Recent content by Quarker

Could the central disc of an Airy disc be “brighter” than the surrounding ring? Or could the central disc itself have a higher intensity in the very center of the disc?

Assuming an Airy disc with one ring, does the dark ring around the central disc have the same area as the disc and bright ring? Do the bright and dark areas balance out exactly? Is that how energy is conserved?

An Airy Disc’s rings get brighter if the point source of light is increased. How is that extra energy transferred to the outer rings?

I’m not going to speculate about something that hasn’t been detected yet. If there is a negative energy associated with areas of destructive interference, people may not agree on where that negative energy comes from.

Because theory says that the energy created by destructive interference should be zero.

Is the array sensitive enough to detect any slight variations of energy that may imply the existence of dark energy? A steady state EM wave obeys the law of conservation of energy, but how has it been proven that destructive interference doesn’t create negative energy, which would still conserve...

How has this been proven experimentally, aside from the conservation of energy argument?

Would an artificial star and a sensor in a telescope serve the same purpose, or would the introduction of a lens in the light path create too many variables? It seems like it would be easier to measure the total energy of an Airy disc than a double-slit interference pattern.

Thanks!

It sounds like there’s no way to verify that the energy going into an interference pattern equals the energy coming out, at least experimentally.

I’m thinking more of the interference pattern, not the entire EM field. In a double-slit experiment, or even a telescope’s Airy disc, there’s no way to predict how much energy will be pushed into the areas of constructive interference, even under ideal situations, as far as I know.

The energy of an EM wave is described by a fairly simple equation. Why isn’t there an equation to describe how that energy is redistributed by destructive interference?

It’s well known that energy is not lost when destructive interference of an EM wave takes place. The energy of the wave instead moves to areas where constructive interference occurs. Does that mean that the area of destructive interference has negative energy?

So you’ve done the experiment?

If two dark minima create an interference pattern, assuming they are truly dark, that would most certainly tell you something new.