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Concept
Arago spot
Summary
In optics, the Arago spot, Poisson spot, or Fresnel spot is a bright point that appears at the center of a circular object's shadow due to Fresnel diffraction. This spot played an important role in the discovery of the wave nature of light and is a common way to demonstrate that light behaves as a wave (for example, in undergraduate physics laboratory exercises).
The basic experimental setup requires a point source, such as an illuminated pinhole or a diverging laser beam. The dimensions of the setup must comply with the requirements for Fresnel diffraction. Namely, the Fresnel number must satisfy
where
d is the diameter of the circular object,
l is the distance between the object and the screen, and
λ is the wavelength of the source.
Finally, the edge of the circular object must be sufficiently smooth.
These conditions together explain why the bright spot is not encountered in everyday life. However, with the laser sources available today, it is undemanding to perform an Arago-spot experiment.
In astronomy, the Arago spot can also be observed in the strongly defocussed image of a star in a Newtonian telescope. There, the star provides an almost ideal point source at infinity, and the secondary mirror of the telescope constitutes the circular obstacle.
When light shines on the circular obstacle, Huygens' principle says that every point in the plane of the obstacle acts as a new point source of light. The light coming from points on the circumference of the obstacle and going to the center of the shadow travels exactly the same distance, so all the light passing close by the object arrives at the screen in phase and constructively interferes. This results in a bright spot at the shadow's center, where geometrical optics and particle theories of light predict that there should be no light at all.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the idea that light does not simply propagate along straight lines gained traction. Thomas Young published his double-slit experiment in 1807.
Official source
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