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Frontiers in Optics

Slit-Width Effects in a Double-Slit Experiment with a Partially-Coherent Source

Brett J. Pearson, Natalie G. Ferris, Ruthie Strauss, Hongyi Li, David P. Jackson

Published Jan 1, 2018• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We perform a Young’s double-slit experiment using a partially-coherent light source. As compared to the standard theory, the data agree much more favorably with a calculation that fully accounts for the width of the slits.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2018.jw4a.23

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We discuss Young's double-slit experiment using a partially coherent light source consisting of a helium-neon laser incident on a rotating piece of white paper. Such an experiment is appropriate for undergraduate students as an independent project or as part of an advanced lab course. As is well known, the resulting interference pattern is observed to disappear and return, depending on the angular size of the source. Interestingly, while the standard theoretical prediction for the light intensity agrees quite well with experimental data when the fringe visibility is high, the prediction is noticeably off when the visibility is low. A first-principles calculation of the light intensity is performed and shown to agree extremely well with the experimental results for all visibilities.
Based on the basic version of the Double-slit experiment, a coherent light source, such as a laser beam, illuminates a plate pierced by two parallel slits, and the light passing through the slits is observed on a screen behind the plate.The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through the two slits to interfere, producing bright and dark bands on the screen — a result that would not be expected if light consisted of classical particles. Our new variant is as below: We shut one of the two parallel slits once the light passed the slits. Or we keep the two slits shutting and opening randomly in high speed. We believe this variant experiment could lead to a farther fundamental understanding of the Quantum Mechanics.
Science, as it is generally described at school, starts with experimental data. Scientists then have to find some hypothesis which explains these results. Using this hypothesis, a prediction is made about what might happen in a slightly different experiment. The double-slit experiment is a modified version of the setup first used by Thomas Young in 1801. Young’s version is a classic experiment that, at the time, seemed to have settled the dispute between wave and particle views of light decisively in favour of waves. The idea that particles might display some wavelike properties dates to the mid-1920s when a young PhD student called Louis De Broglie was thinking about the dual wave/particle nature of light. A quantum mechanical description of the double-slit experiment must involve a set of amplitudes governing the passage of an electron through the slits to the far detector.