An Observation on the Interference and Diffraction of Light

Hieu Nguyen
trihieu.231@gmail.com

May 11, 2016

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)

d : the distance between two slits

: the angle between the center axis to the nth fringe
n : the order number of fringe
: the wavelength of the laser source
sin is approximated to be tan and equals to yn /L, in which yn is the distance between the nth
fringe and the center fringe and L is the distance between the screen and the two slits.

Materials and Methods

Materials for this experiment is from the EX-5545 kit from Pasco.com.
Included
Basic Optics Track, 1.2 m
High Precision Diffraction Slits
Basic Optics Diode Laser
Aperture Bracket
Linear Translator
High Sensitivity Light Sensor
Rotary Motion Sensor
Not included, but required
850 Universal Interface
PASCO Capstone
Procedure:
1. Set up the following equipment on the optic track in order: Laser, single slit, double slit, and light
sensor. The light sensor is put on the rotary motion sensor.
1

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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.
4. Record the intensity data versus the rotating angle.

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.

Discussion

The plot presented in Figure 1 shows that as the rotary sensor rotate, the light sensor receive many different intensity. While the intensity fluctuates quickly representing the interference fringes, the envelope
of plot also has a wave curve representing the middle diffraction fringes.

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.

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.

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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.