Austen Corbitt

Research Paper Diffraction

Honors Physics

For this assignment, I received the topic of diffraction of light. Over the course of this paper, you will hopefully learn from my learning over my topic. Finding information for diffraction was not the easiest thing, as it tends to be the ugly duckling when it comes to interference because of the mainstream appeal of reflections and pencils looking weird (refraction.) But me being the studious achiever I am, I found sufficient information that gave me a concrete understanding of diffraction.

First off, the objectives of this research assignment were to describe how light waves bend around obstacles and produce bright and dark fringes, along with how diffraction determines the optical instruments ability to resolve images. The basic definition of diffraction is a change in light wave direction as they pass through one medium to another. Usually the way the light waves pass through mediums in diffraction are slits, or apertures. An aperture is a tiny slit where the light passes through. Now that the basics are covered, follow me down the rabbit hole and well learn more.

As the light wave passes through the aperture, it spreads out on the other side of the object. In the resulting wave, there tends to be two different things you see; dark and light fringes, or scientifically called the minima and prime maxima, respectively. Diffraction also has an impact on how an optical instrument is able to resolve images. For example, when a camera takes a picture, light passes through the aperture in the camera and causes the resulting image to be disoriented. Another example is how a telescope has trouble showing the distance between two stars, due to the effect that diffraction has on what the pirate or whoever is using the telescope sees. Or two icebergs, if youre in the crows nest..

Austen Corbitt

Research Paper

Honors Physics

The two most common examples of diffraction that you see in your everyday life are probably the back of compact discs and looking into the sky and seeing a bright ring around the Sun or moon. In the case of compact discs, when you look on the back, you see a psychedelic display of colors. This results from the light waves passing through the data engraved rings along with the rings that contain no data. As for the looking into the sky example, that effect is caused by the diffraction of particles in the atmosphere.

Diffraction was a tough topic for me to grasp since it wasnt your usual cookie cutter topic, but I think Ive gained a pretty clear understanding of it and I hope that I was able to share it with my classmates.