gehrcke interferometer; Mach–Zehnder interferometer; Martin–Puplett interferometer; Michelson interferometer; Mirau interferometer (also known as a Mirau objective) (microscopy) Moiré interferometer (see moiré pattern) Multi-beam interferometer ; Near-field interferometer
This means that as the interferometer's arms were spun to face into and against the aether wind, the vertical fringe lines should have moved across the viewer 0.4 fringe widths left and right for a total of 0.8 fringes from maximum to minimum. Michelson reported that only between one-sixth and one-quarter of the expected reading was found. [1]
The Michelson stellar interferometer is one of the earliest astronomical interferometers built and used. The interferometer was proposed by Albert A. Michelson in 1890, following a suggestion by Hippolyte Fizeau. The first such interferometer built was at the Mount Wilson observatory, making use of