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Photograph of a triangular prism, dispersing light Lamps as seen through a prism. In optics, a dispersive prism is an optical prism that is used to disperse light, that is, to separate light into its spectral components (the colors of the rainbow). Different wavelengths (colors) of light will be deflected by the prism at different angles. [1]
A familiar dispersive prism. An optical prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surfaces that are designed to refract light. At least one surface must be angled — elements with two parallel surfaces are not prisms. The most familiar type of optical prism is the triangular prism, which
A transparent object allows light to transmit or pass through. Conversely, an opaque object does not allow light to transmit through and instead reflecting or absorbing the light it receives. Most objects do not reflect or transmit light specularly and to some degree scatters the incoming light, which is called glossiness.
A truncated triangular prism is a triangular prism constructed by truncating its part at an oblique angle. As a result, the two bases are not parallel and every height has a different edge length. If the edges connecting bases are perpendicular to one of its bases, the prism is called a truncated right triangular prism.
As light travels through space, it oscillates in amplitude. In this image, each maximum amplitude crest is marked with a plane to illustrate the wavefront. The ray is the arrow perpendicular to these parallel surfaces. A light ray is a line or curve that is perpendicular to the light's wavefronts (and is therefore collinear with the wave vector).
Rainbows are formed by dispersion of light, in which the refraction angle depends on the light's frequency. Refraction is also responsible for rainbows and for the splitting of white light into a rainbow-spectrum as it passes through a glass prism. Glass and water have higher refractive indexes than air.
Conceptual animation of light dispersion through a prism. High frequency (blue) light is deflected the most, and low frequency (red) the least. Refractive processes take place in the physical optics limit, where the wavelength of light is similar to other distances, as a kind of scattering.
While the doublet prism is the simplest compound prism type, the double-Amici prism is much more common. This prism is a three-element system (a triplet), in which the first and third elements share both the same glass and the same apex angles. The design layout is thus symmetric about the plane passing through the center of its second element.