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6.3 Huygens' principle

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6.2 Wavefronts
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6.4 Diffraction

6.3 Huygens' principle (ESBNG)

Christiaan Huygens described how to determine the path of waves through a medium.

The Huygens' Principle

Every point of a wave front serves as a point source of spherical, secondary waves. After a time t, the new position of the wave front will be that of a surface tangent to the secondary waves.

Huygens' principle applies to any wavefront, even those that are curved as you would get from a single point source. A simple example of the Huygens' Principle is to consider the single wavefront in Figure 6.2.

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Figure 6.2: A single wavefront at time t acts as a series of point sources of circular waves that interfere to give a new wavefront at a time \(t+\Delta t\). The process continues and applies to any shape of waveform.

Worked example 1: Application of the Huygens' principle

Given the wavefront,

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use the Huygens' Principle to determine the wavefront at a later time.

Draw circles at various points along the given wavefront

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Join the circle crests to get the wavefront at a later time

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6.2 Wavefronts
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6.4 Diffraction