Diffraction effects

Poisson’s spot

Fresnel presented much of his work on diffraction as an entry to a competition on the subject sponsored by the French Academy of Sciences. The committee of judges included a number of prominent advocates of Newton’s corpuscular model of light, one of whom, Siméon-Denis Poisson, pointed out that Fresnel’s model predicted a seemingly absurd result: If a parallel beam of light falls on a small spherical obstacle, there will be a bright spot at the centre of the circular shadow—a spot nearly as bright as if the obstacle were not there at all. An experiment was subsequently performed by the French physicist François Arago, and Poisson’s spot was seen, vindicating Fresnel.

Circular apertures and image resolution

Circular apertures also produce diffraction patterns. When a parallel beam of light passes through a converging lens, the rules of geometrical optics predict that the light comes to a tight focus behind the lens, forming a point image. In reality, the pattern in the lens’s image plane is complicated by diffraction effects. The lens, considered as a circular aperture with diameter D, produces a two-dimensional diffraction pattern with a central intensity maximum of angular width about λ/D. Angular width refers to the angle, measured in radians, that is defined by the two intensity minima on either side of the central maximum.

Diffraction effects from circular apertures have an important practical consequence: the intensity patterns in optical images produced by circular lenses and mirrors are limited in their ability to resolve closely spaced features. Each point in the object is imaged into a diffraction pattern of finite width, and the final image is a sum of individual diffraction patterns. Baron Rayleigh, a leading figure of late 19th-century physics, showed that the images of two point sources are resolvable only if their angular separation, relative to an imaging element of diameter D, is greater than about 1.2λ/D (“Rayleigh’s criterion”).

Circular aperture diffraction effects limit the resolving power of telescopes and microscopes. This is one of the reasons why the best astronomical telescopes have large-diameter mirrors; in addition to the obvious advantage of an increased light-gathering capability, larger mirrors decrease the resolvable angular separation of astronomical objects. To minimize diffraction effects, optical microscopes are sometimes designed to use ultraviolet light rather than longer-wavelength visible light. Nevertheless, diffraction is often the limiting factor in the ability of a microscope to resolve the fine details of objects.

The late 19th-century French painter Georges Seurat created a new technique, known as pointillism, based on diffraction effects. His paintings consist of thousands of closely spaced small dots of colour. When viewed up close, the individual points of colour are apparent to the eye. Viewed from afar, the individual points cannot be resolved because of the diffraction of the images produced by the lens of the eye. The overlapping images on the retina combine to produce colours other than those used in the individual dots of paint. The same physics underlies the use of closely spaced arrays of red, blue, and green phosphors on television screens and computer monitors; diffraction effects in the eye mix the three primary colours to produce a wide range of hues.

Atmospheric diffraction effects

Diffraction is also responsible for certain optical effects in Earth’s atmosphere. A set of concentric coloured rings, known as an atmospheric corona, often overlapping to produce a single diffuse whitish ring, is sometimes observed around the Moon. The corona is produced as light reflected from the Moon diffracts through water droplets or ice crystals in Earth’s upper atmosphere. When the droplets are of uniform diameter, the different colours are clearly distinct in the diffraction pattern. A related and beautiful atmospheric phenomenon is the glory. Seen in backscattered light from water droplets, commonly forming a fog or mist, the glory is a set of rings of coloured light surrounding the shadow of the observer. The rings of light, with angular diameters of a few degrees, are created by the interplay of refraction, reflection, and diffraction in the water droplets. The glory, once a phenomenon rarely observed, is now frequently seen by airline travelers as coloured rings surrounding their airplane’s shadow on a nearby cloud. Finally, as pointed out in the section Dispersion, the primary and secondary arcs of a rainbow are adequately explained by geometrical optics. However, the more subtle supernumerary bows—weak arcs of light occasionally seen below the primary arc of colours—are caused by diffraction effects in the water droplets that form the rainbow.