Abstract
Diffraction, whose name was introduced by Grimaldi in 1665, when he first discovered it and described its effects, has been conveniently defined by Sommerfeld (1949), paraphrasing the Grimaldi’s expression, as «any deviation of the light rays from rectilinear paths which cannot be interpreted as reflection or refraction». For example, if an opaque object is placed between a point source and a screen, the shadow thrown by the object does not have an edge as sharp as the one predicted by Geometrical Optics. In fact, careful observation of the shadow edge reveals that a bit of light goes into the shaded area, while darkened fringes appear in the illuminated area.
Lumen propagatur seu diffunditur non solum Directe, Refracte, ac Reflexe, sed etiam alio quodam quarto modo, DIFFRACTE.
Propositio I, De Lumine, P. Francesco Maria Grimaldi
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Giusfredi, G. (2019). Diffraction. In: Physical Optics. UNITEXT for Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25279-3_4
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