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Optic Lab 7 Interference PDF
Optic Lab 7 Interference PDF
Optic Lab 7 Interference PDF
Hieu Nguyen
trihieu.231@gmail.com
1 Introduction
Interference is the phenomena in which two or more coherent waves add up, following the principle
of superposition, and form a resultant wave that has its own amplitude profile in space and time.
Interference can be observed in many types of waves, such as acoustic waves and water surface waves;
this report will only focus on the interference of two coherent light sources.
In order to generate two coherent light sources, a single slit is used to spread a laser beam onto two
slits separated by a small distance. Light beams coming out of two slits will act as two light sources,
which are coherent since they originate from the same laser source. Interference can be observed by
placing a screen at a far distance away from the two slit; dark and bright fringes of light will appear on
the screen. There are two primary phenomenons that give rise to the fringes: interference and diffraction.
During our experiment, both two types fringes were observed (Figure 2).
An approximated formula that describe the positions of fringes caused by interference is:
d sin = n (1)
1
Interference and Diffraction - Lab 7 May 11, 2016 Page 2
2. Turn on the laser. Turn off the room light and set the position of the rotary sensor to the left of
the fringes.
3. Start rotate the sensor to the right slowly and observe the live data taken on a screen.
3 Results
From the data captured by the light sensor and the rotary motion sensor, we plot a graph of the light
intensity versus the angle (Figure 1).
Figure 1: A plot of the intensity versus the angle of the brightest diffraction fringe. Inside this fringe are
many smaller interference fringes.
4 Discussion
The plot presented in Figure 1 shows that as the rotary sensor rotate, the light sensor receive many dif-
ferent intensity. While the intensity fluctuates quickly representing the interference fringes, the envelope
of plot also has a wave curve representing the middle diffraction fringes.
5 Conclusion
We have obtained a plot of the light intensity versus the angle of the rotary sensor. From our plot, both
the diffraction fringes and the interference fringes are observed.
6 Acknowledgement
We thank Louisiana Tech University for providing the lab equipment and Dr. Neven Simicevic for giving
us authorization to conduct the experiment.
References
[1] E. Hecht, Optics, 5th ed. Pearson Education, 2015.
Interference and Diffraction - Lab 7 May 11, 2016 Page 3
7 Appendixes
Figure 2: A plot of the intensity versus the angle captured by a software. Both the diffraction fringes
and the interference fringes can be seen; there are 3 seen diffraction fringes and many interference fringes
inside each diffraction fringes.