Huygen's principle
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6.3 Huygens principle (ESBNG)
Christiaan Huygens described how to determine the path of waves through a medium.
- The Huygens Principle
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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.

Worked example 1: Application of the Huygens principle
Given the wavefront,

use the Huygens Principle to determine the wavefront at a later time.
Draw circles at various points along the given wavefront

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

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