Laws of Reflection and Refraction via Huygens's Principle

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This Demonstration shows the reflection and the refraction of a light beam and the formation of the wavefronts of the reflected and/or refracted beams. According to Huygens's principle, each point of the incident beam at the interface can be considered a point source of light, emitting spherical waves. The envelopes of these elementary waves then combine to produce the reflected and refracted waves.

Contributed by: Lorenzo Roi (January 2015)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


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Reference

[1] Wikipedia. "Huygens–Fresnel Principle." (Jan 9, 2015). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens% E2 %80 %93 Fresnel_principle.



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