Double Slit-o-rama

[FreakBoy]

It's been a while since I've been afforeded time to frequent the board, but when I have time I still peruse.

I'm hoping I might beg a favor of any of you:

My father and I have been discussing the Double Slit experiment and he has decided it might be fun to carry the experiment out. Are there any optimal dimensions to the screen, slits, etc. that would make the results more apparent?


Thanks!

 

[epepke]

Gonna use photons or electrons?

Anyway, this might help:
http://www.physics.yorku.ca/undergrad_programme/highsch/Feynm6.html

 

[Brown]

Well, making your own viewer can be part of the "fun." You can take a piece of smoked or coated glass and make slits on it at various distances with razor blades. This is what we did in high school physics class.

If you really want to do an experiment with some precision, buy an interference/diffraction experiment from a hobby supply store. You can get a selection of screens with a variety of slits (or rulings) and a variety of spacings. The precision is better than what you could make on your own.

You want to project the image on a wall that is pretty far away, so make sure you do the experiment in a room where you have plenty of space. About two meters between the slits and the wall is pretty good. Make sure you have a good light source, too, preferably a laser.

If you have a laser, you can use this double-slit experiment to compute the wavelength of the laser. Any good college-level physics textbook that discusses "double-slit interference" and/or "Young's experiment" will give you the simple equations that you need, and will show you why the equations work. To make the measurement of the wavelength, you will need to know the distance between the distance between the slits, which is usually too small to measure with a ruler. Manufactured screens are very useful because they will tell you the distance between the slits.

 

[FreakBoy]

We've got a laser at hand so we'll be using photons. I wasn't aware that there are kits for this experiment! Woohoo!

We'll take a look for the kits, a good screen would make the experiment much easier to do.

There is something so elegant about this experment, and something great about doing more than just reading about it.

I can't get enough of physics.

As Depeche Mode once said, "Just can't get enough"... though I really don't think they meant physics.... getting physical maybe...