PROPAGATION

OF LIGHT

By: Bersabal, Bilocura, Del Coro, Guablas, Penales, Suello

WHAT IS PROPAGATION OF LIGHT?
- It is a process by which light or sound travel
- It refers to the manner in which an electromagnetic wave transfers it’s energy from one
point to another.
• RECTELINEAR PROPAGATION OF LIGHT
OPTICAL MEDIUM – any space which light travels
ISOTROPIC – have the same properties in all directions
HOMOGENEOUS – posses same properties throughout
their mass
When light source starts from a point source B in an
Isotropic Medium, it spreads out uniformly at the same
speed in all direction; the position it occupies at a given
moment will be a sphere having the source at its center.
• Huygens (1629-1695)
- Founder of the wave theory of light
- Assumed that any point on a wave surface behind as a new source from which spherical
“secondary waves” or “wavelets” spreads out in a formal direction.
• Huygens Principle
- Wavelets travel out in a forward direction only, and that the effect of each wavelet is limited to
that part which touches the enveloping new wave front.
• Fresnel (1788-1827)
- Has shown by considering the “interference” that takes place between the wavelets, that the
second assumptions is approximately correct.
- A luminous such as B, will be seen only if
light from it enters the eye.
- The fact that B is invisible to an eye
placed c d and visible to one placed
within the region k m n l shows, as was
also seen from Huygen’s principle, that
the light effect at a given point is due to
that portion of the light that travelled
along the straight line joining the point
to the source.
• PENCIL AND BEAMS
- The light from a luminous point, or from any one point on a large source or illuminated object, after
passing through a limiting aperture such as k l constitutes a pencil of light.
- The word bundle of ray is often used to mean the same thing.
- Ray bundles are more commonly associated with computer ray tracing and calculation of
geometrical aberrations.
- The aperture may be simply an opening in an opaque screen or the edges of a lens, mirror, etc.
DIVERGENT – the pencil increase in width as the distance from source increase.
CONVERGENT – the pencil may be modified in such way that its width is gradually decreasing and it
converges to a point or focus.
FOCUS – will be the image of the object point from which the light started.
- Beyond the focus the pencil again diverges, its width still being limited by the original aperture.
- The ray passing through the center of the aperture, will be the principal or chief ray of the pencil.
• BEF is the section of a pencil diverging from a luminous
point B, and limited by an aperture CD, EF being the
width of the cross section of the pencil in a plane
parallel to the plane of the aperture. In the similar
triangle CDB and EFB

As the light spreads out uniformly in all directions,

That is, the area of the cross section of a pencil varies as

the square of the distance from the source.
• LAW OF INVERSE SQUARE
- Is a principle that expresses the way radiant energy
propagates through space. The rule states that the
power intensity per unit area from a point source, if the
rays strike the surface at a right angle, varies inversely
according to the square of the distance from the
source.
• VERGENCE
- Is the simultaneous movement of both eyes in opposite
directions to obtain or maintain single binocular vision.
When a creature with binocular vision looks at an
object, the eyes must rotate around horizontal axis so
that the projection of the image is in the center of the
retina in both eyes.
- The unit of vergence is the diopter, the vergence of a
pencil one meter from the luminous point or focus.
• THE PINHOLE CAMERA
- Is a simple camera without lens but with tiny
aperture, a pinhole – effectively a light-proof
box with a small hole in one side. Light from a
scene passes through the aperture and
projects an inverted image on the opposite
side of the box, which I known as the camera
obscura.
- As the light travels in straight lines, the
patches of light on the screen occupy similar
relative positions to those of the
corresponding points on the object, and the
illuminated area of the screen is similar in
shape to the original object, but inverted.
- As the size of the inverted image of any object
will depend on the distances of object and
image from the aperture.
• The degree of sharpness of the pinhole image can never be of
a very high order, because if the diameter of the aperture is
reduced beyond a certain amount, additional blurring
become evident, due to diffraction effects.
• If the illumination of the image is very low as compared with
that formed by a lens, owing to the very small aperture used.
• SHADOWS AND ECLIPSES
- The properties of shadows may easily be deduced from the law
of rectilinear propagation.
- The size of the shadow in any position may be determined in the
same way as the cross section of a pencil.
UMBRA
- dark, central part of the shadow
- That part of a shadow in which all light from a given source is
excluded.
PENUMBRA
- A half-shadow that occurs when a light source is only partly
covered by an object
Example:
When the moon obscures part of the sun’s disk. The other 2 areas:
Umbra – the shadow’s dark center portion.
Antumbra - the lighter part of the shadow that begins where the
umbra ends.
ECLIPSE OF THE SUN
-At a certain times the moon comes between the sun and the
earth and as the distance between the moon on the earth is
less than the length of the umbra of the moon’s shadow, the
shadow on the earth’s surface will consist of an umbral portion
surrounded by a penumbra.
-In the penumbra the eclipse will be partial, only a portion of
the sun being covered.
ECLIPSE OF THE MOON
-When the earth is directly between the sun and the moon, the
shadow od the earth is seen project upon the moon’s surface,
and the eclipse will be total when the moon lies wholly within
the umbra.
-When the eclipse is partial the penumbra of the shadow may
be seen as a partial darkening of the moon’s surface outside
the complete shadow.
• THE NATURE OF WHITE LIGHT
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
- The patch of light received on a screen was broadened out into a band of colors, in which
he recognized seven distinct colors in the following order: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green,
Blue, Indigo and Violet.
SPECTRUM – colored band
DISPERSED - white light
- Newton found that the light was again white: he therefore concluded that white light is
composed of a mixture of light of the seven spectrum colors.
- It is now known that each of these colors consists of a vibration of a given range of
frequency, red having the lowest frequency and therefore the longest wave-length, and
violet the highest frequency and the shortest wave-length.
- The other colors occupying intermediate positions in the scale of frequencies according to
their position in the spectrum.