Huygen’s theory

History
Christiaan Huygens was a Dutch
mathematician, physicist, engineer,
astronomer, and inventor who is regarded as
a key figure in the Scientific Revolution. In
physics, Huygens made seminal contributions
to optics and mechanics, while as an
astronomer he studied the rings of Saturn and
discovered its largest moon, Titan. As an
engineer and inventor, he improved the
design of telescopes and invented the
pendulum clock, the most accurate
timekeeper for almost 300 years. A talented
mathematician and physicist, his works
contain the first idealization of a physical
problem by a set of mathematical parameters,
and the first mathematical and mechanistic
explanation of an unobservable physical
phenomenon.
Huygens first identified the correct laws of
elastic collision in his work De Motu
Corporum ex Percussione, completed in 1656
but published posthumously in 1703. In 1659,
Huygens derived geometrically the formula in
classical mechanics for the centrifugal force in
his work De vi Centrifuga, a decade before
Newton. In optics, he is best known for his
wave theory of light, which he described in his
Traité de la Lumière (1690). His theory of light
was initially rejected in favour of Newton's
corpuscular theory of light, until Augustin-
Jean Fresnel adopted Huygens's principle to
give a complete explanation of the rectilinear
propagation and diffraction effects of light in
1821. Today this principle is known as the
Huygens–Fresnel principle.
Huygens invented the pendulum clock in
1657, which he patented the same year. His
horological research resulted in an extensive
analysis of the pendulum in Horologium
Oscillatorium (1673), regarded as one of the
most important works on mechanics. While it
contains descriptions of clock designs, most of
the book is an analysis of pendular motion
and a theory of curves. He discovered Saturn's
biggest moon, Titan, and was the first to
explain Saturn's strange appearance as due to
"a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, and
inclined to the ecliptic. “In 1662 Huygens
developed what is now called the Huygenian
eyepiece, a telescope with two lenses to
diminish the amount of dispersion.

As a mathematician, Huygens developed the

theory of evolutes and wrote on games of
chance and the problem of points in Van
Rekeningh in Spelen van Gluck. The use of
expected values by Huygens and others would
later inspire Jacob Bernoulli's work on
probability theory.

Huygens work in mathematics

Huygens first became internationally known
for his work in mathematics, publishing
several important results that drew the
attention of many European geometers.
Huygens's preferred method in his published
works was that of Archimedes, though he
made use of Descartes's analytic geometry
and Fermat's infinitesimal techniques more
extensively in his private notebooks.
 Work in laws of motion,
impact, gravitation

His general approach of the mechanical

philosophers was to postulate theories of the
kind now called "contact action." Huygens
adopted this method but not without seeing
its limitations. Leibniz, his student in Paris,
later abandoned the theory. Understanding
the universe this way made the theory of
collisions central to physics, as only
explanations that involved matter in motion
could be truly intelligible. While Huygens was
influenced by the Cartesian approach, he was
less doctrinaire. He studied elastic collisions in
the 1650s but delayed publication for over a
decade.
Huygens concluded quite early that
Descartes's laws for elastic collisions were
largely wrong, and he formulated the correct
laws, including the conservation of the
product of mass times the square of the
speed for hard bodies, and the conservation
of quantity of motion in one direction for all
bodies. An important step was his recognition
of the Galilean invariance of the problems.
Huygens had worked out the laws of collision
from 1652 to 1656 in a manuscript entitled De
Motu Corporum ex Percussione, though his
results took many years to be circulated. In
1661, he passed them on in person to William
Brouncker and Christopher Wren in London.
What Spinoza wrote to Henry Oldenburg
about them in 1666, during the Second Anglo-
Dutch War, was guarded. The war ended in
1667, and Huygens announced his results to
the Royal Society in 1668. He later published
them in the Journal des Sçavans in 1669.

