YOUNG’S DOUBLE SLIT EXPERIMENT

A BREIF ABOUT HOW WAS THIS EXPERIMENT DONE AND WHAT IS THE PURPOSE AND RESULT CONCEIVED

BY ENIYAN
12F1
 How was experiment done?

Isaac Newton defined light as corpuscular, that is, made up of tiny particles. But Young
dared to contradict him. For Young, light had too many characteristics of a classic wave
form, like diffraction and refraction. These two basic physical phenomena could not be
explained by Newton's theory.

Young chose the difficult path of trying to disprove Newton's theory of light. In 1802 his
investigations lead him to devise an experiment known as the double-slit experiment,
which has become part of scientific history. Using a mirror Young directed a beam of light
from a narrow slit in a windowpane of his lab onto a simple apparatus. The experiment
could only work if light exists as waves.
The window slit allows just enough light to enter that it remains constant enough for the
experiment. A card just 20 mm wide with two slits divides the incoming light beam into
two overlapping beams of light. This results in a pattern that Young knows well, an
interference pattern that only waves can produce. The waves of the light ray meet a
barrier. Part of the wave front is blocked, the rest is allowed through. Diffraction occurs
because the waves are steered around the barrier, creating twin light sources whose rays,
when they overlap, alternately add and subtract from each other, behavior only possible of
a wave.
 Who is this Thomas young?
The Thomas Young Centre is named after the extraordinary polymath Thomas Young FRS (1773-1829), who made
breakthroughs in more fields than our amalgamated research can possibly cover. His understanding of the human eye and
vision – arising from his initial training as a physician – earned him a Fellowship of the Royal Society at the age of just
twenty-one. Yet much of Young’s bounty of discoveries was appreciated by scientists only after his death in 1829.

Today, Thomas Young is well known as a physicist (compared with Isaac Newton by Albert Einstein): the rst to
establish – with “Young’s Slits” – the wave nature of light, perhaps his most wonderful legacy, with its modern
implications for the nature of quantum mechanics. Young was the materials scientist and engineer who gave us
“Young’s Modulus”. His proposal of the three-colour theory of vision eventually became known as the “Young-
Helmholtz” theory. In addition, he was a skilled linguist with a deep knowledge of ancient languages, who coined
the term “Indo-European”, and was seminal in decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs: a task completed by Champollion
in the 1820s. It is no wonder that the Blue Plaque on Young’s house at 48 Welbeck Street in central London calls
him “Man of Science”.

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In 1801, an English physicist named Thomas Young performed an experiment that strongly inferred the wave-
like nature of light. Because he believed that light was composed of waves, Young reasoned that some type of
interaction would occur when two light waves met. This interactive tutorial explores how coherent light
waves interact when passed through two closely spaced slits.

Young's experiment was based on the hypothesis that if light were wave-like in nature, then it should behave in a
manner similar to ripples or waves on a pond of water. Where two opposing water waves meet, they should react
in a specific manner to either reinforce or destroy each other. If the two waves are in step (the crests meet), then
they should combine to make a larger wave. In contrast, when two waves meet that are out of step (the crest of
one meets the trough of another), the waves should cancel and produce a flat surface in that area.
An important parameter in the double-slit geometry is the ratio of the wavelength of the light λ to the
spacing of the slits d. If λ/d is much smaller than 1, the spacing between consecutive interference fringes
will be small, and the interference effects may not be observable. Using narrowly separated slits, Young
was able to separate the interference fringes. In this way he determined the wavelengths of the colours of
visible light. The very short wavelengths of visible light explain why interference effects are observed only
in special circumstances—the spacing between the sources of the interfering light waves must be very
small to separate regions of constructive and destructive interference.
Observing interference effects is challenging because of two other difficulties. Most light sources emit a
continuous range of wavelengths, which result in many overlapping interference patterns, each with a
different fringe spacing. The multiple interference patterns wash out the most pronounced interference
effects, such as the regions of complete darkness.
 Second, for an interference pattern to be observable over any extended period of time, the two sources of
light must be coherent with respect to each other. This means that the light sources must maintain a
constant phase relationship. For example, two harmonic waves of the same frequency always have a fixed
phase relationship at every point in space, being either in phase, out of phase, or in some intermediate
relationship. However, most light sources do not emit true harmonic waves; instead, they emit waves that
undergo random phase changes millions of times per second. Such light is called incoherent. Interference
still occurs when light waves from two incoherent sources overlap in space, but the interference pattern
fluctuates randomly as the phases of the waves shift randomly. Detectors of light, including the eye, cannot
register the quickly shifting interference patterns, and only a time-averaged intensity is observed. Laser light
is approximately monochromatic (consisting of a single wavelength) and is highly coherent; it is thus an
ideal source for revealing interference effects.
Thin-film interference
Observable interference effects are not limited to the double-slit geometry used by Thomas Young. The
phenomenon of thin-film interference results whenever light reflects off two surfaces separated by a distance
comparable to its wavelength. The “film” between the surfaces can be a vacuum, air, or any
transparent liquid or solid. In visible light, noticeable interference effects are restricted to films with
thicknesses on the order of a few micrometres. A familiar example is the film of a soap bubble. Light reflected
from a bubble is a superposition of two waves—one reflecting off the front surface and a second reflecting off
the back surface. The two reflected waves overlap in space and interfere. Depending on the thickness of the
soap film, the two waves may interfere constructively or destructively. A full analysis shows that, for light of a
single wavelength λ, there are constructive interference for film thicknesses equal to λ/4, 3λ/4, 5λ/4,… and
Diffraction
Understand how diffraction of light affects stellar imagesSee all videos for this article
The subtle pattern of light and dark fringes seen in the geometrical shadow when light passes an obstacle, first
observed by the Jesuit mathematician Francesco Grimaldi in the 17th century, is an example of
the wave phenomenon of diffraction. Diffraction is a product of the superposition of waves—it is an
interference effect. Whenever a wave is obstructed, those portions of the wave not affected by the obstruction
interfere with one another in the region of space beyond the obstruction. The mathematics of diffraction is
considerably complicated, and a detailed, systematic theory was not worked out until 1818 by the French
physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel.
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