Friday 9 February 2018

Is coherent light required for interference in Young's double slit experiment?


In this Veritasium video, a home experiment is presented which appears to produce a very good double-slit interference pattern with normal sunlight.


The experiment is an empty cardboard box with a visor and a placeholder for a microscope slide with two slits on one side. This is arranged with the slits and visor facing the Sun, so the interference forms on the bottom of the box.


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They claim to observe a good interference pattern from the two slits:


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Discussions of interference in optics textbooks often stress that coherent light is needed to produce such patterns, and that sunlight and other thermal sources of light do not have such coherence. How, then, is this possible?




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