
The lens used to focus the laser also acts as an aperture and diffracts the laser light. It happens because light begins to disperse or 'diffract' when passing through a small opening (such as your camera's aperture). With the slit being completely open, however, the space between the slits (\(d\)) goes to zero, and the number of slits (\(n\)) goes to infinity. This interactive tutorial explores the diffraction of a monochromatic light beam through a slit of variable aperture. Optical data is read by shining a laser beam on a CD-ROM. no matter how many megapixels your camera may have.


One way to think of this is to go back to the diffraction grating case, expressed in Equation 3.3.2. Find out how the Airy Disk can impact your image at Edmund. Unfortunately, diffraction is proportional to the wavelength of the light being shot. To compute the intensity of the interference pattern for a single slit, we treat every point in the slit as a source of an individual Huygens wavelet, and sum the contributions of all the waves coming out at an arbitrary angle. The diffraction pattern caused when light passes through an aperture is called the Airy Disk. So diffraction is less visible as the aperture diameter increases.

Significantly more math is required to deal with the intensity of the bright fringes. The bright fringes only approximately follow the same spacing pattern, not exactly located halfway between the dark fringes, but using the pairwise approach doesn't tell us much about the intensity of those bright regions, for the same reason it didn't for the central bright fringe – constructive pairs will not be in phase with other constructive pairs.
