LM 32.2 Scaling of diffraction Collection

32.2 Scaling of diffraction by Benjamin Crowell, Light and Matter  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

32.2 Scaling of diffraction

This chapter has “optics” in its title, so it is nominally about light, but we started out with an example involving water waves. Water waves are certainly easier to visualize, but is this a legitimate comparison? In fact the analogy works quite well, despite the fact that a light wave has a wavelength about a million times shorter. This is because diffraction effects scale uniformly. That is, if we enlarge or reduce the whole diffraction situation by the same factor, including both the wavelengths and the sizes of the obstacles the wave encounters, the result is still a valid solution.

This is unusually simple behavior! In section 1.2 we saw many examples of more complex scaling, such as the impossibility of bacteria the size of dogs, or the need for an elephant to eliminate heat through its ears because of its small surface-to-volume ratio, whereas a tiny shrew's life-style centers around conserving its body heat.

Of course water waves and light waves differ in many ways, not just in scale, but the general facts you will learn about diffraction are applicable to all waves. In some ways it might have been more appropriate to insert this chapter after chapter 20 on bounded waves, but many of the important applications are to light waves, and you would probably have found these much more difficult without any background in optics.

Another way of stating the simple scaling behavior of diffraction is that the diffraction angles we get depend only on the unitless ratio `lambda"/"d`, `lambda` is the wavelength of the wave and `d` is some dimension of the diffracting objects, e.g., the center-to-center spacing between the slits in figure a. If, for instance, we scale up both `lambda` and `d` by a factor of 37, the ratio `lambda"/"d` will be unchanged.

32.2 Scaling of diffraction by Benjamin Crowell, Light and Matter  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.