In 1659 Huygens found the constant of

gravitational acceleration and stated what is
now known as the second of Newton's laws of
motion in quadratic form. He derived
geometrically the now standard formula for
the centrifugal force, exerted on an object
when viewed in a rotating frame of reference,
for instance when driving around a curve.
Huygens collected his results in a treatise
under the title De vi Centrifuga, unpublished
until 1703, where the kinematics of free fall
were used to produce the first generalized
conception of force prior to Newton. The
general idea for the centrifugal force,
however, was published in 1673 and was a
significant step in studying orbits in
astronomy. It enabled the transition from
Kepler's third law of planetary motion to the
inverse square law of gravitation. Yet, the
interpretation of Newton's work on
gravitation by Huygens differed from that of
Newtonians such as Roger Cotes: he did not
insist on the a priori attitude of Descartes, but
neither would he accept aspects of
gravitational attractions that were not
attributable in principle to contact between
particles.
The approach used by Huygens also missed
some central notions of mathematical physics,
which were not lost on others. In his work on
pendulums Huygens came very close to the
theory of simple harmonic motion; the topic,
however, was covered fully for the first time
by Newton in Book II of the Principia
Mathematica (1687). In 1678 Leibniz picked
out of Huygens's work on collisions the idea
of conservation law that Huygens had left
implicit.

WORK IN FILED OF OPTICS

1)dioptric-
Huygens had a long-term interest in the
study of light refraction and lenses or dioptric.
From 1652 date the first drafts of a Latin
treatise on the theory of dioptric, known as
the Tractates, which contained a
comprehensive and rigorous theory of the
telescope. Huygens was one of the few to
raise theoretical questions regarding the
properties and working of the telescope, and
almost the only one to direct his
mathematical proficiency towards the actual
instruments used in astronomy.
Huygens repeatedly announced its
publication to his colleagues but ultimately
postponed it in favour of a much more
comprehensive treatment, now under the
name of the Dioptrica. It consisted of three
parts. The first part focused on the general
principles of refraction, the second dealt with
spherical and chromatic aberration, while the
third covered all aspects of the construction
of telescopes and microscopes. In contrast to
Descartes' dioptric which treated only ideal
(elliptical and hyperbolical) lenses, Huygens
dealt exclusively with spherical lenses, which
were the only kind that could really be made
and incorporated in devices such as
microscopes and telescopes.
Huygens also worked out practical ways to
minimize the effects of spherical and
chromatic aberration, such as long focal
distances for the objective of a telescope,
internal stops to reduce the aperture, and a
new kind of ocular known as the Huygenian
eyepiece. The Dioptrica was never published
in Huygens’s lifetime and only appeared in
press in 1703, when most of its contents were
already familiar to the scientific world.

2)lenses
Together with his brother Constantijn,
Huygens began grinding his own lenses in
1655 to improve telescopes. He designed in
1662 what is now called the Huygenian
eyepiece, a set of two planoconvex lenses
used as a telescope ocular. Huygens's lenses
were known to be of superb quality and
polished consistently according to his
specifications; however, his telescopes did not
produce very sharp images, leading some to
speculate that he might have suffered from
near-sightedness.
Lenses were also a common interest
through which Huygens could meet socially in
the 1660s with Spinoza, who ground them
professionally. They had rather different
outlooks on science, Spinoza being the more
committed Cartesian, and some of their
discussion survives in correspondence. He
encountered the work of Antoni van
Leeuwenhoek, another lens grinder, in the
field of microscopy which interested his
father.[8] Huygens also investigated the use of
lenses in projectors. He is credited as the
inventor of the magic lantern, described in
correspondence of 1659. There are others to
whom such a lantern device has been
attributed, such as Giambattista Della Porta
and Cornelis Dribble, though Huygens's design
used lens for better projection (Athanasius
Kircher has also been credited for that)

Huygens–Fresnel principle
The Huygens–Fresnel principle (named
after Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens and
French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel) states
that every point on a wavefront is itself the
source of spherical wavelets, and the
secondary wavelets emanating from different
points mutually interfere. The sum of these
spherical wavelets forms a new wavefront. As
such, the Huygens-Fresnel principle is a
method of analysis applied to problems of
luminous wave propagation both in the far-
field limit and in near-field diffraction as well
as reflection

