Question

What happens when a ray of ordinary light is passed through a triangular glass prism?

Answer 1

A prism is a polyhedron having three triangular lateral surfaces and a triangular base. It's used as an optical object to investigate how white light behaves when it passes through it. The angle of incidence, angle of reflection, angle of refraction, and angle of deviation are all angles at which light bends.

Complete answer:
As light travels from one medium to another, its speed varies. The light is refracted and enters the new medium at a different angle as a result of the speed shift. The angle that the incident beam of light makes with the surface, as well as the ratio between the refractive indices of the two media, determine the degree of bending of the light's path.

Dispersion is a phenomena in which the refractive index of various materials changes with the wavelength or colour of the light utilised. As a result, light of different colours is refracted differently and exits the prism at different angles, giving a rainbow appearance.This may be used to split a white light beam into its constituent colour spectrum. Iridescent materials, such as a soap bubble, separate in a similar way.

Prisms, unlike diffraction gratings, scatter light across a considerably wider frequency bandwidth, making them ideal for broad-spectrum spectroscopy. Furthermore, unlike gratings, prisms do not have overlapping spectral orders, which all gratings do. A beam of ordinary light divides into seven colours when it passes through a triangular glass prism.

Note: Instead of dispersion, prisms are sometimes employed for internal reflection at surfaces. Total internal reflection happens when light within the prism strikes one of the surfaces at a sufficiently steep angle, and all of the light is reflected. In some cases, this makes a prism a good alternative for a mirror. White light may be broken up into its constituent spectral colours using a dispersive prism (the colours of the rainbow). Prisms can also be used to divide light into components with various polarizations or to reflect light.