Exploration:
Research Question: How does the travel distance of light waves affect the distance between the constructive interference fringes in the Double Slit experiment?
Personal Engagement/Topic:
Light is seen everywhere, artificial and natural. It is so common, that no one really questions it. But what is light made of? Intuitively, I would answer that visible light is a particle. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The photon from the source shoots into the eye’s retina, and the eye’s rods and cones interpret it into what is known as the sense of sight. All of that sounds like light could be a particle. That satisfied Newton and I alike.
However, I was proven wrong by Thomas Young who demonstrated that light was actually a wave in his double …show more content…
The two light waves from the two slits are going to interfere with one another. So the question becomes, why are there different light and dark bands? To make sense of this, Young incorporated Christiaan Huygens’ theory of wave interference and Augustin Fresnel’s adaptation of Huygens’ Principle, referred to as Huygens-Fresnel Principle (Homer 137). The light from the bottom slit has to travel a little farther than the top slit to get to the same point. If that difference is exactly one wavelength, there will be constructive interference, because the two waves will be traveling in the exact same place, where a crest of a wave will meet a crest of another. If the difference is exactly half of a wavelength, there will be destructive interference, because the two waves will just cancel out, where the trough of the wave will meet the trough of another, resulting in the dark spots …show more content…
The laser beam will be directed at the slits on the glass slide, which would have the slit separation at (0.0250mm). First, the distance between the slide and the screen (IV) will be set to 0 meters apart, then incrementing it by 0.5 meters up until 10 meters. The increments and maximum IV are chosen to ensure that we get the largest possible range of IV within the constraints of the experiments location, with the added luxury of having round numbers to calculate the theoretical values of the DV. The experiment will have 10 rounds of repeated trials to produce an average and assure that the data is accurate and reproducible. The minimum IV is chosen, as it’s the control variable, which should theoretically produce no interference since it essentially means that there are no slits; where at 0 meters apart, the glass slide becomes the
Research Question: How does the travel distance of light waves affect the distance between the constructive interference fringes in the Double Slit experiment?
Personal Engagement/Topic:
Light is seen everywhere, artificial and natural. It is so common, that no one really questions it. But what is light made of? Intuitively, I would answer that visible light is a particle. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The photon from the source shoots into the eye’s retina, and the eye’s rods and cones interpret it into what is known as the sense of sight. All of that sounds like light could be a particle. That satisfied Newton and I alike.
However, I was proven wrong by Thomas Young who demonstrated that light was actually a wave in his double …show more content…
The two light waves from the two slits are going to interfere with one another. So the question becomes, why are there different light and dark bands? To make sense of this, Young incorporated Christiaan Huygens’ theory of wave interference and Augustin Fresnel’s adaptation of Huygens’ Principle, referred to as Huygens-Fresnel Principle (Homer 137). The light from the bottom slit has to travel a little farther than the top slit to get to the same point. If that difference is exactly one wavelength, there will be constructive interference, because the two waves will be traveling in the exact same place, where a crest of a wave will meet a crest of another. If the difference is exactly half of a wavelength, there will be destructive interference, because the two waves will just cancel out, where the trough of the wave will meet the trough of another, resulting in the dark spots …show more content…
The laser beam will be directed at the slits on the glass slide, which would have the slit separation at (0.0250mm). First, the distance between the slide and the screen (IV) will be set to 0 meters apart, then incrementing it by 0.5 meters up until 10 meters. The increments and maximum IV are chosen to ensure that we get the largest possible range of IV within the constraints of the experiments location, with the added luxury of having round numbers to calculate the theoretical values of the DV. The experiment will have 10 rounds of repeated trials to produce an average and assure that the data is accurate and reproducible. The minimum IV is chosen, as it’s the control variable, which should theoretically produce no interference since it essentially means that there are no slits; where at 0 meters apart, the glass slide becomes the