Double-Slit Interference: One of the most famous experiments in physics history is Thomas Young’s demonstration, conducted in the early 1800s, of interference among light waves passing through two small slits.
In Young’s experiment, two tiny holes are used to focus light of single, ideally monochromatic source, and the resultant intensity pattern is measured on a screen.
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Impact of Technology:
Such fringes have been identified by focusing three sets of infrared laser beams upon a thin film of indium tin oxide, which is encased between gold and glass, with a thickness of only 40 nm. For a brief period, the layer’s composition changed between transparent semiconductor with reflecting metal due to the two shortest pulses acting as the slits (reflection is easier to generate than transmission). Instead, the third pulse acted as the probe, increasing the range of frequencies it might encounter during the twofold reflection.
Tirole and colleagues measured the reflected probe pulses’ spectra and discovered that the initial bandwidth of the pulses had been expanded by roughly a factor of 10. Importantly, a sequence of peaks that grew smaller as one moved away from the pulse’s center carrier frequency was seen in that spectrum. Furthermore, they discovered that the longer time that passed between the pump pulses, the farther apart those peaks became.
They state that the results are consistent with temporal diffraction expectations. The peaks are the fringes created when light waves of different frequencies interfere with one another. In this experiment, the fringes migrated farther out in frequency values as the slits got closer together over time, just like the fringes in a conventional double-slit exp extended out more in space.(Source: Physics World)
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