What is the Huygens Principle?

1 Answer
Jasmine
May 26, 2017

See the explanation below.

Explanation:

If we know the shape and location of a wavefront at any instant #t# , we are able to determine the shape and location of the new wavefront at a later time #t+Deltat# with the help of Huygens principle. It consists of two parts :

  • Every point of a wavefront may be considered as a source of secondary wavelets which spread out in forward direction with a speed equal to the speed of propagation of the wave.
  • The new position of the wavefront after a certain interval of time can be found by constructing a surface that touches all secondary wavelets.
    This principle can be illustrated by the help of a figure shown below:cloudfront.net

To determine the wavefront at #t+Deltat#, we draw secondary wavelets with centre at various points on first wavefront and radius will be #cDeltat# where #c# is the speed of propagation of wave.The new wavefront at time #t+Deltat# will be a tangent to all secondary wavelets as shown in above figure.

In the figure,On the left side is a plane wavefront and on right side is spherical wavefront .

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