Year: 2014

What is Newton’s Ring? When a plano-convex lens with its convex surface is placed on a plane glass sheet, an air film of gradually increasing thickness outward is formed between…

In everyday life, the interference of light most commonly gives rise to easily observable effects when light impinges on a thin film of some transparent material. For instance, the brilliant…

Interference of Light: Definition:  When two light waves from different coherent sources meet together, then the distribution of energy due    to one wave is disturbed by the other. This modification in…

What happens when two waves meet while they travel through the same medium? What effect will the meeting of the waves have upon the appearance of the medium? Will the…

Wave Optics : To explain some phenomena, such as interference and diffraction of light, it is necessary to go beyond geometrical optics. Huygens’ Principle Huygens considered light to be a…

A particle in a 1-dimensional box is a fundamental quantum mechanical approximation describing the translational motion of a single particle confined inside an infinitely deep well from which itcannot escape.…

At the beginning of the twentieth century, experimental evidence suggested that atomic particles were also wave-like in nature. For example, electrons were found to give diffraction patterns when passed through…

Wave function,  in quantum mechanics, variable quantity that mathematically describes the wave characteristics of a particle. The value of the wave function of a particle at a given point of…

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you can never simultaneously know the exact position and the exact speed of an object. Why not? Because everything in the universe behaves like…

The Davisson-Germer experiment demonstrated the wave nature of the electron, confirming the earlier hypothesis of deBroglie. Putting wave-particle duality on a firm experimental footing, it represented a major step forward…