Fraunhofer and Fresnel diffraction differ in the distance source and screen are placed from the aperture
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Peer-reviewed literature notes that distinct formalisms are required for diffraction when the source or screen is placed nearby versus far away from the aperture.
The classical wave theory can trace its historical origins to the seminal works of Christian Huygens, Thomas Young, and Augustin Fresnel. To explain some of light’s observed properties, such as rectilinear propagation, reflection, and refraction, Huygens proposed a simple geometrical construction of secondary spherical wavelets with centers of disturbance located on a primary wavefront. More than a century later, Young formulated the law of interference to both predict the formation of fringes in his now famous double slit experiment and also to estimate the wavelengths associated with different colors. A decade after that, Fresnel combined Huygens’ construction with Young’s interference law to qualitatively and quantitatively describe diffraction, which is the bending of light upon encountering an obstacle or an aperture. This grand synthesis, called the Huygens–Fresnel principle, acts as a powerful pictorial aid and conceptual tool that can describe a wide variety of complicated optical phenomena. However, the applications of the principle and its later developments, such as the Kirchhoff–Fresnel integral, are strewn with several simplifying assumptions and approximations that are aimed at minimizing the mathematical challenges involved. Consequently, two distinct formalisms are necessary to account for diffraction effects when the source of light or observation screen is placed nearby and far away from the aperture or obstacle. Recently, a hyperbola framework for analyzing wave interference at a multi-slit barrier was shown to successfully circumvent all conventionally imposed ad hoc conditions. The method commences directly from the Huygens–Fresnel principle and the ensuing predictions pertaining to the distribution of fringe characteristics, namely, positions, widths, and intensities on a detection screen can, therefore, justifiably claim accuracy in both the near field (Fresnel regime) and the far field (Fraunhofer regime). In this paper, the analysis that was previously carried out for the special case of slits of negligible widths is further extended to encompass slits of finite widths as well.
Plane-wave analysis of the near field of light diffracted by ultrasound.
Although the phenomenon of light diffraction by ultrasound has been studied very extensively during the last 40 years, almost all investigations were concentrated on the individual far field (Fraunhofer) diffraction orders. In the present paper, the basic theory is developed for studying the near field (Fresnel region) of light diffracted by an arbitrary plane ultrasonic wave and the fundamental periodicity properties are stated. The general plane-wave theory of Raman-Nath has been taken as a starting point. From the analysis, the near field of the diffracted light is seen to be highly sensitive to variations of the ultrasonic amplitude and this feature provides a useful technique for observing weak ultrasonic waves. In particular, for the specific case of Raman-Nath-type diffraction, a procedure is presented allowing the reconstruction of the time waveform of the ultrasonic wave from the diffracted light intensity signal.
Published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (1992)
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