Optics

Dr Mohsan Waseem
 Intrduction

Optics is study of light (electromagnetic wave in general)!

A knowledge of the properties of light allows us to understand the
blue color of the sky and the design of optical devices such as
telescopes, microscopes, cameras, eyeglasses.
The same basic principles of optics also lie at the heart of modern
developments such as the laser, optical bers, holograms, optical
computers, and new techniques in medical imaging.

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 The Nature of Light
A brief history

Until the time of Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727), most scientists

thought that light consisted of streams of particles (called
corpuscles) emitted by light sources.
Galileo and others tried (unsuccessfully) to measure the speed of
light.
Around 1665, evidence of wave properties of light began to be
discovered.
By the early 19th century, evidence that light is a wave had grown
very persuasive.
In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell predicted the existence of
electromagnetic waves and calculated their speed of propagation.
This development, along with the experimental work of Heinrich
Hertz starting in 1887, showed conclusively that light is indeed an
electromagnetic wave

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 The Nature of Light
The two personalities of light

The wave picture of light is not the whole story.

Several eects associated with emission and absorption of light
reveal a particle nature of it.
The energy carried by light waves is packaged in discrete bundles

called photons or quanta.

These apparently contradictory wave and particle properties have

been reconciled since 1930 with the development of quantum
electrodynamics, a comprehensive theory that includes both wave
and particle properties.
The propagation of light is best described by a wave model, but
understanding emission and absorption requires a particle approach.

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 The Nature of Light
The two personalities of light

The fundamental sources of all electromagnetic radiation are electric

charges in accelerated motion.
All bodies emit electromagnetic radiation as a result of thermal
motion of their molecules; this radiation, called thermal radiation, is
a mixture of dierent wavelengths.
At suciently high temperatures, all matter emits enough visible
light to be self-luminous; a very hot body appears "red-hot".
Thus hot matter in any form is a light source.
Familiar examples are a candle ame, hot coals in a campre, the
coils in an electric room heater, and an incandescent lamp lament
(which usually operates at a temperature of about 3000o C.

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 The Nature of Light
The two personalities of light

Light is also produced during electrical discharges through ionized

gases.
The bluish light of mercury arc lamps, the orange - yellow of sodium
- vapor lamps, and the various colors of "neon" signs are familiar.
In most light sources, light is emitted independently by dierent
atoms within the source.
In a laser, by contrast, atoms are induced to emit light in a
cooperative, coherent fashion.
The result is a very narrow beam of radiation that can be
enormously intense and that is much more nearly monochromatic, or
singlefrequency, than light from any other source.
No matter what its source, electromagnetic radiation travels in
vacuum at the same speed.
c = 299, 792, 458 m/s ∼ 3 × 108 m/s

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 The Nature of Light
Waves, Wave Fronts, and Rays

We often use the concept of a wave front to describe wave

propagation.
A wave front is the locus of all adjacent points at which the phase of
vibration of a physical quantity associated with the wave is the same.
That is, at any instant, all points on a wave front are at the same
part of the cycle of their variation.
When we drop a pebble into a calm pool, the expanding circles
formed by the wave crests, as well as the circles formed by the wave
troughs between them, are wave fronts.

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 The Nature of Light
Waves, Wave Fronts, and Rays

Similarly, when sound waves spread out

in still air from a point like source, or
when electromagnetic radiation spreads
out from a point like emitter, any
spherical surface that is concentric
with the source is a wave front.
In diagrams of wave motion we usually
draw only parts of a few wave fronts,
often choosing consecutive wave fronts
that have the same phase and thus are
one wavelength apart, such as crests of
water waves.
Similarly, a diagram for sound waves
might show only the "pressure crests,"
the surfaces over which the pressure is
maximum.
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 The Nature of Light
Waves, Wave Fronts, and Rays

When electromagnetic waves are

radiated by a small light source, we can
represent the wave fronts as spherical
surfaces concentric with the source.
Far away from the source, where the
radii of the spheres have become very
large, a section of a spherical surface
can be considered as a plane, and we
have a plane wave.

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 The Nature of Light
Waves, Wave Fronts, and Rays

To describe the directions in which

light propagates, it is often convenient
to represent a light wave by rays rather
than by wave fronts.
Rays were used to describe light long
before its wave nature was rmly
established.
In a particle theory of light, rays are
the paths of the particles.
From the wave viewpoint a ray is an
imaginary line along the direction of
travel of the wave. the air and in the
glass are straight lines.

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 Reection and Refraction
When a light wave strikes a smooth interface separating two
transparent materials (such as air and glass or water and glass), the
wave is in general partly reected and partly refracted (transmitted)
into the second material.
When you look into a restaurant window from the street, you see a
reection of the street scene, but a person inside the restaurant can
look out through the window at the same scene as light reaches him
by refraction.

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 Reection and Refraction

The segments of plane waves can be

represented by bundles of rays forming
beams of light.
For simplicity we often draw only one
ray in each beam.
Representing these waves in terms of
rays is the basis of geometric optics.

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 Reection and Refraction

We describe the directions of the

incident, reected, and refracted
(transmitted) rays at a smooth
interface between two optical materials
in terms of the angles they make with
the normal (perpendicular) to the
surface at the point of incidence.
If the interface is rough, both the
transmitted light and the reected
light are scattered in various directions,
and there is no single angle of
transmission or reection.

