# Tag Info

9

Lorentz came with a nice model for light matter interaction that describes dispersion quite effectively. If we assume that an electron oscillates around some equilibrium position and is driven by an external electric field $\mathbf{E}$ (i.e., light), its movement can be described by the equation $$... 8 In non-relativistic systems both E\sim k and E\sim k^2 are possible. Quadratic dispersion relations occur if \langle 0|[Q_i,Q_j]|\rangle\neq 0 for some of the generators. This occurs in a ferromagnet because rotational invariance is broken and J_z has an expectation value. In terms of effective lagrangians the difference between ferromagnets and ... 6 Suppose you have an infinite plane wave. To find the momentum of this wave you Fourier transform it. Because it's an infinite wave the Fourier transform is a delta function and the wave has a well defined single value for the momentum. Now take a wave packet i.e. the same infinite plane wave but now multipled by some envelope function. When you Fourier ... 5 The simple explanation given in Hewitt's Conceptual Physics is that atoms in condensed matter have a high-frequency resonance, and the index of refraction for most substances is strongest at the blue end of the spectrum because that's the high-freqency end, which is closest to the resonance. The following is my attempt to flesh this out with a little more ... 5 What you want to do is change the wave equation into a Klein-Gordon equation:$$\frac {1}{c^2} \frac{\partial^2 \psi}{\partial t^2} - \nabla^2 \psi + \alpha^2 \psi = 0,$$where \alpha is a constant of appropriate dimension and usually (in quantum theory) given by$$\alpha=\frac {m c}{\hbar}.$$Inserting an ansatz of the form$$\psi=e^{i(kx-\omega ...

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An easy way to make this intuitively plausible is by remarking that the Schroedinger equation in the absence of a potential is as follows $${\partial\over\partial t}\Psi = \nabla^2\Psi$$ up to constants, which is the heat equation if we ignore the fact that the omitted constants are complex numbers rather than real and of the right sign. If you consider ...

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Depending on the physics underlying the particular wave equation in question, the three most fundamental limitations on dispersion are causality, stability and holomorphicity. These are most readily converted to mathematical statements about the operators in a wave equation if the wave equation is linear. I'll confine the following mainly to optics; ...

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In a linear wave equation, there is nothing to pull a pulse or envelope of running waves apart. But there is nothing to hold it together, either. A minor disturbance such as a small obstacle or some dispersion, will change the waveshape, or break it up, such as losing some of its energy to outward spherical waves from the obstacle. Two or more pulses in ...

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The dispersion that leads to the rainbow effect generated by transparent media results from an intrinsic property of the medium being considered: the dependence of its refractive index $n$ on the wavelength of light $\lambda$ passing through it. In this sense, water in a glass is just as dispersive as water droplets in a rainbow. When different wavelengths ...

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Google says here. There is a database for 111 direction too. No Sellmeier equation is given for this case, but there are tabulated values of n and k vs. wavelength, so you could just fit it to get the equation.

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You can look at the beautiful physical arguments given here, or you can look at it mathematically. A wave packet consists of a combination of several solutions, in the case of your quantum mechanics problem these will be your eigenfunctions. For the sake of simplicity I will consider plane waves (these correspondend to the free particle, `particle in a box ...

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After some amount of on and off thinking here's what I have come up with. Please pardon the coarse picture. The interpretation of the dispersion as energy is applicable to non-interacting particle. In general, for interacting particles, $E(\vec{k})$ cannot be interpreted as energy (of?). However, frequency $\omega$ is always proportional to energy of the ...

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I will hand wave here, looking at the problem a photon at a time. We know from the double slit experiment that even individual photons impinging on the double slit geometry display an interference pattern, characteristic of the frequency/energy of the photon and the geometry of the slits. One can think of a crystal as a very large number of three ...

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First: I'd guess that by light dispersion you mean chromatic aberration. In general refocussing the light will not undo chromatic aberration, but it's possible to specifically design pairs of lenses to (mostly) eliminate it. These are called achromatic doublets. Second: yes, you need a bandpass filter. It's not possible to transmit everything below 600nm ...

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