Monday, 27 May 2019

optics - Is Huygens-Fresnel principle applicable for waves other than light?


In Wikipedia it was mentioned Luminous disturbance so I Did get confused that this principle only works for light waves and not for all of the Waves. Like some mechanical waves example wave on string.


Wiki text:



In 1678, Huygens [1] proposed that every point which a LUMINOUS DISTURBANCE reaches becomes a source of a spherical wave; the sum of these secondary waves determines the form of the wave at any subsequent time.




Answer




The principle that every point on a wavefront can be thought of as an emitter of spherical (or, in 2D, circular) waves is applicable to any waves - see any introductory high school course on waves, where the demonstrations are typically done with water surface waves. Note that, as @ignacio pointed out, the construction is only exact in odd dimensions (in practice that means 3D), but even in 2D it is quite convincing:


Nice demonstration with water waves in 2D


And the link given by Ignacio:


Mathematical proof that Huygens construction is only valid in odd dimensions


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