Engineering
Physics
Wavefront
Polarisation of Light New
Diffraction New
Question

Explain Huygen's construction of spherical wavefront.

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Solution
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Consider a point source of monochromatic light S in a homogeneous medium. The light waves travel with the same speed(v) in all the directions. After the time 't', the waves will reach all the points which are at a distance vt from S. This is the spherical wavefront XY. Let A, B, C be points on the wavefront. To find the new wavefront after a time Δt, we draw spheres of radius vΔt with A, B and C as centres. The tangents drawn to these spheres is the new spherical wavefront.