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Lesson Plan: Coherent Light Physics • Third Year of Secondary School
This lesson plan includes the objectives, prerequisites, and exclusions of the lesson teaching students how to determine whether two or more electromagnetic waves will interfere to form coherent or incoherent light.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- recognize that two or more waves are coherent if they have the same frequency and a constant phase difference from each other,
- recognize that two or more waves are incoherent if they have different frequencies or a nonconstant phase difference from each other,
- determine, by looking at the waveforms, whether a set of waves are coherent or incoherent,
- determine, by looking at functions that describe basic waveforms, whether a set of waves are coherent or incoherent.
Prerequisites
Students should already be familiar with
- the idea that light can be modeled as a wave,
- how to determine the frequency, wavelength, phase, and amplitude of a wave from its waveform,
- determining whether two waveforms have approximately the same frequency, wavelength, phase, or amplitude by looking at the waveform,
- the idea that a simple waveform can be described using trigonometric functions of the form , where is the amplitude of the wave and is a constant that affects the wavelength.
Exclusions
Students will not cover
- methods for producing coherent light (lasing),
- the emission of light from atoms,
- the difference between spontaneous and stimulated emission,
- the difference between spatial coherence and temporal coherence,
- modeling waveforms with functions of both time and space; that is, ,
- wavenumber and angular frequency,
- using Euler’s number, , and the imaginary constant, , to describe waveforms,
- the particle nature of light.
