Jul 21, 2015
• How a light ray is deviated by a prism,
• How white light is dispersed by a prism,
• The colours of a white light spectrum,
• About the wavelengths of different
colours.
It is (mainly) reflected or refracted
? away from or towards
the normal the normal
What happens to the ray of
light?
But different colours are refracted by
different angles.
In fact, the ray is :
• (bent through an angle), and
• dispersed (split up into separate
colours)
like this.
What happens now?
R
Vscreen
Red is deviated most / least ?
Violet is deviated most / least ?
least
most
Perhaps the most spectacular and best known atmospheric optical phenomenon is the rainbow.
Sunlight and water droplets are necessary for the formation of a rainbow.
Furthermore, the observer must be between the Sun and rain.
When a rainbow forms, the water droplets act as prisms and refraction disperses the sunlight into the spectrum of colors, a process called dispersion.
The curved shape of the rainbow results because the rainbow rays always travel toward the observer at an angle between 40 and 42° from the path of the sunlight.
The primary colours :
› Red ( R )
› Green ( G )
› Blue ( B )
The primary colours add together to make white.