Advertisements
Advertisements
Question
Define the term, “refractive index” of a medium. Verify Snell’s law of refraction when a plane wavefront is propagating from a denser to a rarer medium. Solution
Solution
The factor by which speed of light gets reduced with respect to the “speed of light in vacuum” is said to be the refractive index for the medium.
`μ = c/ν or ν = c/mu`
Here v is the speed of light in the medium, c is the speed of light in vacuum and μ is the defined refractive index for the medium.
APPEARS IN
RELATED QUESTIONS
Calculate the speed of light in a medium whose critical angle is 45°. Does critical angle for a given pair of media depend on the wavelength of incident light ? Give reason.
Use Huygens’ geometrical construction to show the propagation of plane wavefront a rarer medium (1) to a denser medium (2) undergoing refraction.
Hence derive Snell’s law of refraction.
Find a critical angle for glass and water pair, given the refractive index of glass, is 1 ·62 and that of water is 1 ·33.
Derive Snell’s law of refraction using Huygens’s wave theory.
According to Snell’s law, ______.
For small angles Snell’s law becomes ______.
Using Huygen’s wave theory of light, prove Snell’s law of refraction of light.
Draw the shape of refracted wavefront when the plane incident wave undergoes refraction from optically denser medium to rarer medium. Hence prove Snell’s law of refraction.
If light passes near a massive object, the gravitational interaction causes a bending of the ray. This can be thought of as happening due to a change in the effective refractive index of the medium given by n(r) = 1 + 2 GM/rc2 where r is the distance of the point of consideration from the centre of the mass of the massive body, G is the universal gravitational constant, M the mass of the body and c the speed of light in vacuum. Considering a spherical object find the deviation of the ray from the original path as it grazes the object.
A ray of light is incident on a glass prism of refractive index µ and refracting angle A. If it just suffers total internal reflection at the other face, obtain a relation between the angle of incidence, angle of prism and critical angle.