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Lloyd's mirror is an optics experiment that was first described in 1834 by Humphrey Lloyd in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. [1] Its original goal was to provide further evidence for the wave nature of light, beyond those provided by Thomas Young and Augustin-Jean Fresnel.
Due to the quantum mechanical wave nature of particles, diffraction effects have also been observed with atoms—effects which are similar to those in the case of light. . Chapman et al. carried out an experiment in which a collimated beam of sodium atoms was passed through two diffraction gratings (the second used as a mask) to observe the Talbot effect and measure the Talbot length
For instance, the size of red blood cells can be found by comparing their diffraction pattern with an array of small holes. One consequence of Babinet's principle is the extinction paradox, which states that in the diffraction limit, the radiation removed from the beam due to a particle is equal to twice the particle's cross section times the flux.
The original Arago spot experiment was carried out a decade later and was the deciding experiment on the question of whether light is a particle or a wave. It is thus an example of an experimentum crucis. At that time, many favored Isaac Newton's corpuscular theory of light, among them the theoretician Siméon Denis Poisson. [10]
Because diffraction is the result of addition of all waves (of given wavelength) along all unobstructed paths, the usual procedure is to consider the contribution of an infinitesimally small neighborhood around a certain path (this contribution is usually called a wavelet) and then integrate over all paths (= add all wavelets) from the source to the detector (or given point on a screen).
The light diffracted by a grating is found by summing the light diffracted from each of the elements, and is essentially a convolution of diffraction and interference patterns. The figure shows the light diffracted by 2-element and 5-element gratings where the grating spacings are the same; it can be seen that the maxima are in the same ...
Since that refractive index varies with wavelength, it follows that the angle that the light is refracted by will also vary with wavelength, causing an angular separation of the colors known as angular dispersion. For visible light, refraction indices n of most transparent materials (e.g., air, glasses) decrease with increasing wavelength λ:
Young's famous double slit experiment showed that light followed the superposition principle, which is a wave-like property not predicted by Newton's corpuscle theory. This work led to a theory of diffraction for light and opened an entire area of study in physical optics. [27]