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The Huygens–Fresnel principle (named after Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens and French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel) states that every point on a wavefront is itself the source of spherical wavelets, and the secondary wavelets emanating from different points mutually interfere. [1] The sum of these spherical wavelets forms a new wavefront.
It is an extension of Huygens–Fresnel principle, which describes each point on a wavefront as a spherical wave source. The equivalence of the imaginary surface currents are enforced by the uniqueness theorem in electromagnetism , which dictates that a unique solution can be determined by fixing a boundary condition on a system.
Huygens principle of double refraction, named after Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, explains the phenomenon of double refraction observed in uniaxial anisotropic material such as calcite. When unpolarized light propagates in such materials (along a direction different from the optical axis ), it splits into two different rays, known as ...
Christiaan Huygens' construction. In his 1678 Traité de la Lumière, Christiaan Huygens showed how Snell's law of sines could be explained by, or derived from, the wave nature of light, using what we have come to call the Huygens–Fresnel principle.
The Huygens–Fresnel principle is one such model; it states that each point on a wavefront generates a secondary wavelet, and that the disturbance at any subsequent point can be found by summing the contributions of the individual wavelets at that point.
Notation for calculating the wave amplitude at point P 1 from a spherical point source at P 0.. At the heart of Fresnel's wave theory is the Huygens–Fresnel principle, which states that every unobstructed point of a wavefront becomes the source of a secondary spherical wavelet and that the amplitude of the optical field E at a point on the screen is given by the superposition of all those ...
This means that a general Huygens' principle – the wave displacement at a point (,) in spacetime depends only on the state at points on characteristic rays passing (,) – only holds in odd dimensions. A physical interpretation is that signals transmitted by waves remain undistorted in odd dimensions, but distorted in even dimensions.
He restated Huygens's principle in combination with the superposition principle, saying that the vibration at each point on a wavefront is the sum of the vibrations that would be sent to it at that moment by all the elements of the wavefront in any of its previous positions, all elements acting separately (see Huygens–Fresnel principle). For ...