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 Reection and Refraction
Reection at a denite angle from a
very smooth surface is called specular
reection.
Scattered reection from a rough
surface is called diuse reection.
Both kinds of reection can occur with
either transparent materials or opaque
materials that do not transmit light.
The vast majority of objects in your
environment (including plants, other
people, and this book) are visible to
you because they reect light in a
diuse manner from their surfaces.
For the purpose of studying however,
we are concerned with specular
reection

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 Reection and Refraction

The index of refraction of an optical material (refractive index),

denoted by n plays a central role in geometric optics.
It is the ratio of the speed of light in vacuum to the speed in the
material. c
n=
v
Light always travels more slowly in a material than in vacuum, so the
value of in anything other than vacuum is always greater than unity.
For vacuum n = 1.
Since is a ratio of two speeds, it is a pure number without units.

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 The Laws of Reection and Refraction
The incident, reected, and refracted
rays and the normal to the surface all
lie in the same plane.
The angle of reection θr is equal to
the angle of incidence θa for all
wavelengths and for any pair of
materials.
θr = θa
the ratio of the sines of the angles θa
and θb where both angles are measured
from the normal to the surface, is
equal to the inverse ratio of the two
indexes of refraction.
sin θa nb
=
sin θb na
na sin θa = nb sin θb

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The Laws of Reection and Refraction

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 Reection and Refraction

The frequency f of the wave does not change when passing from
one material to another. That is, the number of wave cycles arriving
per unit time must equal the number leaving per unit time; this is a
statement that the boundary surface cannot create or destroy waves.
The wavelength λ of the wave is dierent in general in dierent
materials.
This is because in any material v = f λ, and since f is not changed,
λ should.
λ0
λ=
n

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Example

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Example

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Example

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 Huygens's principle

Huygens's principle is a geometrical

method for nding, from the known
shape of a wave front at some instant,
the shape of the wave front at some
later time.
Huygens assumed that every point of a
wave front may be considered the
source of secondary wavelets that
spread out in all directions with a
speed equal to the speed of
propagation of the wave.
The new wave front at a later time is
then found by constructing a surface
tangent to the secondary wavelets or,
as it is called, the envelope of the
wavelets.

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 Interference

The term interference refers to any situation in which two or more

waves overlap in space.
When this occurs, the total wave at any point at any instant of time
is governed by the principle of superposition

Interference eects are most easily seen when we combine sinusoidal

waves with a single frequency and wavelength.
In optics, sinusoidal waves are characteristic of monochromatic light
(light of a single color).

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 Interference

When waves from two or more sources

arrive at a point in phase, they
reinforce each other. The amplitude of
the resultant wave is the sum of the
amplitudes of the individual waves.
This is called constructive interference.
When waves from two or more sources
arrive at a point exactly half cycle out
of phase, the amplitude of the
resultant wave is the dierence of the
amplitudes of the individual waves.
This is called destructive interference.

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 Diraction
According to geometric optics, when
an opaque object is placed between a
point light source and a screen, the
shadow of the object forms a perfectly
sharp line.
No light at all strikes the screen at
points within the shadow, and the area
outside the shadow is illuminated
nearly uniformly.
But the wave nature of light causes
eects that can't be understood with
geometric optics.
An important class of such eects
occurs when light strikes a barrier that
has an aperture or an edge.
The interference patterns formed in
such a situation are grouped under the
heading diraction.
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 Diraction

We can analyze diraction patterns using Huygens's principle.

This principle states that we can consider every point of a wave
front as a source of secondary wavelets.
These spread out in all directions with a speed equal to the speed of
propagation of the wave.
The position of the wave front at any later time is the envelope of
the secondary wavelets at that time.
To nd the resultant displacement at any point, we combine all the
individual displacements produced by these secondary waves, using
the superposition principle and taking into account their amplitudes
and relative phases.

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Diraction

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 Diraction

Consider a light falling on a slit of

width a.
To analyse diraction, we imagine
dividing the slit into several narrow
strips of equal width.
According to Huygens's principle, each
element of area of the slit opening can
be considered as a source of secondary
waves.

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 Diraction

Consider two narrow strips, one just below the top edge of the
drawing of the slit and one at its center.
The dierence in path length to point P is (a/2) sin θ.
If this path dierence is equal to λ/2, we have cancellation at P .

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 Diraction
Similarly, light from two strips immediately below the two in the
gure also arrives at P a half-cycle out of phase.
In fact, the light from every strip in the top half of the slit cancels
out the light from a corresponding strip in the bottom half.
Hence the combined light from the entire slit completely cancels at
P , giving a dark fringe in the interference pattern.
a λ
sin θ = ±
2 2
or
λ
sin θ = ±
a

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 Diraction
We may also divide the screen into quarters, sixths, and so on, and
use the above argument to show that a dark fringe occurs whenever
mλ
sin θ =
a
where m = ±1, ±2, ±3...

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 Diraction

For small angels, sin θ ∼ θ so,

mλ
θ=
a
If the distancefrom slit to screen is x,
and the vertical distance of the mth
dark fringe is ym , then using tan θ ∼ θ
we get
mλ
ym = x
a

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Example

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