Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Particular light frequencies give rise to sharply defined bands on the scale which can be thought of as fingerprints. For example, the element sodium has a very characteristic double yellow band known as the Sodium D-lines at 588.9950 and 589.5924 nanometers, the color of which will be familiar to anyone who has seen a low pressure sodium vapor ...
In the technical terminology of gemology, dispersion is the difference in the refractive index of a material at the B and G (686.7 nm and 430.8 nm) or C and F (656.3 nm and 486.1 nm) Fraunhofer wavelengths, and is meant to express the degree to which a prism cut from the gemstone demonstrates "fire". Fire is a colloquial term used by ...
The Kramers–Heisenberg dispersion formula is an expression for the cross section for scattering of a photon by an atomic electron. It was derived before the advent of quantum mechanics by Hendrik Kramers and Werner Heisenberg in 1925, [ 1 ] based on the correspondence principle applied to the classical dispersion formula for light.
One of the factors that causes a rainbow is the bunching of light rays at the minimum deviation angle that is close to the rainbow angle (42°). [3] [8] It is also responsible for phenomena like halos and sundogs, produced by the deviation of sunlight in mini prisms of hexagonal ice crystals in the air bending light with a minimum deviation of ...
A ray trace through a prism with apex angle α. Regions 0, 1, and 2 have indices of refraction, , and , and primed angles ′ indicate the ray's angle after refraction.. Ray angle deviation and dispersion through a prism can be determined by tracing a sample ray through the element and using Snell's law at each interface.
For common optical glasses, the refractive index calculated with the three-term Sellmeier equation deviates from the actual refractive index by less than 5×10 −6 over the wavelengths' range [5] of 365 nm to 2.3 μm, which is of the order of the homogeneity of a glass sample. [6]
Circular dichroism causes incident linearly polarized light to become elliptically polarized. The two phenomena are closely related, just as are ordinary absorption and dispersion. If the entire optical rotatory dispersion spectrum is known, the circular dichroism spectrum can be calculated, and vice versa.
Many materials have a well-characterized refractive index, but these indices often depend strongly upon the frequency of light, causing optical dispersion. Standard refractive index measurements are taken at the "yellow doublet" sodium D line , with a wavelength (λ) of 589 nanometers .