Observation of the Talbot effect with water waves
Physics Education
2019-01-30 v1 Classical Physics
Abstract
When light is incident upon a diffraction grating, images of the grating appear at periodic intervals behind the grating. This phenomenon and the associated self-imaging distance were named after Talbot who first observed them in the nineteenth century. A century later, this effect held new surprises with the discovery of sub-images at regular fractional distances of the Talbot length. In this paper, we show that water waves enable one to observe the Talbot effect in a classroom experiment. Quantitative measurements, of for example the Talbot distances, can be performed with an easy to use digital Schlieren method.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1811.06979,
title = {Observation of the Talbot effect with water waves},
author = {Alexandra Bakman and Shmuel Fishman and Mathias Fink and Emmanuel Fort and Sander Wildeman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.06979},
year = {2019}
}