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Concept
Newton's rings
Summary
Newton's rings is a phenomenon in which an interference pattern is created by the reflection of light between two surfaces, typically a spherical surface and an adjacent touching flat surface. It is named after Isaac Newton, who investigated the effect in 1666. When viewed with monochromatic light, Newton's rings appear as a series of concentric, alternating bright and dark rings centered at the point of contact between the two surfaces. When viewed with white light, it forms a concentric ring pattern of rainbow colors because the different wavelengths of light interfere at different thicknesses of the air layer between the surfaces.
The phenomenon was first described by Robert Hooke in his 1665 book Micrographia. Its name derives from the mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton, who studied the phenomenon in 1666 while sequestered at home in Lincolnshire in the time of the Great Plague that had shut down Trinity College, Cambridge. He recorded his observations in an essay entitled "Of Colours". The phenomenon became a source of dispute between Newton, who favored a corpuscular nature of light, and Hooke, who favored a wave-like nature of light. Newton did not publish his analysis until after Hooke's death, as part of his treatise "Opticks" published in 1704.
The pattern is created by placing a very slightly convex curved glass on an optical flat glass. The two pieces of glass make contact only at the center. At other points there is a slight air gap between the two surfaces, increasing with radial distance from the center, as shown in Fig. 3.
Consider monochromatic (single color) light incident from the top that reflects from both the bottom surface of the top lens and the top surface of the optical flat below it. The light passes through the glass lens until it comes to the glass-to-air boundary, where the transmitted light goes from a higher refractive index (n) value to a lower n value. The transmitted light passes through this boundary with no phase change.
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