History of the principle

In 1678, Huygens proposed that every
point reached by a luminous disturbance
becomes a source of a spherical wave; the
sum of these secondary waves determines the
form of the wave at any subsequent time. He
assumed that the secondary waves travelled
only in the "forward" direction and it is not
explained in the theory why this is the case.
He was able to provide a qualitative
explanation of linear and spherical wave
propagation, and to derive the laws of
reflection and refraction using this principle,
but could not explain the deviations from
rectilinear propagation that occur when light
encounters edges, apertures, and screens,
commonly known as diffraction effects. The
resolution of this error was finally explained
by David A. B. Miller in 1991. The resolution is
that the source is a dipole (not the monopole
assumed by Huygens), which cancels in the
reflected direction.
In 1818, Fresnel showed that Huygens's
principle, together with his own principle of
interference could explain both the rectilinear
propagation of light and diffraction effects. To
obtain agreement with experimental results,
he had to include additional arbitrary
assumptions about the phase and amplitude
of the secondary waves, and an obliquity
factor. These assumptions have no obvious
physical foundation but led to predictions that
agreed with many experimental observations,
including the Poisson spot.

Poisson used Fresnel's theory to predict

that a bright spot ought to appear in the
centre of the shadow of a small disc, and
deduced from this that the theory was
incorrect. However, Arago, performed the
experiment and showed that the prediction
was correct. This was one of the
investigations that led to the victory of the
wave theory of light over then predominant
corpuscular theory.
In antenna theory and engineering, the
reformulation of the Huygens–Fresnel
principle for radiating current sources is
known as surface equivalence principle.

Huygens principle as microscopic

model
The Huygens–Fresnel principle provides a
reasonable basis for understanding and
predicting the classical wave propagation of
light. However, there are limitations to the
principle, namely the same approximations
done for deriving the Kirchhoff's diffraction
formula and the approximations of near field
due to Fresnel. These can be summarized in
the fact that the wavelength of light is much
smaller than the dimensions of any optical
components encountered.
Kirchhoff's diffraction formula provides a
rigorous mathematical foundation for
diffraction, based on the wave equation. The
arbitrary assumptions made by Fresnel to
arrive at the Huygens–Fresnel equation
emerge automatically from the mathematics
in this derivation.
A simple example of the operation of the
principle can be seen when an open doorway
connects two rooms and a sound is produced
in a remote corner of one of them. A person
in the other room will hear the sound as if it
originated at the doorway. As far as the
second room is concerned, the vibrating air in
the doorway is the source of the sound.
 Modern interpretation on Huygens
principle

Not all experts agree that the Huygens'

principle is an accurate microscopic
representation of reality. For instance, Melvin
Schwartz argued that "Huygens' principle
actually does give the right answer but for the
wrong reasons".

This can be reflected in the following

facts:

1)The microscopic mechanics to create

photons and of emission, in general, is
essentially acceleration of electrons.
 2)The original analysis of Huygens
included amplitudes only. It includes neither
phases nor waves propagating at different
speeds (due to diffraction within continuous
media), and therefore is not consider
interference.
3)The Huygens analysis also does not
include polarization for light which imply a
vector potential, where instead sound waves
can be described with a scalar potential and
there is no unique and natural translation
between the two.
4)In the Huygens description, there is no
explanation of why we choose only the
forward-going (retarded wave or forward
envelope of wave fronts) versus the
backward-propagating advanced wave
(backward envelope).
5)In the Fresnel approximation there is a
concept of non-local behaviour due to the
sum of spherical waves with different phases
that comes from the different points of the
wave front, and non-local theories are subject
of many debates (e.g., not being Lorentz
covariant) and of active research.
6)The Fresnel approximation can be
interpreted in a quantum probabilistic
manner but is unclear how much this sum of
states (i.e., wavelets on the wavefront) is a
complete list of states that are meaningful
physically or represents more of an
approximation on a generic basis like in the
linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO)
method.

