Light Wave



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                 When a beam of light encounters another transparent medium, a part of light gets reflected back into the first medium while the rest enters the other. A ray of light represents a beam. The direction of propagation of an obliquely incident ray of light that enters the other medium, changes at the interface of the two media. This phenomenon is called refraction of light. Snell experimentally obtained the following laws of refraction:

1) The incident ray, the refracted ray and the normal to the interface at the point of incidence, all lie in the same plane.

2) The ratio of the sine of the angle of incidence to the sine of angle of refraction is constant. Remember that the angles of incidence (i ) and refraction (r ) are the angles that the incident and its refracted ray make with the normal, respectively.

Reflected light waves are simply those waves that are neither transmitted nor absorbed, but are reflected from the surface of the medium they encounter. When a wave approaches a reflecting surface, such as a mirror, the wave that strikes the surface is called the incident wave, and the one that bounces back is called the reflected light wave. An imaginary line perpendicular to the point at which the incident wave strikes the reflecting surface is called the normal, or the perpendicular. The angle between the incident wave and the normal is called the angle of incidence. The angle between the reflected wave and the normal is called the angle of reflection.

There are two laws must be obeyed

1) Incident angle must be equal to reflected angle

2) Incident ray reflected ray and normal all three must be in same plane.

                The amount of incident-wave energy that is reflected from a surface depends on the nature of the surface and the angle at which the wave strikes the surface. The amount of wave energy reflected increases as the angle of incidence increases. The reflection of energy is the greatest when the wave is nearly parallel to the reflecting surface. When the incidence wave is perpendicular to the surface, more of the energy is transmitted into the substance and reflection of energy is at its least. At any incident angle, a mirror reflects almost all of the wave energy, while a dull, black surface reflects very little.