Thursday 5 November 2020

electromagnetism - Is manufacturing roughness really the only reason we don't see optical interference in thick dielectrics like windows?


I had always kind of wondered why we didn't see interference in things like windows -- we were taught that the condition is that the thickness of the film/slab/medium just has to be an integral number of wavelengths, $d=m\lambda$. My logic was, if visible light has wavelengths ~400-780nm, any window pane has got to be an integral number of wavelengths (or close to integral) for some of the wavelengths in the visible.



For example, if a window is, $6mm = 6\times10^6nm$ thick, then you should see interference for wavelengths (and some range around them) 200nm, 250nm, 300nm, 400nm, 500nm, 600nm... Because 6mm is an integral number of each of those.


Obviously that would be really annoying and isn't the case. I found this (warning: PDF) source that seems to explain it and I was wondering if what they're saying is sound. On the 10th page (p171 for them), it says that the reason we don't see this interference is that no window is that smooth, it has a variance in the thickness of at least several wavelengths, so the interference effect is effectively average out among all those thicknesses, which usually gets rid of it. They do the math and show that.


Is that the reason?


If so, that leads me to two questions: Could we, if we were really careful and used something like MBE, make a glass window with that sort of accuracy, and then see interference effects in the optical range? I know that quartz crystal monitors can easily give you nanometer accuracy for evaporators and sputterers, but they also have pretty limited growth rates.


My second question is, then, do we see interference effects in glass windows with electromagnetic radiation of a comparable wavelength, like microwaves?


Thanks!




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