No! You missed the point entirely!
What I meant is, that if the prism is small enough, the fringe zone will be smaller! Sorry if I have not been clear. I introduced a second prism just to "demonstrate" my statement, perhaps I should have made two pictures...
This is why I think that could happen:
As you can see, the fringe region for the blue (smaller) prism f is smaller than that of the bigger prism f'. If the prism in the problem is bigger than the clear one, the fringe region is still f', so it *imposes* a minimum size of the prism. That's...
Yes. It turns out that, if the prism is small enough, there will be no refracted ray reaching the upper part of the screen, and then the fringe region would span from x to some point below the axis, not from x to the axis. And thus the answer may not be technically correct.
Also, I don't know...
That is in the lower half, I had forgotten to indicate it with a minus :)
My reasoning is based on Snell's Law. The beam on normal incidence will not be refracted by the left surface, and the second surface will send it at a certain angle such that the beam ends up at x distance below the axis...
So, I'm about to take an Optics exam, and while I can easily do most of the last years' exam problems, there are some which I cannot solve for different reasons (perhaps some gross oversight?). Yesterday I stumbled upon this:
1. Homework Statement
(my own translation from Catalan)
We have a...
I would say "Hello everyone!" here but that would be sort of redundant, wouldn't it?
I am currently studying Physics in Universitat de Barcelona (just about to begin third year of that Bologna bachelor) set to Astronomy/Astrophysics. I almost literally stumbled upon this forum while searching...