Interferometer Definition and 162 Threads

If one makes a interferometer with a "arm" giant enough or moves it fast enough.. Forget that, basically you could have just a laser and detector floating in space, not connected, at huge distance, with the same speed and direction relative to a, say, planet in background. If the distance is...

Homework Statement I am having trouble understanding how I would apply the Michelson Interferometer equation to a problem on the PGRE. Here is a link to a diagram displaying the interferometer as well as the equation which is very similar to the way the topic is shown in my REA pgre book...

hi everyone, can anyone explain why localised fringes are curved in michelson interferometer experiment with a monochromatic light used, when the mirrors are held not exactly perpendicular to each other and there is wedge formation.

Can one tell me if the treatment of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer in the attachment is correct ?

SETUP: Michelson interferometer with laser source. d1, d2 are the beam to mirror path leg distances. Does anyone know how many times the light reaches the point total cancellation during a micrometer adjustment that passes from: d1 < d2 to d1 = d2 then d1 > d2 ? I know that some...

Hi all Edit: The reflecting side is the right side of left slab Please look at the pic above ... The light from source splits at left slab and goes in 2 directions and come back to interfere. From figure, it is obvious that path diff. in slabs for both rays is 0 and only path diff...

can someone explain to me the speed of light to the mirror and back from the mirror before reaching the telescope ?? please

hello, i am curious to know more about advancements that has happened to the M-m experiment, i am studying relativity and recently saw a http://youtu.be/7T0d7o8X2-E" of a modified interferometer. anyone knows a book/blog/file that talks purely about this. thanks.

Homework Statement A Fabry-Perot interferometer has spacing d = 2 cm between the glass plates, causing the direct and doubly reflected beams to interfere. As air is pumped out of the gap between the plates, the beams go through 23 cycles of constructive-destructive-constructive interference...

Homework Statement Suppose you know the wavelength of light passing through a Michelson interferometer with high accuracy. Describe how you could use the interferometer to measure the length of a small piece of material. 2. The attempt at a solution - Sandwich the piece of material behind...

Homework Statement Express the intensity from a beam that crosses a Michelson Interferometer that its beam splitter transfers 1/3 and reflects 2/3. Homework Equations N/A The Attempt at a Solution Would like to have a hint...

Homework Statement [PLAIN]http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/7386/physicsch3581.png Homework Equations Not sure The Attempt at a Solution the indicies of refracton are inversly related to the speeds, that is n=c/v . You find the time to go distance L in one arm t=L/v with air...

The books say that interference happens basically between the light waves from the two mirrors. But it seems to me that the path difference between the pairs remains constant for all the waves (as long as both the mirrors are perpendicular to each other). So why do circular rings form? How does...

Bad news: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/04/06/nasa-gives-up-on-lisa/

If, in the double-slit experiment, individual photons only interfere with themselves, as apparently happens when the stream of photons is slowed down to "one at a time", does the same rule or phenomenon apply to the various Michelson interferometer experiments? I think it was in Dirac’s...

How to find the resolution of a Michelson interferometer ?

Hello guys! Lets say we have a laser beam and we send it to a michelson interferometer. Why the beam pattern at the screen gives circles and not lines or something else? Thanks P.S. see for instance http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/physicsdemos/videos/9823-michelson-interferometer

Homework Statement Derive the exact expression for the index of refraction n of a glass plate as a function of the fringe shift m, the plate thickness t and the angle of deflection of the plate (hint: find the optical path difference for an incident vs a tilted incident beam, and solve for...

Are there any tricks for getting the two arms of a Michelson interferometer exactly equal, if all I have is a CW HeNe laser to align? The real experiment will be using the interferometer on short pulses, so I will only see interference when the path lengths are equal to within 30 microns or so...

URGENT! michelson interferometer - maxima and minima Homework Statement If a wave is reflected at a surface of a plate with higher refractive index (eg. At air glass or air-metal) it suffers a λ/2 phase change. Show that for the interferometer, maxima will occur for 2dcosθ = (n+1/2)λ and...

I am new to quantum physics and mostly self taught. Please forgive me for what is probably a very naïve question. Here's the way I understand it. A beam of photons is directed into a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (two beam splitters, two regular mirrors, and two detectors). At the first...

in michelson interferometer, does amplitude of of two waves is divided. i mean one wave say from fixed mirror has amplitue say A and the wave from moving mirror has amplitude say 0.8A? can we call this coherent source?

I found this experiment on YouTube, and its about interference pattern variation in a vertically spinning interferometer.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T0d7o8X2-E&feature=related

i know the question may be a bit stupid to some people, but i seriously don't know how to do it... Homework Statement How far must the movable mirror of a Michelson interferometer, illuminated by a 589-nm source, be displaces for 2000 fringes to move past the reference point? Homework...

Homework Statement Giancoli Ed. 6, Ch. 24, #52 One of the beams of an interferometer passes through a small glass container containing a cavity 1.3 cm deep. When a gas is allowed to slowly fill the container, a total of 236 dark fringes are counted to move past a reference line. The light...

Here's my problem: One of the arms of Michelson interferometer without the compensator consists of a cell 7.5 cm long. How many fringes would be observed shifting if all the air were evacuated from the cell? Use nvac= 1, nair= 1.00029 and the source wavelength 5,000 Angstoms (1 Angstrom =...

does anyone know how to derive this equation regarding the Michelson interferometer: d_m = (m[lambda])/2 where d_m is the physical distance of a micrometer division, m is the number of fringes that crosses a screen given some d_m and lambda is the wavelength of the laser used to create the...

