Interference Pattern in Nature

Interference of light waves become observable when we have narrow slit separation. Surprisingly, nature provides us with many natural double slits and gratings.

2 main-qimg-5f83df42917b4f2dc139d230e03f45ef-c

Those shimmering colours you see reflected off a thin layer of oil is a double-slit interference pattern. The light reflected off the top surface and the light reflected off the bottom layer (total internal reflection) interfere with each other.

4 getImage

Some shells are iridescent. Thanks to regularly spaced surface grooves. The light reflected off the grooves act as regularly spaced light sources.

7 main-qimg-22dc1915c3bb35661649158fd215776e-c

Butterflies too. Thanks to the regularly spaced scale structure on their wings.

8-compact-disc-with-light-interference-patterns-damien-lovegrove

Compact discs, are man made objects of course. It has regularly spaced and finely packed grooves, which produces spectacular interference patterns.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s