Wolfram Demonstrations Project

13,000+ Open Interactive Demonstrations
Powered by Notebook Technology »

Michelson Interferometer and Haidinger Fringes

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

The Michelson interferometer contains two perpendicular plane mirrors, which reflect monochromatic light into a beam splitter (a half-silvered mirror). The two reflected rays are then combined through an imaging lens to produce an interference pattern (Haidinger fringes) on a screen.

[more]

You can select the wavelength of the light, the focal length of the lens, and the position of the mobile mirror; 0 means that the distances of the two arms of the interferometer are equal, so that there are no interference fringes.

[less]

Contributed by: Bruno Bousquet (March 2016)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Snapshots

Details

The snapshots of three interference patterns were obtained for three sets of wavelengths, the position of the mobile mirror, and the focal length of the imaging lens:

Snapshot 1: 450 nm, -0.25 mm, 20 cm

Snapshot 2: 550 nm, 0.2 mm, 40 cm

Snapshot 3: 650 nm, 0.3 mm, 30 cm

Reference

[1] Wikipedia. "Michelson Interferometer." (Mar 11, 2016) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson_interferometer.

Embed Code

Take advantage of the Wolfram Notebook Emebedder for the recommended user experience.

Related Demonstrations More by Author
Browse all topics
Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send