- #1
Glenn G
- 113
- 12
Hello community,
I'm aware of Huygens construction for helping to explain why you might possibly get diffracted waves if a plane wave passes through a gap (i.e. About the secondary wavelets and superposition bit) but the wavelength dependence bit bothers me because say one wavefront is passing through a gap why should the distance to the trailing wavefront behind the one currently passing through the gap have any impact on how much the curvature of the current wavefront changes?
Just don't get the wavelength dependence to gap. In fact I'd imagine if you sent a single plane water wave to a relatively narrow gap it would diffract on passing through the gap whether or not there was another wavefront lambda metres behind it.
Please help!
Glenn
I'm aware of Huygens construction for helping to explain why you might possibly get diffracted waves if a plane wave passes through a gap (i.e. About the secondary wavelets and superposition bit) but the wavelength dependence bit bothers me because say one wavefront is passing through a gap why should the distance to the trailing wavefront behind the one currently passing through the gap have any impact on how much the curvature of the current wavefront changes?
Just don't get the wavelength dependence to gap. In fact I'd imagine if you sent a single plane water wave to a relatively narrow gap it would diffract on passing through the gap whether or not there was another wavefront lambda metres behind it.
Please help!
Glenn