The Huygens' principle is essentially

compatible with quantum field theory in the
far field approximation, considering effective
fields in the centre of scattering, considering
small perturbations, and in the same sense
that quantum optics is compatible with
classical optics, other interpretations are
subject of debates and active research.

The Feynman model where every point in

an imaginary wave front as large as the room
is generating a wavelet, shall also be
interpreted in these approximations and in a
probabilistic context, in this context remote
points can only contribute minimally to the
overall probability amplitude.

Quantum field theory does not include

any microscopic model for photon creation
and the concept of single photon is also put
under scrutiny on a theoretical level.

Generalized Huygens principle

Many books and references refer to the
Generalized Huygens' Principle as the one
referred by Feynman in this publication.

Feynman defines the generalized principle in

the following way:
"Actually, Huygens’ principle is not correct in
optics. It is replaced by Kirchoff’s modification
which requires that both the amplitude and
its derivative must be known on the adjacent
surface. This is a consequence of the fact that
the wave equation in optics is second order in
the time. The wave equation of quantum
mechanics is first order in the time; therefore,
Huygens’ principle is correct for matter waves,
action replacing time."
This clarifies the fact that in this context the
generalized principle reflects the linearity of
quantum mechanics and the fact that the
quantum mechanics equations are first order
in time. Finally, only in this case the
superposition principle fully applies, i.e. the
wave function in a point P can be expanded as
a superposition of waves on a border surface
enclosing P. Wave functions can be
interpreted in the usual quantum mechanical
sense as probability densities where the
formalism of Green's functions and
propagators apply. What is note-worthy is
that this generalized principle is applicable for
"matter waves" and not for light waves any
more. The phase factor is now clarified as
given by the action and there is no more
confusion why the phases of the wavelets are
different from the one of the original waves
and modified by the additional Fresnel
parameter.
 Huygens' theory, Feynman's path
integral and the modern photon wave
function

Huygens' theory served as a fundamental

explanation of the wave nature of light
interference and was further developed by
Fresnel and Young but did not fully resolve all
observations such as the low-intensity
double-slit experiment first performed by G. I.
Taylor in 1909. It was not until the early and
mid-1900s that quantum theory discussions,
particularly the early discussions at the 1927
Brussels Solvay Conference, where Louis de
Broglie proposed his de Broglie hypothesis
that the photon is guided by a wave function.
The wave function presents a much different
explanation of the observed light and dark
bands in a double slit experiment. In this
conception, the photon follows a path which
is a probabilistic choice of one of many
possible paths in the electromagnetic field.
These probable paths form the pattern: in
dark areas, no photons are landing, and in
bright areas, many photons are landing. The
set of possible photon paths is consistent with
Richard Feynman's path integral theory, the
paths determined by the surroundings: the
photon's originating point (atom), the slit, and
the screen and by tracking and summing
phases. The wave function is a solution to this
geometry. The wave function approach was
further supported by additional double-slit
experiment

Huygens' principle and quantum field

theory
Any disturbance created in a sufficiently
small region of homogeneous space (or in a
homogeneous medium) propagates from that
region in all geodesic directions. The waves
produced by this disturbance, in turn, create
disturbances in other regions, and so on. The
superposition of all the waves results in the
observed pattern of wave propagation.
Homogeneity of space is fundamental to
quantum field theory (QFT) where the wave
function of any object propagates along all
available unobstructed paths. When
integrated along all possible paths, with a
phase factor proportional to the action, the
interference of the wave-functions correctly
predicts observable phenomena. Every point
on the wavefront acts as the source of
secondary wavelets that spread out in the
light cone with the same speed as the wave.
The new wavefront is found by constructing
the surface tangent to the secondary
wavelets.
 bibliography

I have taken help from the following we sites-:

1)google.com
2)Wikipedia.com
 Acknowledgement

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assignment.