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Optics: Fraunhofer and Fresnel Diffraction

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Optics: Fraunhofer and Fresnel Diffraction
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Fraunhofer diffraction - crossed multiple slits
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49
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CC Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International:
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This resource contains demonstrations used to illustrate the theory and applications of lasers and optics. A detailed listing of the topics can be found below. Lasers today are being used in an ever-increasing number of applications. In fact, there is hardly a field that has not been touched by the laser. Lasers are playing key roles in the home, office, hospital, factory, outdoors, and theater, as well as in the laboratory. To learn about lasers and related optics, one usually takes a course or two, or acquires the necessary information from books and journal articles. To make this learning more vivid and more exciting, and, one hopes, more understandable, one needs to see some of the basic phenomena involved. To fill this need, Professor Ezekiel has videotaped 48 demonstrations that illustrate most of the fundamental phenomena relating to lasers and physical optics. By using split-screen inserts and a wide range of video-recording capabilities, it is possible to show real-time effects in lasers and optics with the simultaneous manipulation of the components that cause these effects. In this way, one can see effects in close up that would be difficult, if not impossible, to display in front of an audience or in the classroom. These video demonstrations are designed for: The individual student of lasers and optics who wants to observe the various phenomena covered in theoretical treatments in courses, books, and technical papers. The Instructor in lasers and optics in a company, university, college, or high school who wants to illustrate, in class, many of the fundamental phenomena in optics and lasers.
VideoLaserOpticsDiffractionMaterialGround stationQuality (business)
VideoMultiplizitätLightScreen printingRulerDiffractionRear-view mirrorLaserCamera lensGaussian beam
Pattern (sewing)RotationDiffractionScreen printingRulerWavelengthVideoOrder and disorder (physics)MetreStagecoachScale (map)Separation processCocktail party effectLightComputer animation
DiffractionWeather frontLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu.
Now we're all set to look at the Fraunhofer diffraction pattern associated with a two-dimensional multi-slits. The setup, again, just to remind you, same as before, here's the laser. Here's the beam from the laser reflected by this mirror and reflected by this mirror into a lens.
Now the lens here is used to expand the beam so that we can illuminate quite a chunk of a two-dimensional multiple slit. And then the diffracted light then goes on onto the screen. Now let's look at the two-dimensional multiple slits.
What we have for you, we have two Runcky rulings. Each one has so many lines per inch. I'm not going to tell you because I'm going to leave that again as an exercise. So we have two identical Runcky rulings
that are crossed. The first one is fixed, which is over here. And the second one is attached to a rotation stage behind the first. So we can rotate the second Runcky ruling, and then we can see what it does to the diffraction pattern. So now let's look at the screen.
And then as you can see on the screen now, you see the two-dimensional diffraction pattern of multiple slits. You can see that they look different than the single slit.
We have a lot more dots. And again, as I say, I'm going to leave it as an exercise for you to figure them all out. Again, I'd like to draw attention to the dots around here, to all these cross terms in this pattern. So this pattern then is associated with the rulings
crossed or orthogonal. Now what I'm going to do, I'm going to rotate the Runcky ruling or the multiple slits in the back of the fixed one. Again, you can see that the pattern rotates. Now if we get rid of the insert
and then look at the entire pattern, now you can see what happens as I rotate the Runcky ruling in the back. Here we are. I can rotate the other way. And I hope you can see all the weak spots, which
are the cross terms in the pattern. Now in order for you to calculate the line spacings in the Runcky rulings, I will give you the information you need. We have a plane wave that impinges on the Runcky ruling.
And the diameter of it is a little over a centimeter. The screen is about 100 centimeters away from the Runcky rulings. And the wavelength of the light, as before, is 6328. And with all this information, you should be able to calculate the number of lines
per inch or millimeter of the Runcky ruling. But you need still one more information, and that is the scale on the screen. And I'm not going to put a scale on, but I will tell you that the separation between these dots here, these pair of dots,
is about 6 millimeters. So now you have all the information you need to calculate the spacing between the lines in the Runcky ruling. Now just before we quit, if we can pull away, let the camera pull away and show you the extent of the pattern.
Now you can see the pattern extends quite a bit. And now we can come in again and back to where we were before. This completes our demonstrations of two-dimensional
Fraunhofer diffraction pattern. Next, what we have for you is Fresnel diffraction. So when we come back, we'll have the setup rearranged so we can look at some Fresnel diffraction patterns.