Hi all. I am trying to understand how a tunable Fabry-Perot interferometer works. This is what I have understood so far: An etalon is placed inside a pressure vessel, and the pressure inside this chamber is changed. Apparently, this changes the "effective optical path length" between the two...

For my undergraduate project, I have been tasked to measure group delay of dielectric mirrors. I have found only papers that point mainly to use a Michelson interferometer using white light interferometry. I have googled and found how to construct a standard Michelson interferometer. However I...

Other than using it to prove the particle and wave naturo of particles and of course show interference? Or does it has some other use?

Homework Statement Explain how a pattern of straight line fringes of equal thickness can be observed in a michelson interferometer. Homework Equations see diagram 1/3 of the way down page at http://www.holo.com/holo//book/book6&7.html The Attempt at a Solution I really am stuck...

Hey guys. All of the info for the problem is in a picture (sorry for not using the template). I've tried working on this for ours and I still can't seem to get the trig identities right :( http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/1770/assignmentquestion2.jpg NOTE THAT THERE SHOULD BE ANOTHER...

Hello everyone, I am trying to test the collimation of light emerging from an off-axis parabolic mirror. My mirror has a diameter of 0.5m or so. The focal length is about 5m. The light source I am using is a red laser focused at a pinhole. To test the collimation of this point source, I am...

Homework Statement Find the angular radius of the tenth bright fringe in a Michelson interferometer when the central-path difference (2d) is (i) 1.50 mm and (ii) 1.5 cm. Assume the orange light of a krypton arc is used and that the interference is adjusted in each case so that the first...

I am reading a scientific essay about a experiment with interferometer. They use so called 50/50 beam splitter and perfect reflector. Well they have the input wave be the plane wave exp(ikx), what interesting is: whenever the wave reflected by the splitter or perfect reflector, it add half of...

I am making an attempt at simulating interference patterns of a Fabry Perot interferometer. I have fully derived the transmission function and the coefficient of finesse. T=\frac{I0 T^{2}}{(1-R)^2} + \frac{1}{1+FSin^2(\frac{\delta}{2})} Where F=\frac{4R}{(1-R)^2} and \delta =...

How would you change the splitting patterns for an interferometer? (Specifically a Michelson interferometer, if it matters) How would changing the fixed mirror, movable mirror, etc. affect the pattern? --- We just started learning some optics, and are just supposed to understand this...

Hello there, I have a question concerning Michelson stellar interferometer. It is about stars ejecting mass in a thin luminous shell of gas expanding to a size greater than that of star itself. So it says in the exercise: a michelson interferometer is used as a fourrier transform...

Homework Statement A Michelson interferometer is operated in a vacuum, using monochromatic light of wavelength 589 nm. The interferometer is set up so that the distances between the moving mirror and the beam splitter and the fixed mirror and the beam splitter are equal. A parallel-sided object...

Homework Statement A Michelson interferometer operating at a 600nm wavelength has 2.00 cm glass cell in one arm. To begin, the air is pumped out of the cell and mirror M2 is adjusted to produce a bright spot ant the center of the interference pattern. Then a valve is opened and air is slowly...

Can anyone help out? I was reading about MZ interferometers on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach-Zehnder In the wiki article they have a picture of 4 samples of photon paths in a MZ interferometer. They indicate the probability of a finding a photon at detectors (A,B,C) for 3...

hi all, I'm new here :shy: i'm italian, so i apologize for my english i never studied quantum physics (i only read scientific books) but i have a question that concerns the mach-zehnder interferometer experiment i hope you all know how this interferometer works, otherwise...

Homework Statement A Fabry-Perot interferometer consists of two parallel half-silvered mirrors separated by a small distance a. Show that when light is incident on the interferometer with an angle of incidence \theta, the transmitted light will have maximum intensity when a = (\frac{m \cdot...

This is a strange experiment (or not so compared to some of the experiments I've done) that I am currently undertaking, and require your help. I have built an interferometer of sorts. Two metal funnels of diameter 200mm are attached together by copper tubing (20mm?) through a Y junction with...

Hi I would really appreciate if someone could answer what maybe a really simple question. I'm no physics expert but I do read a lot and I have a keen interest. My question is related to light interference and the double slit experiment. I know that by observing which slit a photon of...

Homework Statement This is regarding a Fabry-Perot Interferometer with identical mirrors: If you shine a beam of light on a 99% reflecting mirror, 1% goes through and the other 99% is reflected. But if a second mirror is placed behind the first one, where there is only 1% of the light...

The Mach-Zehnder interferometer is shown in wikipedia and on David Harrison's page. If the second (upper right) half silvered mirror is taken away and no sample (as in the wikipedia setup) is in any of the two paths, I read that when sending individual photons through the device, roughly 50%...

Homework Statement One of the beams of an interferometer passes through a small glass container containing a cavity 1.30 cm deep. When a gas is allowed to slowly fill thr container, a total of 236 dark fringes are counted to move past a reference line. The light used has a wavelength of 610...

Homework Statement A Michelson interferometer uses light from a sodium lamp. Sodium atoms emit light having wavelengths 589.0 nm and 589.6 nm. The interferometer is intially set up with both arms of equal length (L1=L2) producing a bright spot at the center of the interference pattern. How...

We have to "closely spaced" frequencies f1 and f2. "The moving mirror moves at a constant speed v. Explain how the Doppler effect on the light reflected from the moving mirror affects the recorded signal as a function of time. Estimate the value of v required to resolve the freq. difference of...